Our friend the taxman is of rather a puritanical bent, normally, and the tax rules tend not to favour anyone actually enjoying themselves. However, there are one or two ways in which your employer can provide you with tax free benefits that you will actually enjoy, and if you are effectively the employer as well as the employee, of course, so much the better, because then you can benefit from the tax breaks on both sides!..

The subject of this article is probably the one most frequently faced problem in the whole of tax planning: how to minimise the tax you pay on profits you take out of your business. This problem is completely different, depending on whether you are running your business through a limited company or through some other vehicle, but as the limited company is by far the most commonly found business entity, I am going to assume, in what follows, that this is the situation the reader is in. Although I have called it the “ABC of profit extraction”, which suggests a basic survey,I may just throw in the odd swerve ball as well!…

Sometimes it seems as though, the more you look at Limited Liability Partnerships, or LLP’s, the more tax advantages come out of the woodwork. In this piece, we’re concentrating on LLP’s set up not to carry on a trading business, but to hold a property portfolio. At one time it was very popular for property holding companies to be set up: that is, limited companies incorporated with shares etc…

This month I am inviting those of our readers who run a business with me on an arduous journey to the moral high ground. It’s not an area that business people tend to be very used to – not, in my view, because standards of right and wrong are any less marked in the business community as compared with employees and those dependent on the income of others…