How FreeAgent populates the Self Assessment tax return for limited company directors

This article explains how FreeAgent populates your Self Assessment tax return if you are the director of a limited company and are keeping the company’s books in FreeAgent.

Salary from the company

Go to My Money > Payroll, and find your own payroll, then look for the last payslip in the relevant tax year.

This will show you your total gross pay for the tax year, and the tax that was deducted from your salary.

You need both these figures to put into the employment pages of your tax return. They go into boxes 1 and 2 of the employment section.

Dividends from the company

Go to My Money > Dividends, and choose yourself from the list of users and the relevant tax year.

This will give you your dividend income for the tax year, to go into the main return.

The net dividend income before tax credits (£1,800 in the picture) goes into box 3 of the Income section of the main return, the box headed “Dividends from UK companies”.

Other information you will need

If the company provided you with any non-cash benefits, or reimbursed you for any expenses, in this tax year, you’ll need to collect the details from your form P11D, which would not have been created through FreeAgent.

If you incurred any expenses while doing your job in this tax year, you’ll need to record these on the employment pages of your tax return in boxes 17-20, using the amounts inclusive of VAT, broken down by category.

To collect this information, go to Settings > Export All Data, and then run a pivot table in Excel on the Expenses tab of the exported data, so that you see:

• Transactions dated between 6th April and the following 5th April only
• Transactions inclusive of VAT
• Summed by category

If you underpaid or overpaid tax through PAYE in the tax year, you’ll see this on Notices of Coding supplied by HMRC. Make sure you include these under- or overpayments in your tax return too, in the Tax Adjustments section.