Surveyor & Architect Accountants

Usually not. Professional work carried out by architects and surveyors within their normal discipline is excluded from CIS, and that holds even where the role includes supervisory or executive responsibility. Two things change the answer. If you act as a developer or take on the construction work itself, you’re inside the scheme. And where one contract covers both professional services and construction operations, the whole contract is caught, not just the construction part.

Possibly, and it’s the side practices forget. The exclusion covers work you do, not work you buy in. If your practice engages subcontractors to carry out construction operations, you can become a contractor under the scheme, which means registering, verifying them with HMRC and deducting before you pay. Design-and-build arrangements are where this most often arises.

As the work is performed, not when you raise the invoice. On a scheme running across multiple stages, that means work you’ve delivered but not yet billed still belongs in the period you did it. Getting this right matters for your tax bill and matters more if you’re ever showing accounts to a lender or a prospective partner.

In most cases, yes. Professional indemnity premiums, registration with your regulator and relevant professional body subscriptions are usually allowable where they’re required for your practice. Run-off cover is worth raising with us specifically, because the treatment of costs incurred after a practice has ceased follows different rules to costs incurred while trading.

It depends on how many of you there are, how you want to share profits and what you’re planning long term. LLPs suit practices with several principals who want flexibility over profit allocation while keeping limited liability. A company can be more tax efficient where profits are being retained rather than drawn. We’ll model both rather than give you a default answer.

Yes. No need to wait for year end. We manage the handover with your current provider.