Tips On Looking After Your Taxes Throughout The Year

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July 19, 2019

By Shoaib Aslam

What is that one thing that makes your head spin round and round? For me, it is that time of the year when I must file my annual tax returns. I consider it to be a dull, monotonous, and an extremely tedious task. It sucks, doesn’t it?

I am sure most of the people are in a similar boat. Data collected at the beginning of 2019 revealed that almost half of the taxpayers had not submitted their Self-Assessment. Most of them did not file on them and are likely to be fined. This confirms that filing annual tax returns is considered such a mundane task that most people delay doing it to the point when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so.

Fortunately, there is a way out of this misery. That is, looking after your taxes throughout the year. I have penned down several ways to do so below.

DOCUMENT THE INFORMATION AS SOON AS YOU RECEIVE IT

It can basically be considered the first step in the right direction. One of the possible ways in which you can stop lazing around is by noting down the tax information as soon as you receive it. It is absolutely essential to do so because once a lot of information has been gathered, it becomes a tedious task to organize and enter it. Also, people like me who have poor memory tend to forget undocumented things easily.

You should know well enough what information needs to be documented. This can easily be found out by doing a bit of research. There is some crucial information that each and every taxpayer needs to enter. However, some taxpayers might be asked to provide some additional information depending on their circumstances.

INPUT THE INFORMATION ON-THE-GO

Most people wait to get back home to enter any information they have received for the Self-Assessment on-the-go. It is wrong to wait to enter information until you are in front of a computer screen. Instead, you should enter information from wherever you are.

Fantastic tax software allows you to do so. Using this software, you can enter the data no matter where you are and what you are doing. This makes you more efficient, and you do not get the chance to laze around.

KEEP YOUR NECESSARY DOCUMENTS AND FILES SAFE

No matter what way you adopt of submitting data, do keep the relevant records. People are often confused regarding how long they should retain their tax record. You can refer to HMRC to find guidance regarding this.

It is advised that you keep your accounts for at least 22 months for the relevant tax year. This requirement only holds true for those who are not self-employed and file their taxes on time. However, those who do not file their taxes on time need to keep hold of their necessary documents for a little longer.

Those who are self-employed should retain their accounts for at least five years after the specified tax return deadline.

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR AN EVEN EASIER WAY OUT?

Even though I can personally vouch that if you follow all the guidelines mentioned above you can make this tedious process of tax filing at least a bit easier, there is an even easier and efficient way out.

That is to seek tax advice from a consultancy that specializes in providing business and tax advice services. These entities know the tax system inside out and way better than any of us do.

Hence, if you wish to get rid of your tax filing woes forever, contact any reliable tax advisory consultancy now!

Shoaib Aslam is the co-founder of Pearl Chartered Accountants, a UK-based chartered accountancy firm that has multiple locations across London.

How to love yourself and why it is very important

By

Adaku Efuribe

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July 19, 2019

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By Adaku Efuribe

‘Give yourself permission to take care of your own needs first. This is a critical skill that many people – women especially – tend to feel guilty about. If this is you, repeat after me: “It is not selfish to take care of myself.” If you become weak or volatile from lack of self-care, you are all but useless to others’. Christine Carter

To function as an ‘emotionally balanced’ individual, we all need to ‘love our neighbours as our self’. It’s a well-known fact that we cannot give what we don’t have.

If you don’t have love inside of you, you cannot show love to others.

Loving yourself would help you develop high emotional intelligence to withstand every form of adversity, difficult moments and bad behavioural attitudes that come your way.

What does ‘loving yourself’ entail?

For starters, get enough sleep (6-8 hours a day). It’s harder to regulate your emotions when you’re tired. In addition, don’t skip meals. Research shows that keeping your blood sugar stable will make you less aggressive if you get angry. And always remember to take a moment to leave a toxic environment, if possible, and breathe deeply if you find yourself in a particularly difficult situation.

Do not neglect your body, soul and spirit.
Feed your Mind with good thoughts
Feed your body with nutritious food
Feed your soul with all things good and worthy
Exercise to keep your body healthy and in good shape

Our minds work like computers, what you put in is what you bring out; garbage in garbage out.

What do you constantly feed your mind with, are they worthy things? Do you dwell more on negatives? You ought to take out time to count your blessings and avoid fixing your mind on negativity all the time. Your thoughts become actions and your actions will in turn become habits.

How do you control your emotions?

To build up emotional intelligence, avoid associating yourself with toxic environments or people, who constantly drain your energy?

Spend less time with individuals who constantly bring you down or discourage you. Even if being in their midst is inevitable, try as much as possible to limit the time you spend with such people and do not taken them seriously.

Warren Buffet captures the essence of being in charge of your emotions in this quote;

‘You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you, Breathe and allow things pass’

Sometimes it feels as though practicing emotional intelligence is for certain people and you think because of your temperament you cannot do it, you have to burst out in anger and respond to ‘every dog that barks at you’.

Although some people tend to have a calm demeanour, or they inherited their temperament from their parents, you can still build your character and decide on how to respond to situations or harsh words said to you.

You need to understand that someone who is a bully has issues and you on the receiving end must quickly calculate how to respond and not react.

Sometimes silence is golden, this may work in certain situations and not work in other situations. The tone of the voice is a very powerful tool in any situation; if someone is shouting or speaking to you with an angry tone, you can make up your mind to respond with kind words.

This is very difficult to do, but the joy that comes with you restraining your self is far much better than the stress that comes with you responding in anger. Words spoken in anger cannot be retrieved, walk away if you can or say nothing.

Always assess every environment to know whether it is safe, you need to be self-aware and know when someone’s action could cause an anger outburst from you. One practical way to control your anger emotions before it springs out of control is to Inhale deeply and exhale slowly as this helps to reduce tension.

Leave the toxic environment and stay alone for some time, this gives you more time to handle the situation and think about your next line of action.

As we mature in age, one thing we must take very seriously is being in control of our emotions, when we are in control, we can live healthier happier lives.

Live in the present: Breathe, Laugh, Believe

A story was told about a successful woman, when asked to share her secret of success.

She smiled and said

‘I started succeeding when I started leaving small fights for small fighters. I stopped fighting those who gossiped about me… I stopped fighting with my in laws…I stopped fighting for attention…I stopped fighting to meet public expectation of me…I stopped fighting for my rights with stupid people…I left such fights for those who have nothing else to fight…And I started fighting for my vision, my dreams, my ideas and my destiny… The day I gave up on small fights is the day I started becoming successful’

Are you leaving in the past, spending time thinking about past events you cannot change?

Why not turn a new leaf today and start living in the present? I mean focus on the now, and be optimistic for your future. Look after yourself because no one else would do that for you

GitHub Votes on Nigeria, Fastest Adopter of Open Source Software

By

Ndubuisi Ekekwe

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July 19, 2019

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GitHub, a software repository platform which brings developers to discover, share, and build, continues to see solid trajectory from Nigerian developers. Our developers are adopting open source software faster than any nation in the world, notes GitHub which is owned by Microsoft. The future of African software sector is open source as that has the lowest marginal cost for growth. The age of licensing software model will continue to fade in Africa.

The bleeding edge of technology innovation is increasingly shifting from Silicon Valley to places that are also at the frontiers of economic development, including sub-Saharan Africa, says Omoju Miller, the head of machine learning at software development platform Github.

[…]

“We are the at edge of another kind of technology frontier, and this time around, it is not happening in San Francisco, it is taking place in Africa,” she said.

Then, when traveling to the Maasai Mara nature reserve, she recalled passing through numerous rural villages. “We are talking about very small villages and yet in these small villages you can still use mobile payments,” she said. “This is going to radically change what the technology environment is going to look like.

The Big Opportunity MAX NG and GOKADA Missed and How New Tech Startups Shouldn’t Miss It

By

Joel Pereyi

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July 19, 2019

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By Joel Pereyi

Gokada and MAX missed a big opportunity!

Africa’s mobility sector according to Adetayo Bamiduro, the cofounder of MAX, is worth 100 billion USD.

Being the first tech startups into Nigeria’s bike mobility space, they could have owned and dominated that space before new entrants make entry into the market.

The growth strategy of these 2 brands is the same: Growth through Entry. This is the Growth Strategy most companies use.

In Growth through Entry, we have pre-entry strategies and post-entry strategies. Pre-entry strategies are strategies you use before new entrants come into your market, while post-entry strategies are those you use after they’ve entered.

Under Pre-entry strategies, we have: Deterrence Strategies: strategies you use to increase costs and risks to prevent new entrants from entering your market and Accommodation Strategies: strategies you use to soften competition after they have entered your market.

The focus is on Deterrence Strategies, so I will be sharing 4 Deterrence Strategies businesses all over the world use to defend their market positions and make it uneasy for new entrants to enter their space while they grow their market share and bottomline.

They Erect Structural Barriers

This can be done through licensing, regulation, etc. Most companies work with regulatory authorities or government to achieve this.

At major airports like Heathrow and Gatwick for example, landing slots are all taken by the main airline carriers. So, if you plan to set up a business flying London to New York, you will find it difficult to get access to a popular airport. This singular move helps the big airlines defend their market positions.

Another example are taxi cabs in New York City. To legally operate a taxi in NYC, a taxi cab must have a certificate called a “medallion.” Medallions are issued by the government. They are very limited in supply and they are not very easy to acquire.

They Reduce the Quality of Information on Costs and Demand

This move is also known as Signal Jamming.

Big investment decisions are hardly made on guesses or speculations. They are most often than not backed by data. And no matter how educated a guess is, it is what it is: a guess!

Signal Jamming is simply a way to keep those who plan to enter a new market guessing. They won’t know what your cost structure is. They won’t know for sure whether or not you’re profitable. And this will make it riskier for them to enter your market.

They Raise “Factor Costs”

Factor Costs represents the entire cost of each individual item needed to run a business or produce a product. They cover the costs of getting products, branding, marketing, etc. Beer brands use this tactic a lot. Sometimes, they invest heavily in advertising not necessarily for awareness, but to raise factor costs and scare new entrants.

I’m not sure how effective this would have been for Gokada or MAX considering the fact that the new entrants into their space have very heavy war chests. But that regardless, it is a tested and trusted Deterrence Pre-entry Growth through Entry strategy.

They Use Limit Pricing

Limit pricing is when a company sets prices sufficiently low to the point where a new firm will not be able to make any profit on entering the market. It is keeping pricing low as a deterrent to new entrants. The only caveat of Limit Pricing is that it is usually advantageous if and only if the firm setting prices low have true cost advantage.

When deterrence strategies are impossible or too costly, companies use accommodation strategies. Any new entrant into a new market will do either of these 3 things: Fight, Cooperate, or Restructure and Change the game. And this is why old players need to have post-entry strategies that will cover their bases on theses 3 fronts on standby.

Markets with high entry barriers usually have few players and thus high profit margins. While markets with low entry barriers have lots of players and thus low profit margins. So as first movers, you play a key role in determining the kind of sector you will be playing in in years to come.

Make the Best of Anything and Everything, Create Your Own Blue Ocean

By

Sikiru Salami

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July 19, 2019

2

By Sikiru Salami

There are endless opportunities around us but not many of us see them, because oftentimes we’re overwhelmed by vagaries of our troubles, comforts and circumstances. So, we practically remain the same, hinged on the glory of the past (if there ever was any) but faintly hopeful about an uncertain future. In this piece, I shall share few tips on how to create your own blue ocean as an individual in the midst of troubles and limitations.

To provide a good context for discourse, let me cite few cases, depending on what scenario applies to you.

You had hoped to be a University graduate, but ended up with an HND. Your hope was to graduate with a First-class or distinction, but for circumstances within or beyond your control, it just never happened. Your wish upon graduation was to secure a cool job with one of the best companies or firms around, but years later here you are still hopping from one “Manage-it-like-that” Limited to another. You’ve spent donkey years with an employer with almost nothing to show for it, and yet you were wondering, “what if I had spent half of these years running a personal business?”. You wished you had schooled at Harvard, John Hopkins, MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, LSE, or at a minimum LBS, but you were financially and intellectually excluded.

There are tons of other instances of lost or denied opportunities. But the kernel of my today’s discourse is how you can create your own opportunities, in spite of all your past limitations and current troubles. Let’s briefly talk about this idea of Blue Ocean Strategy. In lay man terms, it means entering into an uncharted territory; creating a product for which there’s almost no competitor; creating an unusually new market for a product; creating opportunities out of trouble waters etc. Certain real life examples will help throw more light on this.

As of 2007 and earlier years, there were smartphones, IPods, Workman brands of hand radios, cameras etc. But Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs felt that what if he had all these items in a single gadget? Then, there came an iPhone brand. And it changed the smartphone market forever. Let’s talk about Huawei. Huawei is a Chinese global telecom infrastructure firm, also a smartphone maker. Now No. 2 smartphone market leader in the world after Samsung, Huawei has one major headache – Making inroad to the US market and attaining global recognition as does Apple and Samsung. You sure don’t want to know about the troubles the company currently faces with the US government. But to change that, the firm created 5G telecom infrastructure well ahead of the market, and what that does is, render all our phones (largely built for 3-4G capacity) almost archaic. Phone makers are now struggling to catch up, now introducing 5G-enabled phones.

Now let’s talk about how the concept of Blue Ocean applies to our personal realities. Being Oxford or Harvard trained has always been your dream, but you’re systemically and financially denied of such opportunity. Do you know that you can be as much competitive as any Harvard-trained fellow in the marketplace if you choose to do so, even at a lower cost? Here is another instance. You’re running a failing business, or out of job and everything seems hopeless and on a standstill. There are two experiences I will share in this respect – one personal, and another a third party story. Let’s go…

Make the Best of Anything and Everything

Personal confessions. Graduating with a First Class was one goal I had that never materialized. Getting a Harvard or Stanford or LSE MBA remains critical on my dashboard, but there are many impediments on my path. Like most young men, my dream was to intern or build career with one of these great corporations or multinationals after graduation. It didn’t happen. Growing up was awfully tough, and there were many things my peers could do that I was too disadvantaged to do. Limited access. Almost zero funding. Zero mentoring guide. Limited learning and growth opportunities. These experiences perhaps shaped my worldview — for good. I learnt to make the best of anything and everything.

Early enough, one should be very clear about who s/he becomes and not that utopia self one had hoped to become but that never happened. Till date, some people are still stuck to the past. Take the case of a fellow whose dream was to become a Medical Doctor, but as JAMB and Nigerian factor would have it, he became a Lab Scientist. Instead of making the best of what he had become; he’s stuck to his missed chance to become a Doctor. Lamentation over the past. If he strives to be one of the best Lab Scientists around, you know that could potentially compensate for his lost dream. Life happens.

I have learnt to focus more on learning outcomes, and not on optics and certifications. And that perhaps explains why the differential skills that make me competitive today were mostly not backed by any certifications, and were largely learnt for free. Like many other critical skills, I learnt financial modeling and business data analytics entirely online — for free. I’m currently learning Mandarin, and coding entirely online –for free.

Here’s the tip. Having a clear mindset is key — a mindset that practice knowledge is more important than unproven certificated knowledge. At the beginning of every year, I always have a line-up of skills I want to work on. I usually identify these skills by going through course brochure of great business schools and training institutes. Then, I go on Google to look for training contents and outlines for each skill area. Then after, I go on YouTube, Coursera and few other free education platforms to learn every single bit of the course contents. I really don’t know what most people spend time on YouTube doing, but for me, it’s more of a learning platform than anything else.

All Together

Key point here is, continuous learning positions you for great opportunities. And learning the right skills sometimes doesn’t take anything other than internet data, clarity of purpose and personal sacrifice. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of what you can do with your skills and not where you learnt the skills from. One in every seven PhD holders in Nigeria is jobless. Let that sink.

Tips On Looking After Your Taxes Throughout The Year

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