Most Barnsley construction Ltd directors who walk into my office on Century Business Park — that's the one in Wath, fifteen minutes from town and even closer if you're out at Hoyland or Wombwell — turn up with the same five questions. CIS uncertainty. Retentions sat doing nothing.
The R&D thing they've heard about but don't quite believe applies to them. The van they want to buy before year-end. And how to move to us without anything slipping. I'm Sarah Bingham, AAT-qualified, and the rest of this page is those five questions answered in the order they usually come up.
Most Barnsley construction Ltds I sit down with have the same five questions
I see roughly forty Barnsley construction Ltds in any given year. Some are first-call enquiries, some are existing clients getting a year-end review, some are sole traders who've just incorporated and aren't sure what's changed.
The five questions below are the ones that come up most often. Skip to whichever one fits your firm. The full picture of how construction accounting works as a specialism lives on the construction accountants hub — but for a Barnsley Ltd, these five are usually what matters most week to week.
"We've been doing CIS ourselves and we're not sure it's right"
This is the most common question I get, especially from Barnsley Ltds that grew out of a one-person CIS subcontracting business. You started filing your own CIS300 because it looked simple. Then you took on your first subbie.
Now you're at both ends of the chain — contractor to a subbie below, subcontractor to a main contractor above — and the maths is doing your head in.
Three things go wrong most often. The first is verification: every new subbie needs to be verified with HMRC before you can pay them at the registered 20% rate. Skip the verification and HMRC defaults you to 30%, your subbie chases you for the missing 10%, and you've now got an angry conversation to have.
The second is the 19th of the month. CIS300 returns are due by the 19th of the month after the payment month. Miss it, even by a day, and a £100 penalty turns up. Miss it three times and you're looking at five-figure exposure.
The third — and this is the one that costs most — is CIS suffered. As a subcontractor being deducted from up the chain, you can offset that money against your monthly PAYE/NIC through the Employer Payment Summary. Most Barnsley Ltds I see weren't told that. They're sitting on twelve months of CIS suffered that should have been in their account, not HMRC's.
What we do: monthly CIS300, verification audit on every new subbie, monthly EPS to offset CIS suffered in real time, and a Gross Payment Status assessment if your turnover and compliance position warrant applying.
CIS deduction rates for 2026/27 are unchanged from last year — 20% registered, 30% unregistered, 0% with GPS — and you can read HMRC's contractor guidance for the full mechanic. Our CIS Returns service page goes deeper.
"Our retentions just sit there and nobody chases them"
Retentions are the construction industry's quiet cashflow killer. You finish a job. The main contractor holds back 5% — sometimes 2.5% on practical completion plus another 2.5% twelve months later for defects. That money is yours.
It's already on your balance sheet as a receivable. But if nobody is actively tracking it, the release dates slide past without a chase, and the money sits in someone else's bank account earning them interest while you're working capital-poor on the next job.
I see this pattern almost every time I onboard a Barnsley construction Ltd. The figures vary, but typically 4% to 6% of annual turnover is sitting in retentions across the active book. For a £1.2m-turnover Ltd that's £50,000 to £70,000 of your own money tied up because there's no schedule.
What we do: a retentions schedule built into your monthly management accounts. Every retention you've earned, on every job, with the practical completion date and the defects-period release date.
We tell you which ones are overdue this month and which are coming up next quarter. If you want us to draft the chase letters too, we'll do that. Most of the money is recoverable. You just need somebody whose job it is to track it.
"Do we even qualify for R&D? It sounds like it's for tech firms"
This is the question I most enjoy answering, because the answer is almost always yes and the money is real. R&D tax credits are not for people in lab coats.
HMRC's definition turns on whether your team solved a technical problem where the answer wasn't already publicly available. For construction, that's a lot more common than directors think it is.
The Barnsley examples I see most: bespoke groundworks where the ground conditions forced you off the standard detail. Insulation or Part L compliance solutions on older Yorkshire housing stock where the off-the-shelf approach won't pass.
Modular or Modern Methods of Construction work for housing developers like Avant or Bellway. Custom fabrication where you've had to engineer something to fit. If your team has ever spent a week figuring out how to make a job work that wasn't in the original spec — there might be a claim in there.
The mechanics matter though. For accounting periods starting on or after 1 April 2024, the merged R&D Expenditure Credit scheme replaced the old SME and RDEC split, at a 20% credit rate, taxable, which works out at roughly 16p of net cash per £1 of qualifying spend for most profitable Ltds.
The trap is pre-notification — if it's a first claim or you haven't claimed in three years, HMRC needs to know within six months of the period end. Miss that and the claim is dead before you write it. The Additional Information Form has to land before the claim too, with the right technical narrative.
What we do: a free 30-minute scoping call where I go through your last two years of jobs and tell you honestly whether there's a claim worth filing. If there is, we agree the fee before we start. If there isn't, you've lost 30 minutes and learned something useful.
"We're buying a new van before year-end: does the capital-allowance cliff actually save us anything?"
Yes, and it matters more this year than it did last. Three numbers to understand together.
Annual Investment Allowance (AIA): stays at £1 million for 2026/27. A 100% deduction on qualifying plant and machinery in the year of purchase. For most Barnsley construction Ltds buying vans, tools, trailers and site kit, AIA covers everything you'll spend in a year. HMRC's AIA guidance has the full list of what qualifies.
Full Expensing: stays at 100% for limited companies on main-rate plant and machinery, with no annual cap. Runs alongside AIA. Sole traders and partnerships can't use it — only Ltds. If you've recently gone Ltd, this is one of the reasons it was worth doing.
The 14% writing-down allowance cliff: from 1 April 2026 the main-pool writing-down allowance was cut from 18% to 14%. That's the rate that applies to anything that doesn't get Full Expensed or AIA'd in the year of purchase.
Bring your new van into use before year-end and AIA gives you a 100% deduction. Miss the bring-into-use date by one day and the asset drops into the main pool — relegated to 14% a year, taking effectively seven years to write off rather than one.
What we do: a capital-allowances call before any plant purchase over £5,000, a year-end timing check in February, and a recommended bring-into-use date that maximises the deduction. For a Barnsley Ltd buying a £35,000 van in March, that's the difference between £35,000 of 2026/27 deduction and £4,900.
"How easy is it really to switch accountants without things slipping?"
Genuinely easier than most directors expect. The reason people put it off is the worry that something will fall through the cracks during handover — a CIS300 missed, a VAT return forgotten, a payroll cycle delayed. None of that needs to happen.
The process from your end is short. A free 30-minute call. You sign an engagement letter. You sign a 64-8 form authorising us to act for you with HMRC. That's it.
From our end it's two to three weeks of background work. We send a professional clearance letter to your current accountant, request your records (digital and paper), migrate your bookkeeping into our system or update yours, set the opening balances against the most recent year-end accounts, and activate our agent code with HMRC. If your CIS300 or VAT return falls due during the handover, we file it on time regardless of where the records sit — that's our job, not yours.
Most of our new clients start on a Monday and notice no operational change beyond getting their calls returned the same day. I am the person you'll be ringing.