Blog Article

Marriage Allowance going unclaimed

By Toby Lester

Author

By Toby Lester

Author

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Updated 11th July 2022 | 4 min read Published 12th January 2018

Developing long term relationships with clients is of crucial importance to all businesses. However many practices become ‘stuck’ providing the same service to their clients year after year. The real challenge is to evolve from a single transactional relationship to one with an emphasis on customer retention, satisfaction, and lifetime customer value.

Analytics and reporting is an essential element to business success, without it business leaders are prone to make assumptions based on an emotion or a feeling. Analysing historic and live data places leaders at the front of the curve and gives a deep insight into the data.

The Client Engagement Matrix is one of many reports that can be produced within IRIS CRM. This powerful and informative visual interface helps identify the white space and gaps in the services clients take from a business.

The easy way to upsell services to clients

IRIS CRM collects the fee data from Time & Fees on a nightly basis, providing CRM with up-to-date fee data on each service line. From this report it’s possible to identify the total Gross Recurring Fee (GRF) per client. The report is also capable of filtering across client grades if selected.

With this valuable insight readily available it’s possible to deliver personalised, targeted email campaigns to clients with pin point accuracy, creating new sales opportunities and informing clients of valuable services they are missing.

Another benefit of the Client Engagement Matrix data is the high and low performing fee analysis. The report highlights average service line values which can be compared against other firms or across industry sectors.

The Client Engagement Matrix helps business leaders to make more informed decisions, target the ‘underperforming’ clients and service lines allowing for speedy resolution. It can:

• Analyse data across all elements of your business

• Trigger campaigns directly from reports

• Identify gaps and weak points in your business and service

• Plan for the future and respond to changing events, fast!

• Provide instant data reporting… No time-consuming data-mining involved

Ill informed decisions can have a negative impact to a business with serious consequences to finances, reputation and future growth. IRIS CRM allows business leaders to collate meaningful information, make better informed decisions and take steps to successfully develop their business.

£662 Marriage Allowance up for grabs!

When the marriage allowance was introduced from April 2015, the Government boasted that some four million married couples and 15,000 civil partners would be able to benefit from it. However, recent reports indicate that less than half of eligible couples have claimed it - a significant number of people are therefore still missing out.

Reasons for not claiming vary from being unaware of its existence, to not knowing how to claim it. Whatever the reason though, it is actually quite a straight-forward tax allowance to understand and the procedure for claiming is simple. It is worth checking client records to see if any backdated claims can be made.

Who can claim?

Rather than being a standard amount allowance like, say, the personal tax allowance, marriage allowance is a way for couples to transfer a proportion of their individual personal allowance between them in a tax-efficient manner.

It should be possible to benefit from the allowance where the following conditions are satisfied:

The couple must be either married or in a civil partnership – living together is not sufficient.
One partner needs to be a non-taxpayer – which generally means they are earning less than the personal allowance (£11,500 in 2017/18).
The other partner needs to be a basic 20% rate taxpayer, which broadly means they will be earning less than £45,000 in 2017/18. Higher and additional rate taxpayers are not entitled to the allowance.
Both partners must have been born on or after 6 April 1935.

How much?

For 2017/18, the maximum amount that can be transferred from one partner to the other is £1,150, which means that the person receiving the transferred allowance will be entitled to a reduced income tax liability of up to £230 (£1,150 @ 20%).

Looking further back, for 2015/16 the allowance was worth £212, and for 2016/17 it was worth £220. Backdated claims are allowed, so a claim now for all three years will be worth up to £662.

The allowance is set to rise to £1,185 on 6 April 2018, so it will be worth a further £237 in 2018/19.

How do I claim?

In order to process a claim, HMRC will require both partner’s national insurance number, and an acceptable form of ID from the non-taxpayer. Note that it is the partner who is the non-taxpayer who makes the claim for the relevant proportion of their unused personal tax allowance to be transferred to the partner who pays tax at the basic rate.

In most cases, the allowance will be given by adjusting the recipient partner's PAYE tax code. For self-employed people, the allowance can be claimed via the self-assessment return will be given as a reduction against income tax liability.

2017 Autumn Budget change

It was confirmed in the 2017 Autumn Budget that claims can be made where one partner has died since April 2015. A claim could be worth a tax repayment of up to £662 - it’s definitely worth checking clients’ circumstances!