How we restructured a Brick Lane curry house for £8,800 annual saving
Client K runs a well-known curry house on Brick Lane trading as a Ltd company, with several family members working in the business, front of house, kitchen and management, but the structure hadn't been reviewed in years. The director remuneration was inefficient, the VAT treatment of eat-in versus takeaway wasn't optimised, and tips weren't structured through a tronc.
We reviewed and restructured. We set the directors' salaries at the NIC-optimal level with dividends split across the family shareholders to use their allowances and bands, reviewed the VAT (eat-in and hot takeaway standard-rated, with the split captured), set up a proper tronc for the waiting staff's tips to save NIC, and claimed the Employment Allowance against employer NIC on the kitchen and waiting staff.