The FAB blog spot

  There we were, reasonably happy with the People’s Energy supplying our electricity and gas supplies, at least from a tariff perspective, when they went out of business in September.  Our account was transferred, under the “Supplier of Last Resort” scheme, to British Gas.   I’m on the Priority Service Register (PSR), as I am disabled and we have no way of accessing the gas meter, and nobody whom we can ask.   I had requested the meter be read for over a year and was fobbed off with the excuse that because of Covid restrictions the meter could not be read.   Strange, as the meter is external to the house so there would have been no need to enter the house to read the gas meter, and the electricity readings were being sent via smart meter.   The gas meter, which I was told was not connected to the smart meter as it was incompatible, according to an email I had received from People’s Energy on 10 th August 2021 that someone was going to be reading the meter “within 3 months” – then they

    Rant time.  Again.   This time HMRC is the target of my ire.   (Takes deep breath to avoid killing keyboard, sucks thumb and blows while sucking to stimulate the vagus nerve which controls the heart rate (no, really – try it), in a vain attempt to bring it down to less than 120…)   So, as I had completed the filing of my company accounts for 2021, I decided to get the painful bit out of the way and cough up what I owed to HMRC.   I had changed my year end from 31 st August to 30 th September as my trading year actually began 1 st October, so I thought I’d align it at the start.  This meant that I actually had TWO corporation tax bills: the first due for the period 1 st September 2020 to 31 st August 2021, the second for the period to 30 th September 2021.   The amount due was duly paid 7 th October 2021, comprising the two amounts due.   I checked the Government Gateway and there were the payments against the filed periods.   Great, I thought.  No need to worry about that an

  As I have aged, I’ve found myself tolerating fools less and less.  Whether it is on social media or in general life, especially business, I am now consciously having to bite my tongue to avoid appearing confrontational.   In a previous blog, I mentioned grammar and pronunciation (or at least, aspiration) of the letter “h”.   As a now officially card-carrying grumpy old man (having now attained a “certain age”) I find that tolerance of fools decaying on a daily, if not faster basis.   Some advice for people embarking on a career of bookkeeping.   Before you even consider it, first get some training or, at the very least, experience of the genre.   Having been a trained trainer in technical matters, I used to believe that there were no stupid questions:   I was wrong.   Some of the doozies I see posted by would-be bookkeepers and "businesspeople" on social media are so stupid that I seriously think these people should not only avoid bookkeeping as a career/business, but they

This is a rant on the state of literacy and the misuse of grammar and punctuation in social media posts (in particular), and the lamentable lowering in standards of previously admirable broadcasters and their on-screen “talent”. One that really grinds my gears – the pronunciation of a hard “h” when using the letter in an acronym, for example saying "haitch" when talking about the “N haitch S”, which seems to now be the norm ( I know that language is evolutionary but…).  Every dictionary defines the spelling of “h” as “aitch” – so where is the leading hard “h”?  Go to almost any country in the world other than the UK or Ireland and they’ll look at you with raised eyebrows for aspirating the letter.  It’s only been for about 20 years that this abysmal habit has squeezed itself into general societal discourse. Ugh! Then there’s the abuse of the apostrophe where there shouldn’t be one, especially before an “s”. People, the apostrophe is there to abbreviate two words (where