This week: whether a company EV still stacks up as Benefit in Kind tax rises, how your pension could buy your business premises, and why your repeated sent emails may reveal the next process worth automating.

1. 9% BIK: Is The Company EV Still Worth It?

EV company car tax is heading to 9% by 2029/30.

At the same time, the mileage allowance for using your own car has increased to 55p for the first 10,000 business miles, then 25p. At 20,000 miles, that’s £8,000 a year tax-free.

Business owners are asking if it makes sense to ditch the company EV, buy a petrol car personally and claim mileage? So, we ran the numbers.

Take two broadly equivalent £40,000 cars, doing 20,000 business miles plus 5,000 private.

On reasonable lease, fuel, insurance and running-cost assumptions:

Company EV: ~£8,000 annual after-tax TCO

Private petrol: ~£10,500

So even at 9% BIK, the EV wins by around £2,500 a year.

But there’s a hidden cost.

The company pays for the EV from company funds and gets tax relief on much of the cost.

Your private petrol car has to be paid from your money.

If you need another £10,000 personally to fund it, the company doesn't simply need to earn another £10,000. For an additional-rate taxpayer extracting profits as dividends, it can require around £22,000 of additional pre-tax company profit once corporation tax and dividend tax are considered.

That gets significant very quickly.

We also modelled the same thing at the silly end: a ~£135k company Taycan versus a ~£140k privately funded 911.

The company EV required roughly £50k of annual pre-tax business profit to support it.

The private ICE route: ~£84k.

That’s the bit BIK comparisons often miss.

As a motorist, I'm largely against EVs.

As a business owner? Even at 9% BIK, the numbers remain pretty compelling.

Don’t compare the tax charge. Compare the total cost of getting the car onto your driveway.

2. Could Your Pension Scheme Become Your Landlord?

If you own a limited company, have a decent pension pot and need commercial premises, there’s a potentially very tax-efficient combination sitting in front of you.

Your pension can buy the property your business operates from.

Say you have £300,000 accumulated across existing pensions.

You transfer those funds into a suitable SIPP or SSAS, which then buys a £250,000 office, workshop or industrial unit.

Your company moves in and pays rent to the pension.

That creates an interesting tax circle.

Say the market rent is £20,000 a year.

Your limited company pays £20,000 to the pension. Assuming it's incurred wholly and exclusively for the business, that rent is normally deductible when calculating Corporation Tax.

At a 25% Corporation Tax rate, a £20,000 deduction is potentially worth £5,000 a year in Corporation Tax.

The pension receives the £20,000 rent and, generally, doesn't pay Income Tax on it.

So rather than paying rent to an unrelated landlord, the company is effectively moving money from the business into your retirement fund — with Corporation Tax relief potentially available on the way.

Over 15 years, £20,000 annual rent is £300,000 paid into the pension before considering reinvestment and changes in rent.

Then there's the property itself.

If the pension buys it for £250,000 and eventually sells it for £400,000, the £150,000 capital gain is generally exempt from Capital Gains Tax within the registered pension scheme.

So you've potentially got three tax advantages working together:

Corporation Tax relief on the rent.

Rental income accumulating tax-free within the pension.

Property growth generally free from Capital Gains Tax within the pension.

The pension may also be able to borrow towards the purchase, subject to strict limits, so you don't necessarily need the entire purchase price sitting in your pension today.

There are rules. The rent and lease need to be commercial, the pension owns the building rather than you personally, and residential property is a different beast altogether.

But if your business is going to pay rent for the next 10 or 20 years anyway, there's a fairly obvious question worth asking:

Would you rather spend £300,000 building your landlord's wealth - or potentially use it to build your own pension?

3. Your Next Automation Is Hiding In Your Sent Emails

Most business owners approach automation the wrong way. They start with the software and ask what it can do. You should start with what you keep repeatedly doing. Open your sent emails and look for messages you’ve written repeatedly such as:

• “Has this invoice been paid?”

• “Please send your timesheet.”

• “Your quote is attached.”

• “Can you confirm the job is complete?”

Each one points to a process that could probably be automated.

A quote is accepted? Create the job and send the deposit invoice. A job is finished? Notify the office and prepare the final bill. An invoice is overdue? Send a reminder and create a follow-up task. A new enquiry arrives? Acknowledge it immediately and make sure somebody owns it.

You don’t need a massive AI project. Tools like Make, Zapier and features already sitting inside your existing software can handle much of this. AI can then read the information, summarise it or draft the response.

The objective isn’t to remove people. It’s to remove the chasing, copying, rekeying and remembering that eats their time.

Try this today: find one email you regularly repeat and work backwards. What causes you to send it?

That trigger is probably where your next automation should start.

Don’t ask, “How can we use AI?”

Ask, “Why are we still doing this manually?”