As the rules currently stand, everyone in the UK has access to Business Asset Disposal Relief of £1m per lifetime. Most day nursery owners only have 1 or 2 nurseries to sell, and they often don’t top this amount, or do they?
A lot of nurseries trade as limited companies and from a tax perspective when you sell the nursery you do-not sell for the valuation price, you sell for the valuation price plus/minus a Net Asset Value Adjustment. By this we mean that if you leave £50,000 in cash in the limited company at completion (and assuming all other NAV computations equate to zero) you would, on paper, sell for £50,000 plus the business value. This £50,000 would be taxed at 10% if you are using BAD Relief, which is a lot cheaper than if drawn as salary or dividend in advance of a sale.
Net Asset Value is a lot more nuanced than the paragraph above suggests, but the principals aren’t complicated, and the message is simple: you need to take solid advice prior to any sale – particularly if you are selling a limited company. Owen Froebel can provide you with some outline advice and/or put you in touch with experienced accountants that can explain how Net Asset Value works and based on your most recent set of accounts how much of an adjustment you should budget for post-completion.
It is important to understand this because it can work both ways so if the business is carrying a CBils or BBils loan balance from COVID this can form part of the NAV and would also be a post-completion adjustment. Imagine if you sold your nursery for £500,000 only to be asked for £50,000 back eight weeks after completion purely on an accounting adjustment. This would be an entirely fair adjustment based on sound merger and acquisitions precedent but not if you had sold for £500,000 and budgeted your retirement on retaining this amount.
