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Can I treat personally invoiced income as belonging to my limited company?

Question:

I've started providing services as my side occupation (I have full-time employment), and before I registered my limited company and got my bank account sorted, I was paid by two of my customers. I invoiced them, and they paid me as an individual. However, two weeks after that, I finally formed my limited company. My questions are as follows: 1. Can I (or should I) declare those invoices under my company name and transfer payment from my personal account into my business account?  

2. Do I leave those as they are (i.e., as they were paid to an individual) and then pay income tax?  

My issue is, I'm in a higher rate tax bracket from my main job (I pay 40% on any amount I earn now), thus paying 40% from earned amount is something ideally I would like to avoid and instead, if I could declare it for tax purposes as company income, I'm happy to pay all related taxes but as a business. 

Arthur Weller replies:  

Logic suggests that a company cannot receive income before it exists. But see the case Hepburn v HMRC (www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKFTT/TC/2013/TC02837.html), where an individual successfully argued that 'her' income was really the income of a yet to exist company. Possibly, you could do the same. But you would need to carefully examine the facts of the case, to see whether they differed significantly from yours. 

I've started providing services as my side occupation (I have full-time employment), and before I registered my limited company and got my bank account sorted, I was paid by two of

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This question was first printed in Business Tax Insider in December 2021.