Budget Month and the Security Owner's Year-End Checklist

How to read a Budget as a business owner

A Budget is due later this month, and the fortnight before one is often a time of sudden interest among owners who have not thought about selling in years. Speculation in the trade press hardens into certainty over a few days, somebody mentions a rate change at a networking breakfast, and a decision that deserved six months of thought gets compressed into a fortnight of anxiety.

The discipline that helps is to separate what is known from what is anticipated. What is known is that the tax rate under Business Asset Disposal Relief, the reduced rate for owners selling a business they run, was 14% from April 2025 and went up to 18% in Apr 2026, against a lifetime limit of £1m of qualifying gains and a main rate of 24%. Those are published, legislated positions, and they are the only ones on which a plan can sensibly be built.

Everything else circulating this month is a forecast. Some forecasts turn out right, which is what makes them persuasive, and none of them is a reason to bring forward a transaction that is not otherwise ready. Bringing a sale forward three months to get ahead of a forecast usually costs more in the price achieved than the change itself would have cost in tax, and nobody ever measures that comparison afterwards.

A business sold three months early because of an anticipated change usually loses more in price than the change would have cost in tax.

The housekeeping that shortens next year's diligence

The genuinely useful November work has nothing to do with the Budget. It is the set of tasks that are easy now, while the trading year is still in front of you, and disproportionately difficult once it has closed and everybody has moved on.

Start with the contract schedule, because it is the document every buyer asks for and almost nobody has ready. Each account, what it covers, start date, term, notice period, current monthly or annual charge, date of the last increase, and whether the agreement is signed. Building it in November means the year-end figures and the schedule agree with each other, which is a check a buyer will perform whether or not you do.

Then the adjustments. Write down, now, which costs in this year will not recur and why. The insurance claim, the tribunal, the van written off, the consultant brought in for a single project. In twelve months these will be line items nobody can explain, and an unexplained cost is a cost that stays in the earnings a buyer prices.

Then the licence and vetting file. Every renewal that falls due in the next twelve months, diarised. Every BS 7858 pack checked for completeness. This is an afternoon of work that removes an entire category of friction from diligence, the buyer's detailed checks, and November is the month when an afternoon is still findable.

Why tax is rarely the decisive number

For most owner-managed security businesses, the spread between a well-prepared sale and a poorly prepared one is considerably larger than the spread between one tax rate and the next. Preparation moves the multiple of profit a buyer pays, the number of interested buyers, the structure of the consideration and how much of the money arrives on completion day rather than years afterwards. Tax moves what is left once all of that has been settled.

That is not an argument for ignoring tax. It is an argument for sequencing. Establish what the business is worth and what would move that figure, then take advice on structure and timing from an accountant who knows your position, then decide. Owners who reverse that order end up optimising the smaller variable.

The other thing worth saying in November is that nothing here requires a decision. The contract schedule, the adjustments note and the licence file each make the firm simpler to operate and simpler to borrow against, whether or not it is ever sold. That is the test I would apply to any preparation somebody recommends to you this month, including mine.

For owners with a few years in hand, the Reads Pre-Sale Programme sets out what to prepare and when.