Dividends

Dividends cover the statutory dividend lifecycle for a limited company: recording the board resolution that approves a distribution, declaring individual dividends to shareholders against that resolution, marking them paid, voiding them, and producing a dividend voucher for each shareholder's records. A tax calculator provides an advisory estimate of the dividend tax a shareholder would bear.

The lifecycle is ordered and gated. A distribution begins with board minutes that record the directors present, the financial year the distribution relates to, the retained profit available, and the total dividend approved. The approved total cannot exceed the retained profit recorded at the resolution, the profit sufficiency rule that protects directors from declaring an unlawful distribution. Individual declarations are then made against those minutes, each drawing down the resolution's remaining allocation until it is exhausted. Declaration and payment each post their own double-entry journal; a void posts reversing journals rather than deleting anything, so the ledger keeps a complete history.

The board minutes are the single writer of the approved allocation: declarations read and decrement the remaining figure they hold, and the profit check reads cumulative retained earnings against what prior resolutions have already approved for the year. Monetary fields are in pence. The dividend tax figures are an advisory estimate, not a binding tax record; the rate and band figures applied are returned in the calculation response.