• The Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) is a HMRC tax requirement for contractors and subcontractors in the construction industry. See www.gov.uk/what-is-the-construction-industry-scheme
• If you're a contractor, you must register for the scheme
• Under CIS, contractors deduct money from payments received from subcontractor’s payments and pass it to HMRC. The deductions count as advance payments towards the subcontractor’s tax and National Insurance
• If you're a subcontractor you don’t have to register, but deductions are taken from your payments at a higher rate if you're not registered
• If you want to import your own chart of accounts, you must do this before you activate CIS. Once activated, we create additional CIS categories and disable the import chart of accounts feature
• If you're using Accounting Start, you can only use CIS if you are a subcontractor. This is because Start doesn’t support purchase invoices
• Learn how to use the CIS feature if you currently enter CIS into the system manually

How it works in Accounting Start

Turn on the CIS features before you start.

Use special CIS ledger accounts when recording transactions and we deduct the CIS amount automatically.

Identify which of your contacts are contractors and subcontractors. The CIS ledger accounts are only available when entering transactions for CIS contacts.

CIS for subcontractors

If you are a subcontractor

1. Identify which customer contacts are your contractors. This is to make sure you can select the CIS categories and that we apply the correct deductions to your transactions.
2. Identify when contractors need to use reverse charge VAT.
3. When recording sales invoices, select a CIS category and we'll automatically deduct the CIS amount withheld by your contractors.
4. Create a CIS Suffered report, over any given period, to track the deductions made on your behalf by your contractors.

Set up CIS for your business