Crossbone Systems

Once you are registered for VAT, sending in your returns every three months can be a bit of a daunting task, especially if you’re not keeping strict electronic records on a regular basis.

I’ve blogged about various online accounting packages before, but if you want to keep track of your company’s finances, and make your VAT returns effortless, KashFlow is the way to go. Read the rest of this entry »

[Note:- this article was originally scheduled for appearance in April but unfortunately time constraints delayed it until after the 2008 end-of-year filing deadline. I've published it now in the hope that it will show potential company-founders how easy it is to stay on top of such things].

At the end of the tax year, (ie. 5th April), you must file a return that tells HMRC the breakdown of the income tax and NIC payments you have made throughout the previous year. HMRC need this information because tax and NI deductions are paid to them monthly throughout the year without any additional details about the breakdown. (See part 1 of this article for more information). Read the rest of this entry »

Once you’ve started your own limited company and people are paying for your products or services, you may want to start taking a salary.

This is a good idea for several reasons:

1. It’s the main way to legally move money from your business bank account to your personal bank account
2. It ensures you continue to pay National Insurance contributions, (essential if you expect a government pension later in life)
3. You pay tax to the government, thus preventing them from breaking down your door and demanding your money!
4. It gives you some money to live off

This article is designed to take a lot of the jargon away from paying yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

When you haven’t got any money and you need a website that will look nice and professional, my advice would be to head over to wordpress.com. As well as being really easy to update (even for non-technical users), they offer all sorts of nice features for creating web pages and news/blog posts. The bonus is that they have stats tracking built right in, so you can how popular your site is (or isn’t!) getting. Their site is built on the same engine that this website uses, and you can sign up with them for free.

Just what every bootstrapper needs.

Once you’ve built your site using their tools, it’s only a few dollars to ensure it appears whenever you visit your company’s main website address.

This article is all about how to set up an official private limited company, but to write about that subject requires me to make some assumptions. Without any, I’d have to write an entire book. So here are my assumptions - if more than a couple of these hold true, read on:

1. You’ve got a ton of ideas and are struggling to find time to work on any of them
2. You’ve hardly got any money to use to seed a company
3. You want to build a company, a brand and/or something you can point to and call your own
4. You live in the UK

The last one doesn’t preclude you from enjoying this article, but I’m going to focus on the specifics of starting up in the UK, because that’s where my experience lies. The bootstrapping blog has a guide for any Americans reading. Read the rest of this entry »