Sunday, June 02, 2013

#40@40: Set up your own company

So I've not been working since before Christmas. After the fun times I had at the last company I decided to take a bit of time off and concentrate on things like ski trips and daytime TV. Of course this wasn't a situation I could maintain indefinitely and at the start of May I had to start the process of earning again.

Fortunately a good friend of mine had some work going at the company he works for and I was a good fit for it. The draw back was that it was freelance work and up to this point in my career I've always been working in permanent positions. So I needed to get myself a company that I can trade as a freelancer through.

Now I had been avoiding the issue of getting myself sorted out for a little while now but knew I was quite likely to be setting myself up for freelance work at some point. But in the end when the call came in I hadn't done anything about it and had to move quite fast. My mate called on the Monday saying can I start on the Wednesday and I said sure. Then he said I needed be a limited company so his company could trade with me as a vendor and I said...um..sure see you Wednesday.

OK, so how exactly does all this work and what on Earth do I need to do to set up a company?

I had started some time before that week to think about the whole freelancing process and had been asking advice from a few people I know who are working as contractors what they recommended. They said basically a company can be set up pretty quickly online and I should get an accountant that knows all about contracting/freelancing. Running cost are mainly the cost of the accountants and bookkeeping.

I was recommended to check out https://www.pcg.org.uk/ the PCG, an professional association aimed at freelancers. Handily they have a beginners package for a couple of hundred quid they sort me out with company registration, getting an accountant and a years membership. They provide cover for issues dealing with the Tax man and how-to guides on lots of setup and running a company issues. That seemed like a good deal so I paid my money and filled in a few online forms and got the whole thing started.

Bits of the process are really quick, like the actual getting a company registered only took one afternoon and I had the email with the company certificate the next day. It took longer for me to decide on the company name, TaskerWeb than it did to do most of the other forms. So by Wednesday my new company and me was legal and able to go to work and start earning money.

Getting hold of that money however is an entirely different business. Over the next few days I got a whole host of forms from the accountants in the post to fill in. Government ones to give details of my new company and ones to register for VAT, Forms for registering for self assessment and getting a tax return,VAT application for registration and an application to join the flat rate tax scheme. One from the bank entitled limited company application form and mandate. And ones from the accountants asking for more personal details. I also had to send in my last P45, a bill with my address on it, my passport and oddly a cheque for 1 GBP from my personal account made payable to my company to set the business account going.

There was a lot of it but going through it all step by step with the instructions was pretty straight forward.

At this point I now have my company number, my business bank account and my VAT registration number so I can submit the last couple of weeks of work in an invoice to the client and hopefully it wont be too long before I get paid.

Next to sort out will be bookkeeping, receipts and expenses and then down the line it will be fun things like finding my next contract and filing a tax return! the journey starts here :)