Running a business in Britain, page 13
246 articles on what it actually takes to run a business in Britain: VAT, staff, rent, rates, tenants, stock and sites. From the studio that simulates it.
- CDM, and who is legally in charge of the site. On a domestic job the client's legal duties do not disappear. They land on you, usually without anyone telling you, and they start before the first delivery.
- Building control, and the inspection you must not miss. Concrete goes in on Friday. The inspector cannot come until Tuesday. What happens next decides whether the house is sellable in ten years.
- The VAT you no longer charge. From one March morning, subcontractors stopped collecting VAT they had been using as working capital without quite realising it. Many did not notice until the cash ran out.
- Quoting for a kitchen, not a contract. A homeowner reads a quote as a promise about the finished kitchen. You wrote it as a price for the work you listed. The gap between those two readings is where the money goes.
- Getting paid without the twenty per cent taken off. Twenty per cent of every labour invoice, held by HMRC until your return is filed. Gross payment status hands that money back, and one late return takes it away again.
- The van that is emptied overnight. The van is emptied between eleven and four. The insurer asks where it was parked, what was locked, and where the receipts are. Two of those three answers usually fail.
- Falls are still the thing that kills. There is no two metre rule and there never was. The regulations apply wherever a fall could injure someone, including off the back of a van.
- The survey before the sledgehammer. A management survey says the building is safe to occupy. It says nothing about what is behind the wall you are about to take out, and the two documents are not interchangeable.
- Retrofitting a house that was built to leak. Insulate a solid wall properly and the house gets warmer. Insulate it without thinking about ventilation and you have built a mould machine at the customer's expense.
- The ten year warranty and what it covers. For the first two years the builder fixes it. After that an insurer covers the structure, and only the structure. Most of what goes wrong in a new house is neither.
- Scaffolding, licences and the neighbour's garden. The council licence takes a fortnight. The neighbour who has to let the scaffold over their garden can simply say no, and there is no law that makes them say yes.
- Inside the engine that runs Business Baron. One Rust library, a dependency list you can read in a second, and a month that advances in fifty-nine ordered steps. The interface is allowed to know none of it.
- How do you test a game with forty years in it. The bug appeared in simulated 1993, in about one game in four hundred, and only if you had bought a second site. Finding it took a machine, not a tester.
- How the artwork gets made. A game with more than two hundred business types across 91 towns and nearly a century needs more pictures than a small studio can draw. Here is how we made about eleven hundred of them, and what we still drew.
- Seventeen tracks that must not be noticed. A soundtrack for a game people leave running for six hours has one job: to still be bearable in hour five. Seventeen tracks, and none of them wants your attention.
- Why the tax code is in a game. A slider you drag from 10% to 30% is not a decision. A threshold you can be one invoice away from crossing is, and that is the whole argument.
- Making a dense game readable. Nine numbers, four of them red, on a screen you have to read in fifteen seconds. Dense games are exactly the ones where accessibility is not decoration.
- Modding, and why we publish the formats. A player rebuilt our 1970s corporation tax table because we had one year wrong. That was easier for both of us than a bug report, which is rather the point.