Running a business in Britain, page 9
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.
- What a small hotel is actually worth. The seller says twenty-two bedrooms at £45,000 a room. That is not a valuation, it is an asking price. What you are buying is a profit, and the roof behind it.
- Breakfast is the most expensive free thing you sell. Breakfast is included, so it looks free. It is the highest-cost, highest-labour, most wasteful hour of your day, and it is buried inside a room rate you set six months ago.
- What an accountant is actually for. Accountant is not a protected title in the UK. Anyone can use it. Here is what separates the ones who file your return from the ones who are worth paying.
- Bookkeeping you can keep up. The shoebox is not a cheap system. It is an expensive one with the bill deferred to January. A weekly hour costs less than the annual reconstruction.
- Forming a company, step by step. Incorporating takes about twenty minutes and costs less than a tank of fuel. The decisions you make in those twenty minutes are the ones that are awkward to undo.
- What being a director actually commits you to. Seven duties in the Companies Act 2006, and one moment when the company you serve stops being the shareholders and becomes the creditors. Most directors never learn where that line is.
- Salary, dividends, or some of each. The optimal split is worth a few hundred pounds a year and about an hour of thought. Taking money the company has not made is worth considerably more than that, in the wrong direction.
- The agreement you write while you still like each other. Two founders, fifty shares each, and no document. It works until one of them stops turning up, and then there is no mechanism at all for anything.
- R&D relief, and what actually counts. Most rejected R&D claims are not fraud. They are ordinary competent work described as if it were science, by an agent paid a percentage of whatever they can get through.
- Taking on an apprentice. A small firm that has never paid the apprenticeship levy can still have most of the training bill paid for it. The part nobody budgets for is the time.
- Sick pay, and the week you have to cover anyway. Statutory sick pay is a fraction of a wage and you cannot reclaim it. The expensive part is not the payment. It is that the work still has to be done.
- Maternity leave in a firm of five. A year of leave in a firm of five sounds unaffordable until you work out what you can reclaim and how much notice you actually get. It is a planning problem, not a crisis.
- TUPE, and the staff who come with the keys. You negotiated hard on stock and fixtures. The staff came across automatically, on their existing terms, with their existing claims, and you never priced any of it.
- Getting a disciplinary right. Most unfair dismissal claims are not lost on the facts. They are lost because somebody decided on Tuesday and held the hearing on Thursday.
- References, right to work, and the checks that are not optional. A right to work check takes about four minutes and protects you from a penalty running to tens of thousands of pounds per worker. Most employers do it wrong anyway.
- The rota that quietly breaks the law. The 48 hour limit is an average, which is why the rota that looks legal in any given week can still be unlawful across seventeen of them.
- How firms underpay the minimum wage without meaning to. Nobody in the public naming lists set out to underpay. They deducted for a uniform, or did not pay for the ten minutes before the doors opened.
- UK GDPR for a business with eleven customers. You do not need a data protection officer or a forty-page policy. You need to know why you hold each thing, how long for, and what you do in the seventy-two hours after a laptop goes missing.