Can anyone post easy steps to set up a Limited Company?

chrismac1

PM me if you want more details on this lot.

property.advert

Umbrella used to work on capital gains but as that has gone up to 28% the benefit is not there. Go Ltd, use the best portal in the business http://www.madesimplegroup.com/ and set yourself up as flat rate VAT (unless you pull in over £175k or so - check limits).

Then you get an extra 6/7% income from the VAT angle and you really don't need much of an accountant to do the books. Sub £1000 is the norm, better if a few of your fellow bods use the same company.

rogerp

The following are the steps in brief:-

The registration of your private company from scratch using your own registered office address, and appoint your own candidates to the roles of director, secretary (if needed), and shareholder;


The standard capital on company formation is £1,000, this is divided into 1,000 ordinary shares valued at £1.00 each (it is not required to have all of the shares issued, but a minimum of one share must be issued).


You can contact agents who can get it done for you for as low as £30 (including govt. fees). Just check out in the internet.


You will be able to start your business after you have the following documents:-
A certificate of incorporation
The memorandum & articles of association

The first meeting of the board of directors

Share certificates and a company register

property.advert

rogerp wrote: »

The following are the steps in brief:-

The registration of your private company from scratch using your own registered office address, and appoint your own candidates to the roles of director, secretary (if needed), and shareholder;


The standard capital on company formation is £1,000, this is divided into 1,000 ordinary shares valued at £1.00 each (it is not required to have all of the shares issued, but a minimum of one share must be issued).


You can contact agents who can get it done for you for as low as £30 (including govt. fees). Just check out in the internet.


You will be able to start your business after you have the following documents:-
A certificate of incorporation
The memorandum & articles of association

The first meeting of the board of directors

Share certificates and a company register

What truly poor advice.

No need for £1000 of share capital at all. No need for shares to be £1 each. No need for anything other than 1 director, secretary not required by law nowadays.

There is nothing standard about this company formation advice as it is simply made up nonsense.

In order to bolster your own empirical information, I suggest you reverse engineer the situation. For example, you would need a company bank account. Starting with exactly what they need in practice, not listed on some website or via some grubby £35 cashback claptrap. Issues such as who own the shares, what the scope of your trading activity will be and letters from the company, on company paperwork, may well be required. If you have set it up one way under duff advice but then need to backtrack or whatever, then you are stuffed a little. Far better to make sure of exactly what is required before starting out.

Another issue is to make your company seem as normal as can be. You do not want to highlight to the authorities that you are a one man band as your chances of being investigated rise dramatically. Think things through, have your company do other things, not only your work.

Don't have it registered at your address. I would use an intermediary and probably make sure my name did not appear on the published list of directors. However, this can impact on your bank account application so you need to think it all through, before jumping in with your 1000 £1 share set up etc.

The bottom line is that you make on your VAT as I've explained earlier. You can also offset expenses (you'll need to know what and how the dates matter significantly). You need to understand depreciation, capital allowances and other tax and accounting issues. It is not rocket science but can boost your income by tens of percent, perhaps by half.

chrismac1

"You do not want to highlight to the authorities that you are a one man band as your chances of being investigated rise dramatically."

Do you have any evidence to back up this statement? A local accountant died in April and I've picked up 25 of her clients so far. She'd been in business for 20 years, had 300 small clients (all one-man bands so far for me) and had seen just 1 investigation in those 20 years. I make that a 0.02% strike rate against the PUBLISHED average of 3% in any given tax year.

However, I agree that one-man bands operating in the IT field with one major customer (or only 1 customer) are much more likely to be investigated. But this in my view is nothing to do with the "one-man" aspect, it's more to do with potentially "false self-employment" and IR35. For now until March 2011 IR35 is dead in the water - see post above.

A Secretary is not a legal requirement, but banks will often insist on it for companies of any great size. I've had two of my clients get this in the last 6 months and they've put their spouses on as Secretary. In the last 3 years UK banks have made an astonshing discovery in the world of business, one of the few genuine innovations in the banking world in the past 50 years. It's called Risk!

"I would use an intermediary and probably make sure my name did not appear on the published list of directors."

I don't know what the hell that is all about. It makes absolutely no legal difference as the OP would clearly be a Shadow Director given what he's posted so far. Also, remember that the reason so many IT contractors are set up in this way is client perception. If I were a client, I would be highly unimpressed if my supposedly one man band IT contractor was not even a director of his own company!