New Company startup, working from home

Intheattic

Can I ask why you decided to form a company straight away instead of starting off as a sole trader? Definitely find a good accountant however a little tip (from an accountant ) use a separate bookkeeper and accountant or try to learn how to do your own accounts ready to be passed onto the accountant for your year end.

It will save you a fair bit of money as accountants tend to charge alot more for just the bookkeeping side.

Mistral001

You can claim for entertaining staff members up to a certain point, but not clients. It seems counter-intuitive but that is the way it is. But as others have said you need to see your accountant.

Pennywise

Intheattic wrote: »

Can I ask why you decided to form a company straight away instead of starting off as a sole trader? Definitely find a good accountant however a little tip (from an accountant ) use a separate bookkeeper and accountant or try to learn how to do your own accounts ready to be passed onto the accountant for your year end.

It will save you a fair bit of money as accountants tend to charge alot more for just the bookkeeping side.

Depends on the type/size of business. If you have a small/simple business, then the proprietor can easily do the book-keeping themselves, helped with good, simple, cheap software and maybe the modern auto bank feeds, to hand over to the accountant. In that kind of case, a book-keeper would be an unnecessary extra cost. But if the business has hundreds of transactions, then indeed, a book-keeper may be better if the proprietor can't handle it themselves.

Spuggy200

If working from home (like I do):

3 bed house with 4 'workable' rooms - means I work in one and can claim 25% of the house bills ie. rent, gas, electric, Internet. Food/drink etc aren't classed as tax deductible. Buying your laptop - yes. Buying a new garden shed....no.

There's so many variables and depending on what work you do as an IT professional then you will no doubt have lots more areas that you can claim. If you go VAT registered (if you earn over 82k per year) then you can make savings on VAT too, but this is a) something for an accountant to help you with b) a headache in itself if you don't have a bookkeeper that knows what they are doing.

motorguy

SBrown86 wrote: »

Yeah, fair play. It's just been completely dead between Christmas and New Year so I've been bored out of my skull.

New work laptop that I bought is arriving today though so should be able to get cracking

New laptop?? Yes, been there too! :T