If you want to start working as self-employed, you must register with HM Revenue & Customs, but first make sure you have a National Insurance Number. After the registration, you will receive your Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR) and HMRC will set up the right tax and National Insurance contributions records. You should keep your UTR safe because you will need it when completing your Self Assessment tax return.

You may need to register for VAT if you are doing business in the UK as an individual, a partnership, a company, an association, a charity, a local authority or any other organisation or group of people acting together under a specific name. Registration for VAT is compulsory if your annual turnover exceeds £85,000 or you expect the turnover to be higher than that amount in the next 30 days. However, it may happen that your turnover has exceeded the registration threshold temporarily. In that case, you may apply for exception from registration. This applies for entrepreneurs supplying goods or services within the UK. If you take over a VAT registered business, your VAT taxable turnover over the last 12 months must be added to the turnover of the business you are taking over when checking if the registration threshold has been exceeded. And if you have received goods from other countries in the EU, registration for VAT is compulsory if the total value of the goods acquired has gone over £85,000 in the current year since 1 January. Note that you cannot register for VAT if you sell only goods or services that are exempt from VAT or you are not in business according to the HMRC’s definition.

If you need to close your business you should plan it carefully. First of all, it is important that you inform HMRC of your intent. Only then will you be able to settle matters related to tax and National Insurance. In some circumstances it is possible to extend the deadlines for payments or even to claim back some tax or National Insurance.

If you wish to trade and do not use a limited company you will be personally liable for the debt of your business. If you have assets or savings they are vulnerable to a claim made against you. By trading through a limited company you are literally placing a limit on your liability. That limit is the value of the company, including any money you may have invested in, loaned to or are owing to the company. The company has a separate legal identity from its owners and directors and unless they sign a personal guarantee for its debts they are not liable for these. There are a number of advantages in becoming a limited company, such as :- You can give a share of the business to others eg family. It may be easier to attract people to invest money in your business. Obtaining bank loans may be easier. There is no higher rate tax bands. In the event of a partner leaving or somebody dying it is easier to continue the business. It is easier to sell the business. You have better standing in the public eye. It can assist in the protection of a name. People have more confidence in your business as they can check up on your company on the public records at Companies House. Subcontractors and agency workers will find it easier to obtain work. The main disadvantages of becoming a limited company are the extra costs of preparing of annual accounts and some loss of financial privacy.

We have some very safe data policies to make sure that we never compromise on our data safety. Following are some of things that we do in order to make sure that our client’s data is kept with utmost safety: - We tend not to request customers to upload data on our servers rather we request for login to their systems to make sure that we get the right data at the right time at right place. If some customers don’t maintain a system, then in those cases we keep all our data servers in UK and the data never goes out of UK. Employees are not allowed to carry their phones to their working systems. Employees get access to only those files which they are allowed to. Nothing can be downloaded on to the system. Internet is blocked on the office machines. We do monitor this very diligently as we understand how important the data is for our customers.