On Monday, I should be the proud owner of Flukebox Ltd. It was actually surprisingly quick and easy, once I had actually read up on what all the legalese means. The Business Link website is generally very helpful, and outlines everything involved in starting a business. I felt that occasionally it didn’t go into enough detail, but a quick Google usually turned up plenty of information.
I registered the company at @UK PLC whose basic package, at £23.49 all-in, is actually cheaper than you can do it yourself, and much quicker – electronic filing can only be done using special software or via an agent, and paper forms take around 8 days to be processed. It seems a bit crazy that I can do something as important as incorporating a company without ever signing anything, but I guess signatures are fairly meaningless anyway. Hopefully we’ll be able to conduct the more mundane government interactions over the Internet soon.
Once the registration has gone through, I’ll be able to open a bank account. Abbey offer free business banking (forever), so long as you don’t pay in more than 100 cheques or £3000 of cash or make more than 100 withdrawals per month. I that’s unlikely to ever be a problem for us. Their charges for exceeding those limits aren’t exorbitant, so it would seem like a good deal for most small businesses.
Once I have a bank account, I can apply for VAT registration, which is just a matter of filling in the right form, which looks fairly straightforward. So that was all reasonably easy, now I just have accounting, tax and employment law to get my head around. Joy.