New Company Formation - procedure, pros & cons, obligations, and any management / accounting software

Anyone got any tips or suggested websites for information on starting a new company?

Suppose you want to do two different businesses - is it better to have one company and register two names as trademarks, or have a parent company and two subsidoary companies?

Are there any software / accounting packages recommendations for a small business that can do invoices, keep your head round VAT, list debtors / creditors and so on?

Reply to
ITMA
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Anyone got any tips or suggested websites for information on starting a new company?

Suppose you want to do two different businesses - is it better to have one company and register two names as trademarks, or have a parent company and two subsidoary companies?

Are there any software / accounting packages recommendations for a small business that can do invoices, keep your head round VAT, list debtors / creditors and so on?

Reply to
ITMA

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is probably a reasonable starting point
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- multi search, is quite usefully although I wouldn't bother with their services as they are quite costly
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has quite a lot of info
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quite a lot of their members (particularly larger(ish) firms) may well be happy to give you a free 30 minute initial interview A for software to be honest most of the time we are recommending sage (instant accounting for basic/startup use or line 50 depending on what you want out of it) as thats what our professional systems accept and the staff understand when the clients make a mess of things but if you have an accountant in mind I would be inclimed to got with what ever they can understand, it makes thinks a lot easier. Chris

Reply to
Chris

I found absolutely nothing that was remotely useful for a small Ltd. company doing a turnover of around 50k to 100k per year with fairly small numbers of invoices being generated. We do probably around 30 or 40 bank transactions per month and maybe a similar number of others (credit card purchases, travel expenses, etc.)

I looked at Microsoft Money, Quickbooks and some more 'professional' packages.

Most simply did not provide the ease of transaction entry that my home grown system now provides. My system is explicitly *not* double entry as that would simply increase my workload for no tangible benefit at all. My system is basically a 'journal' of all transactions entered into a database which, with various extra bits of information for each transaction, produces reconciliation reports, analysis reports and VAT reports to be generated from the transactions entered.

Reply to
usenet

Chris, does it produce a P&L, and Balance Sheet?

Reply to
Doug Ramage

Not as I have it configured at the moment but it would be trivial to add such things. For a business such as ours (mostly service with very little investment required so no 'working capital') such things are not really very important. The balance in the bank account tells us the basics.

... and before you say something about "it'll never last" the company has been running successfully since 1987.

Balance Sheet and P&L are vital for businesses with significant investment requirements and regular outgoings - even when they're as small or even smaller than ours. However for service companies such as ours I really don't believe they're going to tell you much.

Reply to
usenet

I was thinking more about the Inland Revenue, Companies House etc.

Reply to
Doug Ramage

My accountant does the year end things that go to Companies House and the IR. He's very happy with the printouts I provide him with. The Companies House requirements are actually pretty trivial now for small Ltd. companies, I could probably do that myself, but I need the accountant do all the tax returns anyway.

Reply to
usenet

Ah, I thought you had devised a new "accounts package". :)

Reply to
Doug Ramage

My accountant recommends QuickBooks -- and uses it himself for his own books. He reckons the starter package is ideal for a startup, particularly since it includes lots of tutorial information.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Green

My "accounts package" does 90% (or even 99%) of the work and does it with much less data input than conventional ones (at least I believe it does having played with Quickbooks and others).

As I said I could easily enough add the year end stuff but it's not really worth the effort.

My "accounts package" does do the VAT returns for me, or at least provides the figures for directly copying onto the VAT return.

As we have only one salaried employee a wages package is (again) not worth the effort.

Reply to
usenet

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