I've recently started a business doing just okay so far but the upside potential is great. However, I moved into business after 20 years in the job market so I am really mentally struggling with the open backstabbing and manipulation with no consequences. My integrity and word means a lot to me and I've had some shocks. For example the middleman who I initially used was someone well known to me personally and I found out he quoted me 12% of order value as his markup (already above market rate of 5-7% in my area), but I discovered from a chance conversation with the factory that he had added more to their quote and given me a price 50% over what they quoted. (I mean there's cheating and then there's CHEATING).

Add to that every friend and sibling who knows vaguely about me launching a business is now talking about launching their own and expecting me to hand over details I spent thousands of hours researching on a silver platter. I'm a middle aged person who was in a legal profession my entire life and I thought it was fairly cutthroat- but this is a whole new ball game for me. How do the more experienced amongst you deal with it? How do you deal with people's expectations that they can sail into your line of business and you will give them your entire business model to 'help'?

My husband’s company went into liquidation in 2023. There was approx £10-12k in assets, liquidators said that would cover their fee and release some funds for creditors. The liquidation company has just come to him requesting payment of £6k+ after nearly 2 years.

There’s a “statement of receipts and payments” filed where they’ve said basically they had multiple interested parties in the assets, but the landlord wasn’t allowing them to take the assets so they have decided to leave them.

What can he do here - is there any comeback on their decision to forgo assets which would have paid their fee?

He was declared bankrupt in 2023 too and has just began working agains to get back on track, £6k of debt isn’t exactly how he saw that going.

Invoice amounts have been around £7 for the whole year but this months invoice was £43? Such a big jump, feel like I have been overcharged or perhaps I am not on a plan, honestly no idea. Looking to switch either way, the domain was brought through ionos so can I still use it if I go to a different provider?

Pricing Advice

There are rumours of redundancy at my work, and given the job market, im looking at starting an online shop for a little extra income.

I've started reaching out to suppliers and I've been given access to a trade account by one of the smaller ones.

I noticed that I can make 25% profit on these items (after accounting for tax and platform fees) and still undercut the established companies by around £5-10.

There is no price variation between the companies who all just sell at the rrp suggested by the manufacturer.

Ill be dealing in smaller volumes at first, I've got about 2k I'd be putting into stock to start and sell through eBay.

Am I missing something here? Is there a reason I can't undercut them? Have I missed a cost somewhere?

I started my small business 13 years ago from home from nothing. I’ve now got a 6000sqf and 6 members of staff however the stress and anxiety is becoming too much and I don’t know how much more I can carry on - the taxes, bills, staff issues, supplier issues - it’s just one thing after another. I feel like the more I spend dealing with these problems the more I’m missing out on time with my family and my mental health is getting worse by the week. The business does make profit and would have 200k+ in the bank if I was to close it down but I don’t have a plan B and I honestly don’t know what I would do - has anyone closed down their small business? If so what did you do afterwards?

I run a fairly niche art education business, running evening classes for adults. We've been open for about 9 years now, and we always set our pricing to be similar to businesses around us. We've all stayed similar prices for the majority of the time we've been open. We're all in slightly different catchment areas so kept out of each others way etc. Recently I've noticed our main competitor who moved slightly closer to us into bigger premises has started to slash their pricing of their short courses, to around 50-60% of their original pricing. We can't compete with this, and don't really want to undervalue our offerings by doing the same. We wonder whether either they got a lot of arts council funding or are just struggling with their new higher rents and trying to get bums on seats. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with something like this without having to react in a knee jerk fashion?

Got a VO and company registered there. While opening a Starling account , I need a correspondence address. VOs sometimes have issues with correspondence. Any issues/concerns using my home address for this? What's everyone's experience?

I'm currently trying to start a business which is reliant on my ability to gather stock of imported soft drinks into the UK. When I first explored this idea a couple months back everything seemed promising when it came to this front, however looking at the suppliers I bookmarked and multiple others (primarily those based in the UK) I see that most US items are out of stock, and the availability of Japanese drinks seems scarce.

I would really appreciate some help right now as it feels like a never-ending battle just researching the same thing everyday for the past week without really getting much further. Does anyone have any tips about different ways to source suppliers or any other knowledge they can share?

Much appreciated!

Up until now I’ve been employed and on the payroll of my company where I’ve been looking at getting a company car.

Though I’ve just accepted a job offer with another company, where I’ll be on their payroll but still keeping my business going and taking dividends and will still be a large part of it.

Though my understanding is that if I was on the payroll of my company, then BIK would be taxed on my monthly salary. But if I’m not, how does it get worked out and paid?

I’ve been trying to research it over the last few days but struggling to make it make sense. All I’ve picked up so far is the new company wouldn’t pay it, I wouldn’t pay it on a self assessment from dividends but that the tax still needs paying.

Is it just a simple case of the business pays it anyway on a different tax return?

I might not even be going down this route of a company car yet but I’m just researching

No, I'm not looking to operate a fish & chip place myself.

Someone's popped up on my horizon, declaring that he and his wife pull in a total of £100k per year running a fish and chip shop. I want to check whether that's possible because I might be engaging in a financial agreement with them, and I'm trying to sus out whether they're legit.

Our potential financial agreement has nothing whatever to do with fish and chip shops. I know nothing about the economics of fish and chip shops, or of retail generally.

They definitely operate (but don't own) the chippie concerned, which is in a busy, touristy area. I see from Google Street View it's a small place, a single-unit shop, operating just as a takeaway. And Google Maps indicates they only operate limited hours, and don't do Saturday evenings which seems odd for a fast food place.

So does their claimed income of £100k for the two of them make sense?

Hi we are looking to expand to the UK/Europe. Expecting 50 orders/mo in the UK and 50 orders/mo in the EU.

Is it easier to ship from the UK to EU or EU to UK? (when considering customs declarations, VAT, tariffs, etc.).

For the EU we're considering Netherlands.

Any thoughts?

Hi all.

TLDR; How have your personally coped with your business failuring? Do you have any tips for making sure you get up in the morning and out it behind you?

Long Version: My company has failed and it's time to shut down, and I've found it very difficult to deal with.

It's just me, so no staff to worry about. My first year was a success (in my own small way) and I felt like I was making a difference, but this was followed by no sales since April (it's a rough time in my industry), and a betrayal from a joint project partner tanking my company and motivation.

I've secured other employment, but the process of shutting down has been devastating, with some anxiety and sleepless nights developing.

Have any of you experienced something similar, and how did you get through it?

Thanks for reading, and I hope any advice you offer can help others too.

My wife is a sole trader and her business currently pays each of us 12,570 per year. (Legitimately, we both work for the business) She has another job but I am self employed and have no other income. We have built up about £15K in the business account, what is the most tax efficient way of us using that money? I’m not looking to dodge tax, just be as efficient as possible.

Do we just pay ourselves more and then pay the income tax?

Hi all, I am opening a new business and my business partner lives in the EU, we were planning to use our accountants address as our public address (service, director, etc. address) as we don’t have a need to have an office, however, I just found out to open a bank account, many banks are requiring the trading address to be an home address or an office address where we would work from. Also, some of them are saying a desk or a serviced office in a cowork is not accepted and some only accept all the company directors to live in the UK, so are banking options are quite limited. We really want to avoid using our home address.

What are your experiences on this?

Thanks

I’m looking for a bank account for a new business and wanted to ask if anyone has experience with Virgin money M account, HSBC small business account, or Co-Op bank small business account.

I’m particularly interested in whether anyone has experience using their mobile apps and whether the apps have receipt capture functionality (I.e. being able to take a photo of a physical receipt and add it to a transaction). I do a lot of coffee/ lunch meetings so need a way of keeping track of these receipts specifically.

I’ve used starling in a previous business and always found the receipt capture feature very handy but am ruling them out as I’m using a holding company/ trading company structure in new business and they don’t seem to support those.

Main things I’m looking for are: Fee free banking, Integration with Xero/ live bank feeds, Ok with the company being owned by another company (holdco), Receipt capture functionality in mobile app.

If anyone has any feedback on the banks mentioned or suggestions for others I’d be very interested!

I have a Ltd company and I'm new to selling physical items as a business (individual art items, not large stocks of things.) I can see that a lot of people have ceased shipping to the EU or US due to it being unfeasible for various reasons that I can't quite get my head around.

My question, to get a clearer idea of the issue in my head, is what happens if you just send something out without worrying about it? What are the outcomes? Would you simply not be able to send something at point of delivery because you need some codes/numbers you have to register for? Would it go through but you risk being rumbled by say, the French authorities, for not having the right paperwork? Is it just that the customer is going to get hit with a customs fee to pay before they can receive it? Or is it all of these things?

Also, hypothetically, if you were to send a sold product as a gift rather than declared goods, at what point does that come back to bite you in the ass and how badly?

As the title says, I’m looking at starting a raffle site. I’m aware there’s loads floating around nowadays but they all seem to sell enough tickets. Looking at starting small with iPhones etc and working my way up. Think I’ll start a ltd company from the get go. Has anyone tried this before? Any tips?

I see a lot of questions being asked, right or wrong being discussed, budgets sufficiency or in sufficiency or may be the most asked zero or low performance, Anyone wanna discuss just hit me up may be we can get into a mutual beneficial stage sometime!

Hi, I come across it in my email. Sounds it is quite loose on eligibility and use of grant. But when I googled, search on X and even search on Reddit, not much was mentioned. And it requires you to be a startup platform member (membership is £269 per year) or a £20 application fee for non-member. It looks skeptical for me. Anyone has experience applied for it before?

Hi,

If I am posting in the wrong subreddit please remove this post (and my apologies).

Along with many other people, I am having software issues with HMRC PAYE Tools.
Lots of people reported this at a forum hosted by HMRC.
The forum was at THIS link, but it has been shut down for at least the last two months!

I have searched for a place to post about the software issue and hopefully find a solution from the software developers or other users, but have not been able to find anywhere.

I searched for a subreddit and this is the closest I can find so far.

If anyone knows of a subreddit or user forum for HMRC PAYE Tools I would be very grateful for a link. Or maybe this is the place to post!

I'm considering starting a subreddit for HMRC PAYE Tools myself, but would prefer to join an already established forum.

Thanks

When you hit the threshold, what processes did you tighten? (Pricing, deposits, invoice wording, cash-flow around VAT quarters, software).
Any “wish I’d known” about Flat Rate vs standard or MTD bridging?

Long story short, I started selling a product, and it's been going really well. It's in a niche market, so it's not some mass-produced drop shipping gunk that goes on Amazon, where it's money from giant volumes.

A distributor with a really nice team that specializes in exactly my industry showed interest in working with me to distribute and sell my product further, but they need to purchase at 50% off MSRP.

Basically, we lose money because our product costs us too much to make to fit into a 50% MSRP distributor. But it made me confused how anyone manages to make money with a 50% cut into the MSRP price?

The effort to risk and reward never seems to line up. You sell a product for £20, it costs you £2 to make with a 50% distributor, you make £8 per order, basically £400 every 50 orders. That's a lot of orders to fulfill as a small business for what is basically just £400. (if it sells)

You start selling more premium items at £150, which equally comes with more and more cost to make the product, so you still end up low profits per p/order at a 50% MSRP.

Adding costs to the MSRP will likely no longer make the product competitive, and the only other option is to reduce the cost to make... but it just seems a little insane how anyone makes this work.

Hey everyone, looking for some advice.

Im a wedding photographer who issues between 25-50 invoices a year. Occasionally I’ll buy something expensive, but most of my purchases are small items, and excluding things like monthly subscriptions (software/cloud storage) I’m maybe purchasing 30 purchases each year.

i believe my accounting is as simple as it gets.…

quickbooks… to be fair I’m pretty happy with it, but I’m also paying £20pcm (Not a crazy amount I know, but…) I’m looking to save some Cash and cutting down on avoidable expensive if possible.

I use QB to track expenses, issue invoices, connect my bank, and ofcourse at the end of the year it spits out my profit and Loss.

so that’s the background.. my questions though….

of there a half decent free option, or cheaper option. And…if I move accounting software whats the best way todo this, what do I need to keep and can I migrate? Do I even need to migrate all the data?

any help would be appreciated

Hey everyone,

I’ve recently set up an IT services company in the UK. We’ve got prior experience delivering development work in the US, but the UK public sector market is totally new to us. For the past couple of months, we’ve been bidding on government tenders, but so far we haven’t managed to land a contract.

Has anyone here gone through this process and have tips on how to break in? Also, if you’re already established as a main contractor and sometimes look for subcontractors, I’d love to connect.

Appreciate any guidance or opportunities you can share!