A free one hour face-to-face session at our offices to advise whether you should operate as a sole-trader, partnership, or limited company.

The choice will depend upon a range of factors that include:

• Who is involved and will they share in the profits of your intended business.
• What services and/or products you will provide to your clients, and to a lessor extent which sectors you intend to serve.
• Whether you will employ staff directly, or perhaps rely upon sub-contractors.
• What is your personal liability risk exposure if things go wrong. A limited company affords some protection against becoming personally liable for all the debts of your business activities. As a sole-trader you are personally liable for settling all of the debts of your business failure. As a partner, you are jointly and severely liable, meaning if your partners cannot settle their fair share of a debt, you become liable for settling their share too.
• How much time you are prepared to spend administering your business. Trading as a company is more expensive and demanding than operating as a sole-trader or in a partnership.
• What tax system you will be subject to, which in turns dictates when and how much tax you might pay each year.
• Whether the business is only planned to trade in the short-term, or intended to operate for many years with the expectation that it might be sold as a going-concern in the future.

An all-inclusive, affordable, LOW fixed monthly accounting fee for the first year of trading.

In the normal course of events we base our monthly fees on the time we expect to spend dealing with your business and tax affairs each month, once your business is up and running. To arrive at that happy state of affair, we will write-off the extra time we will spend working with you as a new client:

• To register you and your business with the HMRC, and Companies House if you are trading as a limited company or a Limited Liability Partnership.
• To establish a working accounting system that will allow you to meet your statutory duty to keep accurate and compliant accounting records.
• To install and train you to use our free accounting software we can provide to you as a client of MAAP.
• To set-up and operate a monthly payroll (if applicable) for you and your staff, including filing the mandatory monthly and annual payroll reports to the HMRC.
• To set-up and account for CIS (if applicable) and file the monthly CIS reports to the HMRC.
• To set-up and account for VAT (if you are, or become VAT registered) and file the quarterly VAT returns with the HMRC.
• To set-up and prepare your first annual business tax returns and submit them to the HMRC.
• To set-up and prepare your first financial statements and submit them to Companies House and/or the HMRC as required.

We will prepare a formal letter of engagement, written in plain-English, that clearly sets out our respective obligations and duties we must fulfill to achieve the end goals set out above.

Access to our free advice.

Within the bounds of reason, we actively enjoy using our experience and expertise to mentor new entrepreneurs starting out on their journey to success. We recall how much we learned from the mentors who guided us when we first started out on a pathway we never regretted taking all those years ago.

Like any advice, it is only as good as the understanding and experience of the person giving it. So, we provide the credentials of our professional services director that will hopefully reassure you that what we have to say, may be worth listening to.

It is the breadth of experience we have to draw upon that makes our advice so valuable. We have been there and earned the T-shirts from the places you might need to travel to on your journey. We aim to help you avoid the (many) mistakes we made along the way, and point you in the right direction whenever we can.