Many people are unaware that if you are new to the world of self employment or starting up a company you can attend very useful classes in the basics.

Here are some Workshops you can attend for FREE!

Newly self-employed

Covering:

• How to register your business with HMRC.
• Understanding what is meant by employment status.
• Different classes of National Insurance contributions.
• Basic record keeping.
• The tax return cycle, payments to HMRC and penalties.
• Where to go for further help and advice.

How VAT works

Covering:

• How to tell the difference between inputs and outputs.
• The different rates of VAT and what they apply to.
• How to add the right amount of VAT to any amount of money and work out how much VAT has been included in any amount of money.
• How to work out how much VAT you owe or are due back.
• How to access VAT Online.
• How to identify what goes where on a VAT Return.
• How to use the Standard Method of accounting for VAT.
• Where to find further help and guidance with VAT issues.

You can get more info and book by following CLICKING HERE

Wufoo is stunning.

It allows you to design and deploy detailed forms that can be used to gather inforamtion, as a contact me page, for research, maintaining a mailing list and much much more.

What is extra spiffy about wufoo is that it will generate reports on your responses for you that you can also export as excel etc. Also it will host and generate the code for you to link to or even embed the form on a website made with iWeb via HTML Snippets, as well as myspace etc.

On top of that there is a theme designer which means your forms can look great and appear branded (by uploading your own logo or image)

A free account will give you up to three forms and up to 100 responses with premium accounts starting at a very reasonable low sum….Most people, however, shall probably never need more than the free service (unless its for business etc).

CLICK HERE

Writing a business plan is one of the most daunting things about setting up a company or expanding an entrepreneurial idea into reality. Long and complex and they often are the minimum requirement for any kind of funding be it from a bank or a venture capitalist, your business plan is your rock.

This is the document that shows your direction, your ethos, your meaning, your competition, your projections and your strengths.

Plan2biz far from being the prettiest web application out there but it is free and it is terribly good at what it does and thats give you a modular and step by step method of building various kinds of business plans.

CLICK HERE

A great resource for finding mac and pc shortcuts for applications and the operating systems – life saver for users of Adobe applications like photoshop and illustrator!

CLICK HERE

I came across this remarkably concise and awesome article on colour theory and its application in websites and design. It serves as a great resource for anyone embarking on creating or rejuvenating a brand who wants to be clever about it.

CLICK HERE

Who doesn’t like free stuff?

Well this is an amazing and gargantuan list of free design elements all in one place, and there is some beautiful stuff in there, plenty of photoshop layer styles etc.

Enjoy.

CLICK HERE FOR THE LIST

photo credit: NaN

Mention VOIP and many people think….complication, complication, complication.

Well it needn’t be so.

Sipgate.co.uk provide a completely free service for incoming calls. Their plans and tariffs for outgoing and international calls are pretty amazing too. Best of all, there is finally a simple application from the mac app store that makes setting it up a cinch.

There are lots of terribly ugly “Soft-Phones” like X-lite etc and to be perfectly honest I have never once managed to set one of them up without problems or needing a telecoms expert to change something or other.

“Telephone” by Alexei Kuznetsov is a whole different story,

It has a beautifully minimal interface and does not complicate things with features you will never need.

Once set up it integrates with your mac address book or you can just type a number in the box. Best feature of all, though, is that via sipgate.co.uk you can set up voicemail for free. When someone leaves you a message when your either busy or do not have Telephone running, the message is sent to you via email as a sound file, so you can keep the voicemail and use it in audio applications etc (i store mine in itunes).

So if your looking for a communications solution for your small business this setup works beautifully for me, so it should for you too.

Having looked through the resources and offers on there, it is a very useful website indeed.

I can very well imagine that this will become THE web portal for startups and young businesses in the not too distant future. I urge anyone starting up to at least have a quick look as there are some tools and links to resources on there that are gold dust!

http://www.startupbritain.org

Own-it.org are a part of the University of the Arts, London and provide various services including telephone advice, contract template purchase and free events and lectures which are always extremely useful and cover a varied range of topics from Fashion and Design to Jewellery production and Photography.

www.own-it.org

Keeping a soul and a sense of integrity is difficult when your business grows and the distance between the CEO and the frontline grows wider, many big, famous and stinkingly rich companies (you know who you are) started out with ambitious, virtuous, envious and game changing ideas, but alas through the passage of time and the enlargening of coffers, these companies lose track of what really matters. The people.

Noded is an idea that stems from the ideal creative process and was created by Andreas Carlsson and Jaan Orvet who believed there is something better than the top to bottom hierachy of most business practices.

Here is their explanation.

Noded Network, Noded Team, a Noded Team.

A group of individuals, often but not necessarily geographically distant, that come together to form temporary or recurring project teams. Unlike ‘distributed teams’ Noded teams work for a wide range of clients and any member of a Noded team can take the lead to bring work, manage work and choose their team members.