Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Not sure of your country but it's extremely simple in the UK.

Here's what I did in the UK.

1. Create company for £15 on government website

2. Get bank account in company name, applied online, took 20 minutes. I had card and everything within a week.

3. Enrol for tax on government website (optional in UK if your company turnover is less than £80k). Bit confusing, but accountant can help and only takes 1/2 hour at most

4. Start selling subs to my app, stripe integration

There are some admin tasks I have to do regularly:

1. Monthly, keep on top of accounts. I use an app, QuickBooks online. But I've previously used a spreadsheet for my consultancy company as there were only a handful of invoices and expenses each month

2. Every 3 months. Submit VAT returns and pay government tax. Takes 1/2 hour

5. File accounts yearly. Accountant will do this for £400 per year or you can do it yourself (half days work, but confusing)

6. File confirmation statement yearly (UK company thing, confirms who the shareholders are and the share composition). Costs £18, takes 10 mins

To break it down:

- Incorporate company

- Get bank account

- Register for taxes

- Make sure you do your admin

You might find you need to get certain things certified when providing ID, our Post Office does that. There's other little things I'm skipping over, like some people prefer not to use their home address and setup a virtual office, etc, but generally it's pretty simple.

You know I bet there's a market for this --- because when you say "Submit VAR returns and pay government tax - takes 1/2 hour" I can tell you it doesn't take half an hour if you have no idea how to do it.

But if you made a video tutorial of each step and sold it as a pack, I'd buy it from you. I'd easily pay £100 GBP for that, and I bet others would too ...

Incredibly helpful. In the US here, some of these are definitely things I'll need to do, but I don't know the places I need to go yet. Something tells me that registering is easier in the UK, but I'll find out.

How do you keep on top of your accounts for your business?

In the new one it's mostly all automated, with the app it imports your bank statements and you just need to match the payments to invoices and classify the expenses. Upload pictures of any receipts for expenses, etc.

In my consultancy business I have a spreadsheet tab for invoices and one for expenses, and try and update it every month. And then a template for calculating the p&l accounts and tax I need to submit each year. I would use an app, but never get round to sorting it out.

I really would recommend just getting an accountant and accountancy app unless your turnover is very low.

It is worth getting your ledger codes right if you get to the sort of size where you employ people (codes are how you classify your income and spending), and I would recommend the less ledger codes the better, you can always create more later.

To be honest, you should be able to find a 'dummies guide' to setting up a business in the US, I would just buy that. Read it and then come back and ask more specific starting a web app business questions. People will recommend you the right US state to incorporate in and corp structure.

You should probably use an accounting software.

I used a self-hosted instance of Odoo for my consultancy company. It worked well when I did it right. It worked really bad, and data loss when I tried to use Docker.

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