macrobug

The other thing you need as a start-up business is a good accountant.

I was very lucky here – a friend works in a small company, and her boss is a very friendly approachable sort of entrepreneur. The friend kindly arranged for me to have a long chat with him in a pub one lunchtime, and he gave me lots of useful advice. (If it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have left Symbian).

One bit of extremely practical useful advice was the name of a good local accountant with a small business focus. I had a chat with him; he was great. One of the first things he said was that I should shop around for other accountants – a good sign in itself – but I didn’t, because I think a personal recommendation goes a long way and can save important time that can be spent on other aspects of the business.

I think I probably could have done all the accounting/paperwork myself, but I’m absolutely sure it would have driven me mad. I could easily have spent all my first month just reading up on the tax situation, and the rest of the year dreading the arrival of the tax returns (VAT, income tax, corporation tax…)

One thing I hadn’t expected was that the accountant might turn out to identify significant tax savings. A friend says the same thing; he was already running a small business but getting set up properly with the same accountant looks as though it will effectively pay for itself.

It’s also great having somebody to talk to, who knows the answers to all the business-admin decisions you have to make. I would very strongly recommend anyone starting a small business to find a good accountant. I’m happy to pass on the name of my accountant to anyone in the Cambridge area starting a small business.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 17th, 2006 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.