E4 GUY wrote:

I use these lot:


http://www.sjdaccountancy.com/

Set your own limited company up inside 2 hours,

I pay £132/month . They assign you a dedicated accountant and guarantee to return your emails inside 24 hours.
That cost is deductible against your business and they prepare your year end accounts and directors tax return.

Send very regular email reminders to tell you your vat is due etc

I don't really have expenses to put through, just train fares, but they told me rule of thumb is that you can only really put through 100% related . Can't even claim my mobile, as obviously use it for personal calls too.

I only earn the basic wage But take monthly dividends ,
I think annual limit is £28,600

Also get yourself on flat rate vat scheme

I use CMEasy, but they do pretty much the same thing. Quite happy with them. Si. <This is my name.

I eat rat poison.

A man ain't truly been insulted until he stands buck naked in front of a woman and she didn't even notice. Or care.

Bellini wrote:

A man ain't truly been insulted until he stands buck naked in front of a woman and she didn't even notice. Or care.

With a face like that are you really surprised

It's got worse since but as I modelled myself on you I figured I was doing OK. Si. <This is my name.

I eat rat poison.

A man ain't truly been insulted until he stands buck naked in front of a woman and she didn't even notice. Or care.

I think the IR35 rubbish will make me come acropper, although the main jist is it would allow me to work a little less for the current company and possibly take on a slightly different role as well as being able to work elsewhere as well like a proper contractor  FFRR MY06 facelift With TDV8 Alloys Zeros/ATR's
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Bellini wrote:

...but as I modelled myself on you I figured I was doing OK.

You've been peeking when I was having a dump

kingpleb wrote:

I think the IR35 rubbish will make me come acropper

Unless you do a significantly different role and it's not your main income you are definitely going to hit IR35. You will also hit IR35 if you use the word "Consultancy" in your contract with them.

I'd say take a look at the free trial of Crunch though as I found them better for me than SJD (and significantly cheaper while being easier to work with). SJD are top notch at saving you money though, but I found Crunch offer the same for less (and a better web interface without having to fill out Excel workbooks all the time).

Provided your current employment contract doesn't conflict with what you want to do on the side means that you could have a limited company that you only use for the side works and only take dividend from. This is because your main job covers your tax requirements (the minimum income thing is so you keep your NIC's up to date, so you don't need to take it if you're already paying NICs elsewhere).

I would probably talk to your current employer about this and see if they are happy with you doing stuff on the side and you can put the car / uniform / some expenses through your business still and save tax/cash that way? 
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You'd hit IR35 head on - working for your previous employer in substantially the same role is a key trigger for requiring you to operate a payment structure to comply with IR35.

Note that this doesn't stop you doing so, just means you have to pay PAYE as though you're still employed.

Nor does it stop you contracting with other organisations to supply services which are outside the scope of IR35 (ie you can have multiple sources of income, some caught by IR35 others not; some within a limited company, others not)

aneurysm1 wrote:

If your setting up as a ltd company, this is only beneficial if your income would be sufficient to attract the 40% tax rate, with the idea being you pay yourself a 'wage' at the personal allowance threshold and then supplement with dividends that are taxed at 10%, but don't forget you pay 21% corporation tax, thus a total tax rate of 31%, which is obviously better than 40% as a sole trader. However it must be stressed that this is only beneficial if the income would attract the top rate of tax. Plus there are the additional cost/responsibilities of submitting annual tax return to companies house

Hang on, that's not quite right. If you're a limited company, you pay 20% corporation tax on all profit, not on turnover. But your income, which is taxed at 10% because you take a low salary, isn't included in the figure taxed at 20% because your salary is part of the overhead. And dividends are taxed differently to income, so you pay less tax on dividends unless you take loads of money in dividends. I can't remember the figures offhand, but I can look them up when I'm on my PC if you're interested.

The other benefit of a limited company over a sole tradership is that you can claim quite a few more things as expenses. Things like private health insurance are paid for out of taxed income if you're a sole trader, but they can be paid for out of untaxed income if you're a director of a limited company.

The downside is that the advice of an accountant costs a lot more if you're a limited company. But personally, I find that my accountant saves me loads more than he costs.

My accountant would be proud of me, he's tried for months to get me to understand this.

Well thought i'd update this

The contract i was offered was only a 1month rolling one so i decided not to take the risk, rightly or wrongly who knows.

I've been asked about another one which is a 3month rolling contract over in leeds, so about an hour each way without traffic which could be fun added with the usual cliche of 'Highly likely to be extended' stuff....

It involves virtualisation of older kit and the thing i love the most(NOT) migration of XP machines to something newer, which is a challenge sometimes and im guessing that with the cut off next year for XP other than companies that have really silly amounts of money to pay for extending the support of it but from what ive seen of the price scales its a real easy cashcow for MS to get millions out of companies without much work..

Anyone else in this segment of IT? I stick to the MS stuff, so hyperv/server/sbs(loathed)/desktop builds and am noticing an increase in contracts coming out for such migration projects, not a large increase just an extra few adverts a month. But im wondering if there will be a flood after christamas as companies scramble to get migrated as places like NHS trusts are just rife with the systems and to comply with PCI-DSS & DataProtection and all  FFRR MY06 facelift With TDV8 Alloys Zeros/ATR's
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Plenty of XP migration work out there but most of what I've seen are XP to Win-7 low paying stuff. Very few enterprise level outfits are willing to take on Win-8 with all the user interface re-training issues.

There are also plenty of places watching the Vmware acquisition of Desktone quite closely too. That may well be something that becomes a viable alternative to a mass win-7 or 8 rollout.

April 14 deadline....I wouldn't read too much into that. We still support clients who have NT4 running in Production. If an application is critical it rarely gets updated in those environments. We also have one client with 185,000 desktops/laptops running XP. Their view is that MS will continue to provide patches if a massive linux migration is to be avoided (That's the polite version)

Places most likely to be doing desktop migrations en-masse would be the financial institutions.

Last point. Sticking to MS might be a limiting factor. With the advent of Cloud, Mobility and end-to-end virtualisation the emerging standards would appear to be Vmware, AWS, Openstack, Software defined networking etc. MS is being rather sidelined for whatever reason, certainly in the enterprise space.

Cheers MZ

I've started with playing with aws a bit as you get so much free time before you have to pay for it so good on basic build outa where you can just power up a machine to so some work on it and test and then power off again

The news I've heard from some big companies is that they will get ms xp updates as long as they fork out largely increased support contracts for it. Don't mind doing the lower paid stuff as once you get in, deploy a wds server and the updates and so forth and software, keys and gubbins on it to cover most stuff it's a case of wandering round and pxe booting, although my favourite for lower volumes is wim dumps using a usb3 key and some batch scripting, machines up and ready for dev's in 30-40mins.

I think the biggest worry for me is jumping the full time ship for contracting and then when the contract is up either with or without extensions, being able to get into another one quickly. FFRR MY06 facelift With TDV8 Alloys Zeros/ATR's
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That's the thing. Your first contract needs to be a 6 month thing which gives you time to get settled, sort an accountant, bank account, get over the payment lag etc. That first 6 months you would live like a pauper to get on top of everything. A 1 month rolling contract isn't going to cut it really unless it has a spectacular day rate.

I've done both and I much prefer contracting but I work on the principle that I'm only going to work for 6 months a year and therefore my minimum day rate is at least twice that of a full time job. That way anything else is a bonus.

Previous ones i'd been asked about were ones based in other countries, generally ones that are on the Home Office no visit type places

The one im thinking about at the minute is twice my current hourly rate rising to 3 times that depending on how they feel about paying it, so it could cover 6 months from the 3months alone.

hmm decisions decisions  FFRR MY06 facelift With TDV8 Alloys Zeros/ATR's
Mantec Sump Guard, Rigid Load liner, MY10 BT upgrade.