LeeHayler said:

I do have an accountant who ive messaged but she is on annual leave at the moment. I dont wish to use Both types of accounting as i know that cant happen. my question was about the implications of having a large material cost thats been carried into the new tax year and whether there was any process available to account it for last years tax year. it appears there isnt.

Anyway, Cheers for the help

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I think you are looking at this the wrong way, if the work is still ongoing now in 2026/2027 then surely some of the Income must be for tax year 2026/2027, I personally would advise waiting for your accountant to return and speak to them.

Very confused here.

Every OTP process will be different. The documentation for the provider you are using will tell you how to build the API calls and response.

KL7773 said:

which they claim is based on an alleged €800,000 value of infringement.

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Over €6,000 per item!

Justin Smith said:

So the Bank of England's inflation calculator is "rubbish" is it ?

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If you're using the BoE website calculator, it uses the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a basket of goods looking at the change in purchase prices of these goods (in a weighted basket).

You'd have to factor in any housing costs separately to CPI. This means it is "rubbish" for the real long term cost of living metrics versus wages we are talking about.

The Consumer Price Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH), factors in an adjusted monthly "rent" equivalence figure. This inflation rate is quite a bit higher (every month) than the CPI, this adds significantly to real living costs.

Even the CPIH doesn't really reflect all true living cost changes; there are a few reasons for this, the basket of goods has changed a lot over time, plus it doesn't cover a large proportion of people in the UK being home owners. House buying and mortgage costs are considered a capital cost (even for private home owners) so not included. There is the old RPI data set which does include mortgages, this inflation rate is even higher again, having gone up 400% since the late 80s.

When you factor in the lack of affordable/council houses today, recent big increases in food and energy costs, plus use the right data sets for your calculations, you can see that wages have stagnated in real terms for a long time.

For those at the bottom end pay wise it's way worse, with their real earnings and disposable income going down over that period, and even more dramatically over the periods of successive Tory governments. Getting on the housing ladder is a pipe dream for many in low paid work, with benefits and food banks a reality even when they're working full time.

All your examples stated as facts, or in bold/capitals, are not "facts" they're opinions. This is common behaviour among people who don't use complex data to make an argument. The simplistic views and straw man arguments you've made don't stand up to scrutiny. If you think you can live on the minimum wage in most of the UK, why don't you give it a try and report back on your findings.

@aripho - this is why you need to pay someone to do the cost analysis.

A lot of note takers can take down the notes and summarise them into an easier format

Thank you for the mention Securify and ThatDevAaron. We just launched a new website too

ctrlbrk said:

I have a single date deadline as director but a deadline window as PSC, but in my case the PSC window ends the same date as the director's deadline.

Is this not the case for you?

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I'm not sure. I registered as Director in January as the Confirmation statement was due, not because of a deadline. As PSC the deadline started on my birthday in February.

I understand why you feel aggrieved but this is a unique situation for which there seems to be no precedence and therefore no legal answer.

What is the actual item that got damaged?

The real answer here is that you need dedicated & ongoing advice from a professional, otherwise you will end up in a right mess.

But start by giving yourself some clarity on what you actually want to happen, both short and long term.

Autism in business is essentially a title for a specific set of strengths & weaknesses - The key is to play your strengths and use professionals to bridge your weakness.

@JEREMY HAWKE to clarify, I was thinking more of something I said in an earlier comment that the legal changes make Spongebob a riskier option even without a BBL. It looks like the intent is to ensure people either pay off creditors or go through proper liquidation. They are looking at blocking mechanisms for BBLs, but once you do that it would be very easy to simply bank strike offs if insolvent/wihtou paying creditors in general. If you have a BBL a strike off is not an option anyway, right?

JEREMY HAWKE said:

Only do this if you have no personal assets as you might be liable

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From what I read on MrBounceback they are using a mix of disqualification and criminal charges. I did not see any mention of going after personal assets of directors. Someone facing jail has bigger problems than them going after personal assets!

Judging by MrBounceback it looks like so far they are mostly going for disqualifications rather than criminal charges: 500 pages of "disqualification files" vs 20 of "BBL Jailbirds". That is despite most of the "disqualification files" involving false declarations and similar criminal conduct.

WaveJumper said:

Unless you are in my contacts you won't get through

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I think this along with other modern technologies on phones (the main obstical or tool in the process) could be contributing to a decline.

Business number identification on the caller screen, sometimes marked as spam by other users or reviewers who may not have given the caller a fair assesement, could lead to your companies attempts being wasted.
The call wont even ring on the phone.
These settings are on by default on some handsets, hiya I think is one I saw on a Samsung for example.
People are quick to mark things as spam and leave negative reviews.

My advice to overcome this, as an outsider, would be to check your number isn't 'spam listed' or negatively reviewed on the web. Perhaps have the number you call from listed on the Web so its easily searchable and linked to some information about your company.

Perhaps send a text message with a website link prior to calling so the recipient can search you up.

Not many like unwanted door callers, in todays word a person's telephone number is their door to the outside world.

Also I find that many now a days prefer to find their own deals, info etc and act upon rather than accept anyone's help or offerings as they feel more comfortable knowing they have made an informed decision and perhaps don't want to have to make a decision on the spot.

Lasly I'm not sure of your audience but I have noticed that in my sector, very very little want to talk on the phone, they prefer to message back and forth for days - this could be for various reasons to do with modern life, time or location constraints eg imagine being on a bus or around kids, anxiety issues so many factors that I feel will be highly impacting telesales currently or in the future.

The increase in ad spend, has only increased the equal amount in revenue. Not profit. So it was a disappointed experience.

I have increased my ad bids and created more adgroups with slightly wider keywords. The cost per conversion has gone up (the conversion rate is the same) which suggests that I am overbidding on keywords.

It has made me value my organic search rankings, there are some keywords that adwords wants me to bid excessifly high for, because it beleives my "ad rank" is too low. I already have #1 organic search position for it. But google wants me to bid minimum 60p a click for the keyword. But the product sale price doesnt justify the bid. The product in question retails for around £20 average, it's not a £100+ product, so the 60p minimum bid isn't financially viable.

When shoppers are going back and forth between the search pages and ads. They might click an ad, and go back and the ad might go away so they cannot go back to the site they visited.

On organic seo your site is almost permanently there, on the search page. So it is much easier to find the website again. But with ads, google might not display your ad on every refresh, the ad placements might appear and then not appear in the same spot.

UKSBD said:

Yes, and once drawn in and familiar with what you are using the prices initially gradually increase and eventually increase at crazy rates.

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That is there plan, but there is a lot of competition, a lot of light users will not pay a lot more and local AI is improving rapidly too. Even now I think it would be a lot cheaper for a team on typical business subs to spend a few grand on their own hardware and run local AIs. Not quite as good, but no worse than the best ones were six months ago. Unless you really need the best, not worth paying a lot.

DuskMind said:

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to ask if any small businesses or start-ups have considered using AI voice/chat and automations in their business and if you are already using AI in your business, what are you using and how is your experience? Thanks

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I have only ever recommended AI voice automations for very very specific use cases where the process is very narrow and there is no wiggle room for what the call is about. I dont trust it enough to really deal with some serious calls and the human hand off always feels jarring. Id rather the human do the call and AI automation after the call for whatever admin heavy task that needs doing.

In terms of how they speak there are alot of things that you can use to make them sound human. Alot of the examples being shown online are really standard implementations that are obvious but with tuning they can definitely sound real especially optimising models to ensure there is next to no lag between responses

It does do stock sync, but we do our sync from our order management software so not sure how good it is.

It creates sales receipts for us as we receive payment at time of purchase. I think it could import invoices if you receive orders that then get paid later but never tried to use it for that.

We have quickbooks plus and definitely have SKU (they call item/service code) as well as product name (they call name) like most stock control systems have both identifiers.

Smart Air UK said:

Thank you but we have now found a warehouse

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Can i ask who you work with now?

ctrlbrk said:

Hence the Trumpesque adjective!

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and Matt is at it again: https://www.therepository.email/mat...t-akismet-on-wordpress-7-0s-connectors-screen

Huge conflicts of interest (this is not the first) caused by him running both the non-profit Foundation (wordpress.org) and the for-profit company (wordpress.com and other things)

I just have to say I have just switched to Voipfone and find the service excellent Listen to @cjd - he know what he is talking about

I have a client who has been a pain since the beginning - their computer skills are close to non-existent and they did not understand what I needed when I explained I needed a timesheet every time I ran payroll (hourly paid staff, paid 4-weekly). So I designed a simple timesheet for them, with rows and columns automatically totalled and a colour code for each type of day - normal, sickness, holiday, unpaid etc. The key for that was repeated on every timesheet.

They struggled with completing the timesheet, making changes so the totals didn't work, entering totals manually, which did not add up properly, etc. I reminded them on the Monday every 4 weeks that I needed the timesheet by lunchtime on Thursday so I could run payroll for them to pay staff on Friday. Every Thursday I chased them for the timesheet. I explained several times that the deadline was 12:00 mid-day on Thursday. I often worked Thursday evening, but often also didn't get the data I needed until Friday, often late Friday so I would work at the weekend so they could pay staff on Monday. Terms were payment 3 periods in advance and I always had to chase it.

Last year I had enough when they complained that the payslips weren't available on Friday morning when the data had been there by 18:00 on Thursday. I explained that my work on their payroll was scheduled for 12:30 on Thursday and if they missed their slot it would be done when I had time. They were amazed by this.

Some months ago I notified them that I would not be providing payroll after end March this year. I chickened out of the real reason and told them new government regs meant It wasn't economically viable. They argued about that saying they weren't aware of the new regs. They asked, last week, for a P45 for someone who left on 2 April (last payroll of the year was 3 April). Their next paydate is 1 May and they haven't found a new provider yet.

What I should have done was recognise the red flags and sack them as a client after the first year, but I hoped it would improve.

Sorry, sometimes, when you work alone, you need a rant!

Shopclicks said:

Can you share how you first heard about llms.txt files? Interested to know how the message is getting out.

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I first came across it through a video by Imran from Web Squadron on YouTube — he does very practical, no-nonsense content on technical SEO and GEO topics. The video walked through what llms.txt is, why it matters for AI visibility, and the exact steps to create and upload the file. Worth watching if anyone wants a straightforward walkthrough rather than just reading about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmgudGV7U6Y