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How to grow my business?

R
bob2019 said:
Depending on your type of business, a quick route to online visibility is advertising through Google Adwords. This involves choosing key phrases or words that you want to target when someone does a Google Search. Depending on how much you are prepared to pay depends how high up on the results page you can get.

Like anything quick, it requires investment and testing. Be VERY careful - my opinion is to never link it to your bank account through Direct Debit, just top it up manually so you know you have complete control of your budget. Even though there are budget options etc within the panel, Adwords is very good at eating funds very quickly without you realising and I prefer the manual top up method.

Whilst it is easy to set up an account and get clicks from AdWords, you may want to speak with a specialist to ensure you are getting the most for your money - you want to minimise the amount of people clicking your advert and costing you money if they are less relevant customers or less likely to convert to sales.
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Thanks for your advice
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UK small business employing contractor in Sweden

B
I have spoken with HRMC and it may be possible for them to remain employed but on an NT (No Tax) code and X NIC code so that they are paid Gross of any tax etc each month and then they are responsible for their Tax declarations etc in Sweden.

I will investigate this on both sides and post the final outcome here as no doubt other people will have a similar question in the future.
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Balance Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention

M
Erika Jones said:
In any business, there should be a balance between the two strategies customer acquisition and customer retention.
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That is over generalising - I've been involved in two different businesses in which the service provided will generally never be needed by the same customer twice. They can recommend friends/family, but they will not be back themselves. Focusing on retention there would have just been silly.

You need to know metrics are important for YOUR business, there is no hard and fast rule.
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Messy Accounts

MyAccountantOnline
Blood Lust said:
I am on assignment with a company whose accounts are a mess and I`m struggling to fix it.

I have spent a month posting a backlog of transactions onto Sage 50 for their financial year 2018 to 2019 and correcting transactions which were posted using the wrong bank account nominals. This part isn't so bad although the bank recs dont balance anymore. They dont balance as I have altered the bank nominals for many transactions to their correct ones.

I also have a further 500 transactions left unreconciled from their previous financial year. Most of these their staff weren't able to reconcile because they used the same kind of incorrect bank nominals etc. I cannot touch these as that year is closed.

What is the correct procedure for fixing this as I have never encountered a set of accounts as bad as these before?

Do I match all outstanding transactions in the rec windows for each bank account?
Then manually alter the nominals for each to show the correct amounts?

If it was my company I would start their financial year afresh on Sage 50 but is this allowed and even possible?
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If the records are that bad I'd start from scratch.

In my experience very often re-doing it properly is a lot quicker than trying to sort out a mess.
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Retail Merchant Services Milton Keynes

K
Hi Judy.
I've heard nothing further from RMS so no news is good news.
Stick to you guns. The important thing is not to enter into any dialogue with RMS unless it's by letter sent via Recorded Delivery. Has your husband had any communication with the actual card provider ie. Elavon? I wrote to them also advising that the contract had been mis-sold to me etc. They were happy to cancel their side of things - got the impression that they had "issues" with RMS!
Good luck.
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What figure is adjusted net profit?

Clinton
"Adjusted net profit" is whatever fiddled figure the creator of the figure wants it to be :)

Think EBITDA is bad, unreliable, deceptive, irrelevant (given lack of Capex considerations) etc etc? Adjusted Net Profit is EBITDA that's been further fiddled. ;)

There are multiple uses for adjusted net profit you get from a business owner. The most important use is that it provides numbers you can use for your lottery ticket and you don't have to think of new numbers every week.
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Bargain Hardware 2.0

itsnathanhere
Just a small bit of input from me, but I find the animated nav menu to be quite jarring. What I'm talking about is when you scroll down the page and the nav bar shrinks slightly - it's too jumpy. I'd recommend either making it a smooth animation instead of a jump from one to the other, or just keeping it small in the first place.

This is just nitpicking on my part. The site feels fairly smooth to navigate otherwise!
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If you offer student discount, do you include mature students?

WaveJumper
The big question I suppose is do you have to offer 'discounts' to attract customers, are these local customers, repeat customers, is the discount factored in to your overall pricing etc etc. I once worked for a very large retail company who jumped on the band wagon of offering points for every five pound customers spent. Yep points made prizes, well actually they added up to money off future purchases just like your Boots card, and then some bright spark in the marketing department realized we were giving money away to all our 'local' customer catchment who probably would have shopped with us in the first place with out what in affect was a 5% discount. All I am saying is take a long hard look at your business model and make sure it really does pay and contribute to your bottom line
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PAYE and self employed tax query

MyAccountantOnline
richb330 said:
Hi all. I need some advice and wondered if anyone on here could help.

I have had a ltd business for about 7 years and treated it as a part time job supplementing my PAYE income. It is registered with companies house and with the Flat Rate VAT scheme. I gave up my full time job around a year ago to focus on building it up but things haven't worked out as i'd hoped. I've had to go back into full time employment and landed a perfect job. Good money, great benefits and a really good work/life balance. The only issue is the working contract explicitly states that employees over a specific pay grade should focus all their time on the business, and not have any other business interests. This applies to me.

I think it's unfair that they have such a policy but it is what it is so I've de-registered from the FRS scheme and in the process of closing the business down.

However, I have two good customers of my private business that I wish to retain. They have been really good to me over the last year and between them I probably make around £5k per annum.

The query is, how do I go about maintaining these customers financially. I will have to invoice them for work so I’ll amend the invoice template and remove the VAT line. Can I maintain my business bank account and have income paid into that?

More importantly, how do I declare the income? I'd prefer not to register as a sole trader as i don't want to alter my tax code and potentially jeopardise the full time job. Can I simply invoice out, have money paid into the business bank account and declare the income through the annual self-assessment process?

Any thoughts greatly received.
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Do you have a spouse who could operate the company rather than yourself?
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