PRIME business club

Welcome to the PRIME resources area. This is where we put detailed, helpful information we have bought in from qualified specialists. This area is also updated every working day with new stories of particular relevance to small and medium-sized businesses.

Click here to go straight to free content.

HIGHLIGHTS
Strategies for saving tax
Business start-up advice
Growing a business
Raising capital for your business
Tax news including tax rates information and Budget announcements
IR 35 (tax ruling that can affect self-employed people with one main client)
Personal tax planning
Estate planning and selling your business

SOME QUICK LINKS

Break-even calculator Will you breakeven? This calculator will provide the sales figure you need in order to break even, i.e. obtain a net profit figure of zero.

VAT calculator Calculate the VAT to be paid where VAT is included in the amount entered at the standard rate of 15 per cent.

Business start up calculator Use this calculator to help estimate you business start up costs.

Selling your business A strategy to maximise the assets of your business on its sale requires patient, advance planning.

We have bought it so you don’t have to. So it’s free. But occasionally you will see clearly marked offers of other paid for services the specialist information providers also offer. You can of course ignore these.

Tax and accounting guides

We are in the process of adding 700 pages of detailed information on everything from starting a business to selling one. Click here to see it.

Since tax and accounting issues are involved we have enlisted the help of PracticeWeb, whose expert writers provide the content for the web sites of many professional accounting firms.

UPDATE 27 NOV 2009: All the pages are now up. There may still be a few glitches - the phrasing might occasionally suggest PRIME is an accounting firm eager to do your books! We are sorting sort the final details out.

We’ve removed the access restrictions on everything it’s possible to, so you can view almost all the content now without logging in.

We have also simplified the registration process by making most questions optional. The main reason to register is to make sure you get the newsletters.

You probably won’t have to log in in again unless you need to alter details in your profile such as your email address, or to unsubscribe yourself from a newsletter.

You might also need to go into this area if you ever decide to buy any of the optional stuff from our partner PracticeWeb / Sift Media, such as company reports or credit reports.

But for routine access to read the guides and other resources material you can go straight there now without logging in.

The most likely reason for a login failure is something going wrong with a copy and paste. So if you try to paste in either the password or the username, and accidentally pick up a leading or trailing space as well, the login might fail. The system treats ian[space] as different to just ian and would not recognise you.

Fact sheets on specific business areas

Don’t forget that PRIME has other resources we can provide for free. For example, when you know what business area you are interested in we can often send you a fact sheet about it.

These “business opportunity profiles” are normally about four pages long and provide a useful run through of the issues you should be thinking about - for example start-up costs, regulations and training that may be needed, useful contacts, market conditions and so on.

Here are some examples of the business areas covered. There are hundreds of others.

Alexander Technique Practitioner
Domestic Security Installer
Indian Head Massage Practitioner
Micro Brewery
Mobile Hairdresser
Wedding Favour Maker

Our agreement with the company that produces them (Cobweb Information) means that we can’t give you immediate online access. Instead we can print them out and post them to you in response to a request. Note that we’ll often do this automatically when you first contact us if you have mentioned a particular business area when requesting a pack.

Email us if there’s a business area you are interested in.