RadDavie
L Plate Warrior
Joined: 14 Jun 2022
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Fat Angry Scotsman
World Chat Champion
Joined: 12 Jan 2021
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 Posted: 13:28 - 16 Jun 2022  Post subject: Re: Best practices for servicing and the likes: |
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| RadDavie wrote: | Hi fellow bikers,
I've been working on and off with various bike shops and mechanics since I was a kid and so now I get a lot of requests from locals and friends of friends to fix something here and there or to trade in bikes and parts. Id been thinking of making it more official, with maybe some rented land for a store/service garage and maybe selling a few things on eBay. For face to face transactions up to now id been using PayPal or taking cash in hand. Would that be a good practice to keep going strong with or should i get into a proper finance app for my bookkeeping, invoicing, statistics etc? and what would you recommend?
Any help is greatly appreciated,
see you on the open road! |
1. Set yourself up as a limited company first, this means that if you fuck things up it's the company that bears the liability and not you personally.
2. Sort out insurance for being a mechanic as well or one claim will sink you.
3. Set up a company bank account at any bank of your choosing. I would just used whatever bank had the lowest fees.
4. You don't need to worry about VAT registration until you make over the threshold in turnover, but it means YOU CANNOT ADD VAT TO YOUR INVOICES. DO NOT FUCKING DO THIS. Many sole traders chance it to make a 20% top up and grill their books. I personally detest it as I have fell victim to it and actively report them every fucking time to HMRC and you better believe HMRC investigate and prosecute. It might be worth becoming VAT registered asap anyway even if your turnover is going to be below the threshold.
5. Find premises, it can even be in your own garden drive or garage. As you are small time the latter is better as it means you won't pay rent. Technically you will need to pay business rates to your local authority for the portion of your home that you use for business purposes but I have never heard of the council giving a fuck about this in actual practice.
6. Taking payment, you can just get your customers to pay by direct bank transfer to your business account you set up in (3), you can take cash-in-hand too but it means physically depositing it in your bank account later. You can use free or cheap bookkeeping options online like QuickBooks to do your invoices and simple accounting as your business is not complicated. You can also just buy card readers so customers can pay chip-and-pin in person.
Screwfix:
https://www.screwfix.com/p/sum-up-card-reader/1972x
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PRESENT: 2018 BMW S1000XR SE Sport.
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Easy-X
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Joined: 08 Mar 2019
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xX-Alex-Xx
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Joined: 12 Sep 2019
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