Free Tax Advice and Tax Help for business start-ups

Many people start up in business without first taking professional advice. That's a fact.

Many of these people are unaware of the services and advice they could get from an accountant. There is also a common misconception that all accountants are the same. They're not. Some specialise in advising business start-ups. Many others are far better at advising only established businesses.

I would always encourage a business start-up to discuss their plans with a suitable accountant. This will provide an objective insight into the feasibility of the plans and financial projections. It could make all the difference down the line - although there is a limit as to the valuable advice you will get for nothing.

One of the issues that an accountant should address are your tax obligations as a new business owner. This is not a subject that the Tax Advice Network attempts to address. Our role is more to provide support and advice in cases of tax investigations and other issues arising from the less common tax difficulties, challenges and difficulties.

But we do get visitors to our website looking for free tax advice - especially in the context of business start-ups. Whilst we don't seek such visitors the challenge is how to help them find what they want even if it's not something that we can provide ourselves.

So I was very pleased that the Tax Advice Network was selected as one of 20 trusted organisations to share some simple new tax support material and tools, tailor-made for small businesses. Included are easy-to-read PDF guides and 'bite-size' videos on a variety of key subject matters - from record keeping and how to avoid a penalty, to PAYE.

We will be incorporating links to some of this material into our website shortly. For the moment here's a link to the relevant items which are being made available through the Business Link website. Do please add your comments to this post to let us know what you think of them.

I'm also posting links on twitter and am curious as to whether that will generate much traffic to the Business link website. So far as I know we're the only one of the 'trusted organisations' to have a twitter strategy so it'll be interesting to ascertain the reach of our message after ReTweets. Please help if you care.