Setting up Your Own Business - Andy Gardner HMRC

This was probably the most helpful talk I attended this week. Andy Gardner from HM Revenue and Customs, gave a lively, extremely useful and funny talk. Walking in to this talk, I was expecting to come out with my head fried, and so confused, but I was surprised to find that this was not the case at all. Considering it was only an hour talk, Andy went into a lot of detail about: tax, paying and the classes of National Insurance, keeping and maintaining records, calculating net profit from turnover, allowable and non-allowable expenses, capital expenses and how to fill out tax return forms. Andy also provided us each with a thick booklet, explaining what he was saying in a lot more detail. He gave us some links to watch 'webimars' which are also there to help us a lot more for when we need them. I have always thought of tax as a extremely complicated thing that should only be approached by those who know what they're doing; to be honest, I still think this, but this talk has helped my understanding of taxes a lot more, and that they're not quite as scary as I first thought.