Think about what s easiest for your prospective customers. Will they understand that the company that they buy their web design from also sells self-help books, say?We tried running our training and consultancy business under the umbrella of our limited company that provided professional photography and art. It s hard to divide your webiste up into the different cost centres so that people arrive at the bit they re supposed to. And they ll always have a look round the rest of the site. In the end, we split them into two separate businesses.If there s a logical link between the products and services you offer, it will work. You need to register the different SIC codes at Companies House that show what your limited company trades in.As has been said elsewhere, a good accountant will explain to you the tax advantages and disadvantages of keeping everything in one company. They ll explain about related companies, too, where, if there are obvious links between the companies, you may only be eligible for one set of tax reliefs.Setting up a limited company needn t cost you more than ��50 if you do it yourself. It s not hard to do. You ll have to do an annual return for each one, which costs ��15 on-line, and present annual accounts to Companies House for each company. That has implications for accountancy fees but a reasonable accountant will do you a deal for doing accounts for however many companies you have. It s all business that they don t have to go looking for.As you have a full time job, work out what time you have available to run each of your businesses before launching them. If you re able to outsource some of the work you ll be able to do more.Good luck!
Hi,A complex question and one that you really need to talk to a good accountant about as there are a number of other questions to answer but, simply put, yes you can create one limited company and have multiple divisions trading from it but they would all have to be identified as Division of (Company Name) Ltd .There are tax advantages and disadvantages which you really need to talk to an accountant about and take their advice. You also need to make sure that the structure you choose makes it possible for one company to be sold as an individual entity once you have built it up.Also, make sure that the structure allows for the situation if one business fails, it doesn t bring them all crashing down too.Talk to a good accountancy firm before you do anything as, although it may be costly to setup initially, it will be cheaper than re-doing it all at a later date.
