There’s no doubt about it, the wholesale contractor accountancy marketplace is big business and everyone wants a piece of the action.

As SMEs struggle to access funding from the banks, the Treasury has launched a paper asking businesses to give their views on how to increase finance options. These will then be proposed later this year.

It is a legal requirement that if you are trading as a business you have to register for VAT as soon as your turnover exceeds £68,000 (from 2009 – the threshold is periodically reviewed). This is based on turnover in any given trading year, not your profit; as soon as you have raised invoices in excess of the threshold you must register.

The first thing is to think about why you want to go freelance. While permanent jobs are increasingly unreliable, the one certainty of freelancing is that you will be out of work at some point and you won’t have a formal support structure around you to help out. Although, of course, that is exactly the way many freelancers prefer it. So having decided to go freelance, here are the steps you take.

When you are starting out as a freelancer, or transferring from an umbrella to running your own company, you are going to incur some out-of-pocket costs before your company is fully operational, or even before it actually exists. These costs can be reclaimed from the company.

Having made the decision to work through your own limited Company, there are a few steps to take to set it up. Always remember the Company is a separate legal entity and never mix its affairs up with your own.