Two distinct services from one company?

T

TBFrank

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My wife and I are thinking of setting up a business as co-directors running from our home. We will both work in the business although it will be mostly based around her profession (psychologist) and so she will be the core-value service-provider with myself adding some complementary services and looking after promo/admin etc. Separately, I plan to do some consultancy in my own field (digital/content) but limited to part-time or occasional commissions. We each have 30yr careers behind us and have no debts so not looking to work around the clock and will want to take time out now and again etc.

before engaging an accountant (don't have one!) or solicitor I'd like to be thinking about some default arrangement and my questions are:

- is there a downside to running all work through the one limited private company - I could have neutral looking stationary/business card etc. for my sideline.? If it's not economically silly I'd have a preference for just keeping one set of accounts etc.

- how flexible can we be in terms of paying ourselves salaries ... quite honestly we could have months of next to nothing coming through .... can we extract variable wages as needed.

Thanks for any advice or food for thought...
 
You need to talk to an accountant. Far too many variables here for anyone to be giving meaningful advice on the basis of the limited information you have provided. I would question your need for a limited company for instance.
 
by no means an expert on this but I think you can establish a company the objectives of which could be a combo of both businesses. I cant see why not...

if you are company directors surely you can pay each other whatever you want as long as you have the money to do so.
 
Thanks both. Maybe the projected scale will not justify a limited company. I wonder would it make sense if we could both register as sole traders sharing a common business name ... and then invoice individually according to which of us delievered the specific service?
 
jim said:
by no means an expert on this but I think you can establish a company the objectives of which could be a combo of both businesses. I cant see why not...
Click to expand...
there is no need to worry about objectives of a ltd company since Companies Act 2014.
Goodbye ultra vires.

If objects are required then it will be a DAC
 
What are the general advantages and disadvantages of forming a company? Maybe someone has a link to a useful document that summarises the relative merits of both approaches?
 
There's some good stuff at a company called parfreymurphy.ie - see also their discussion Q&As

(google them, as I'm not allowed to insert actual link)

If I leave aside the ltd. company option in my own situation described above, I'm probably left with choice of either : both my spouse and I being sole traders, or us forming a business partnership .... given it is with my spouse and assuming 100% trust etc. does anybody know if there's much financial/tax reason for choosing one over the other
 
Thanks Joe - Some of this is very useful. (That said - some material is out of date, some of it is disjointed and some links no longer work, etc.)

Thanks TBFrank - I'll check out parfreymurphy later.
 
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