Sunday, 23 August 2015

Do e-commerce sites have to state the country of origin? - North American and European answer


http://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-it-compulsory-for-clothing-e-commerce-websites-to-specify-on-each-product-page-where-the-clothes-were-produced

The link has a couple of answers for two different trading blocks, North America and Europe.

The American answer says there is a law forcing people to state the country of origin, but that it isn't enforced.

The European answer states that EU makers are too-much lobbied or too feckless to allow their voters such information. The European Union finds it impossible to do something that's possible in America. However things might be changing with a 2014 EU directive, opposed by German and UK delegates, to make force EU manufacturers to label their EU origins.

Neither answer states where to look-up the law or lack of law, but both look pretty convincing and one has links to parliamentary debates on the subject

That's it.

Here are some related blog posts and afterthoughts.

  • Veganline.com is a shoe shop that tries to sell UK-made products and label by country of origin.
    Make It British has a couple of posts about labelling. I hope to get a bit of search ranking by publishing this related stuff.
  • https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/10/bad-economics-teaching.html is a post about how bad econmics teaching works. Teachers get lecture notes and such from the McGraw Hill Publishing Company, teach from the textbook, and avoid facts.
  • Pantstopoverty.org.uk is a salvedged web site, reclaimed in order to write why the great Pants to Poverty craze did not take-off in proportion to costs as hoped. A review of social enterprise examples, one or two per country for a European Parliament committee, says that Pants "only" sold £250,000-worth in a good year. Maybe the problem was that Pants to Poverty were wrong about whether they were helping. 
  • http://makeitbritish.co.uk/uk-manufacturing-2/a-step-forward-for-made-in-britain-labelling/
  • http://makeitbritish.co.uk/made_in_britain/made-britain-labels-become-compulsory/
    Here is a related subject: how to tell people that your product is made in the UK. A tricky point because you have already spent money on the income tax and national insurance of people who make the product, their high rent, and the costs of safety laws or general civic stuff that don't apply in China or Rana Plaza so there is no money left-over for anything else, like explaining sales points.
  • Vistaprint used to offer more cashback through cashback web sites than they charged in their postage-only offer on 250 template cards with a lie on the back - a note that business cards are free when they're not. They've also cancelled their union jack template from their cheapest templates, so the days of making money by ordering swing tags are over unfortunately.
  • Moorplan sell some cheap made-in cards, one country only.
    Walk-in to a shop to buy 100 at 3-4p per card.
    Order 1 box @ 1000 online and pay delivery but a lower rate per card.
    Order 2 box @ 2000 online to get 1.6p per card with free delivery.

    Moorplan also sell woven name tapes rather like over-size cashe's school name tapes in black or white to say "made in england". I plan to do a post on product labelling some time and so shall keep the other options secret to build-up anticipation. 


If you print your own cards in colour and want a first idea for a design, there's a free one commissioned by a firm called Stoves.co.uk available to anyone who makes something in Britain, as enforceable by trading standards agencies. It is an open source design. They no longer promote the scheme and have picked a niftier logo for a new scheme that you have to subscribe to. Neither logo suggests why anybody should care what country something is made-in, and both are brash about origin in a way that's out of fashion everywhere but sports grounds, but hey.
Made in Britain


















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Friday, 21 August 2015

Installing pictobrowser galleries of photos from flickr or picassa onto a web page


Installing pictobrowser galleries of photos from flickr or picassa onto a web page

One day I hope to have a site on software that has plugins for image galleries, so images can be hosted on sites like Flickr and Picassa, which saves server space, might increase options for quick uploading, and adds some slider-viewer-gallery-type functions so that the viewer can choose which of the photos to view. (Picassa is now closed to new uploads)

Most e-commerce sites have a single main picture shown and then a 360 degree slide show or a series of other pictures, and mostly with magnification in a pop-up window as an options. My work-around does not offer a magnified version and offers one basic layout for the first picture and icons to others, which can be adjusted by the way you embed it.

Most e-commerce sites aim for quick loading of the first picture if it's shown on the customer's screen. My work-around does not offer that, so it's something that better suits sideline sites and just happens to do for now for ecommerce. I think there would be more services like this, and possibly there are, but they are hard to find because different types of people want different things from this technology. The most common application is showing a bunch of photos. Showing 360 degree spins or ecommerce photos on a flat-file web site is more rare. Flat file sites are coming back into fashion for speed and cheapness, but are still not much good for ecommerce, and the need to drop-in some kind of third party picture gallery (or shopping cart) is one of the reasons.

Pictobrowser is my work-around 

(handy-web-hints.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/embedding-flickr-into-websites.html says that there's another.)
db798.com/pictobrowser/ - front page with explanation and instructions
db798.com/pictobrowser/samples.html - samples of what it can do. They start with a grey pattern
db798.com/pictobrowser/builder.php - is a form that writes a script for each kind of sample
db798.com/instruction.swf - is a form for one default setting that shows the plain text of the script on screen.

Showing a default picture instead of a "get flash player" message

Once you have a copy of the script, it can be easier to lay it out in a text editor with a line for each bit, just in for ease of tweaking and in order to guess how the long the long line of code works.
I don't know how it works
A pattern of phrases beginning "so" and ending ";" seems to define variables.
The file is easier to read if you put each of these phrases on one line with a plain text editor.
There is also a bit a the top that says something like "if you don't have flash player you can get a free one here". Mobile phones are set up not to want to download flash player in order to save phone bills. Blogger.co.uk seems to be set-up the same way as well. It's better to put a default first photo in that space so it shows on the site as soon as possible.

Hosting your own swfobject.js javascript for Pictobrowser

One link at the top of the script is to a javascript:
script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.db798.com/pictobrowser/swfobject.js"
It is possible to save this as a file on your own  host - assuming that it allows javascripts - just to stop information having to hop back and forth between your server and pictobrowser's server. You'd have to change the link to the javascript as well. It's a standard javascript and there is stuff on the net about how it works, which I don't much understand.

Hosting your own  .swf shockwave flash file for Pictobrowser

Another link very near the top of the shockwave flash file:
http://www.db798.com/pictobrowserp.swf
It is possible to save this as a file on your own host - assuming that it allows .swf files - just to stop information having to hop back and forth between your server and pictobrowser's server. You'd have to change the link to the flash file as well. It is not a standard flash file, or at least I have not found stuff on the net about how it works.

Removing the grey patterned placeholder from Pictobrowser's flash file

If you managed to get a default photo from the gallery to show instead of the "get flash player" message, it's frustrating to see it disappear again as flash-enabled browsers load and show the grey wiggle pattern for a second or two instead. It's the same pattern that you get if you click on the "pictorbrowserp.swf" link above, so I think they are connected.

I've discovered that there are flash decompilers that convert it to an .fla file. They exist online.

I've discovered that there are programs like free-decompiler.com that do more. The help page of that one links to some blog posts about fiddling with flash. This is the point at which I gave-up last time. If anyone would like to suggest a new pictobrowserp.swf file without the wibbly-wobbly grey placeholder, they would make me happy.

I might come back and post some code examples from the Veganline.com site, but don't promise that they're written in the best way.

By the way, if you look at the source code for this last bit, you will see a default script from db798.com/instruction.swf used to show some UK-made vegan bouncing womens' brogue shoes.
You can see a version with its own default photo instead of "get flash player", and my choice of settings for some other stuff like sizes and self-hosted javascript and flash files on the source of this page:
https://veganline.com/tredair-bouncing/tredair-monkey-boot which shows some rather wonderful monkey boots made in the UK. I hope to change it soon. If it has changed you might have to trawl through the source code of an archived version : https://web.archive.org/web/20150329102305/http://veganline.com/bouncing-monkey-boot.htm
Pictobrowser is my work-around - Showing a default picture instead of a "get flash player" message - Hosting your own swfobject.js javascript for Pictobrowser - Hosting your own .swf shockwave flash file for Pictobrowser - Removing the grey patterned placeholder from Pictobrowser's flash file
Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

This shows on the default view of blogspot.co.uk but not the magazine view - I don't know why.
Just another example of why a picture is a better place-holder than a line saying "get flash player here..."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A similar free and easy program geared to flickr (not picassa) is
http://flickrslidr.com/ which doesn't have obvious examples of what it can do

Juicebox with Flickr looks a good free one too, with an example on
http://www.englishweavers.co.uk. This is what they say:
JuiceboxBuilder is a desktop application for building Juicebox galleries. It runs on:
  • Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.
  • Mac OS X 10.6 or higher.
Web Server
  • To display Juicebox galleries you need a website and a way to upload files (usually via FTP). We do not host image galleries on our servers
  • Password Protection and Image Download features require PHP version 5.2 (or higher) on the web server. The vast majority of web servers run this version of PHP. To find out which version of PHP your server runs, please check with your web server tech support, or follow these instructions.



Another program like pictobrowser that came-on on searches was
http://visualslideshow.com/slideshow-software.html, but it turns-out to be $49 for commercial use or to use without a link back to the publisher. An advantage is that there is a version with no flash. Or possibly good: people who pay do download photos they don't want onto their mobiles might think it's bad.

Batteries, chargers and flashlights have a testing blog on lygte-info.dk where they can read about each other. "I do publish most reviews on BLF, batteries and charger are also published on CPF and Fonarevka", says the author.

This came to mind because product photography lighting can be a chore. You need to use either very bright lights - strobes - or have good curtains to photograph during the day and get even results. For the draw-curtains-and-use-steady-lights method, you ideally need dimmer switches and bulbs that render most of the colours, evenly enough for your camera to adjust. Strobes were the technology of the 2010s but continuous LED lighting has emerged as a new cheap option, with 160-led lights under £15 from China. Their continuous light could be used for table lamps as well as for photography, and allows more intuitive set-up of pictures for someone who hasn't the concentration to stick to one job for a long time. This is why batteries become interesting.

160-led lights appear to use 9v 3a transformers, so far as I can tell from Aliexpress, but are more often used with video batteries which are a couple of lithium-iron in series. Cheap lithium-iron batteries have also just emerged on Aliexpress, and a charger that can cope with them has arrived in the post. In a way, this is exciting.

 http://lygte-info.dk/review/Review%20Charger%20Xiamen%20Nanfu%20HG-1412W%20UK.html
...is the review of a the cheapest charger for Li-ion batteries and the other sort.
"The charger will charge lots of chemistries, but it do not use the correct algorithm for any of them. The charger is useable, but not the correct charger if you care about your batteries or want a safe charger". If I understood the graphs and explanations a bit better, this might be more useful, but it gets me started.





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SW14, London, UK London, UK

Friday, 31 July 2015

Stock-control puzzle: how products are related to each other

Shopping cart software and stock control.
How are products related to each other?

Programmers see products and attributes in a different way to shopkeepers.
Programmers use language to describe the subtleties, but I don't think there is any standard way of using words to describe
  • different ways that programmers relate data, and
  • different ways that shopkeepers relate stock

Programmers see a product, and a variation to make a 2D table, and another variation to make a 3D table, and a third to become something you can't draw. Programmers take that product and add more to it at the checkout stage, when shipping zones and such are attached.

Shopkeepers see products in a way that has probably built-up over the years from experience, rudely interrupted each time their systems are automated. I'm thinking of small-scale self-employed shopkeepers and stall-holders and people who sell things online with DIY shopping cart software. People who work in logistics at Tesco are probably ahead of me in their analysis. They don't need to read the relationships below, which are customer expectation, ability to alter the product after an order has come-in, and then some relationships further-up the supply chain. These can be whether a product has a minimum, such as five reams of paper in a carton, or a minimum per type of product, such as any choice of sizes of green slipper from the slipper manufacturer, or any choice of products from the slipper shoe and boot wholesaler.

Customer expectation about stock?

I can have nearly identical products from different suppliers within one family.
To a programmer they can share a photograph and an ordering system.
To the customer they are T shirts in small medium or large sizes.
As long as the customer doesn't mind, I can have blue T shirts from one supplier and red T shirts from another supplier, and they are all just a T shirt range to the customer. The link is that the customer is likely to look for T shirts and then think about size, unless a shopping cart persuades a customer to state a size while browsing. People with specialist clothes shops particularly want a full size range. They don't want a customer to make a special journey one Saturday, think they have seen a product available, and then discover that it's not.

Can stock be altered on-site, after an order comes-in?

Shopkeepers are used to altering the address and delivery costs after an order comes in. They may offer gift wrapping or first class postage. I could probably turn a white T shirt into a blue T shirt, but I am not sure if the dye would be fast or cheap or that I could do it quickly enough for it to be worth the time. Maybe a specialist T shirt printer would know. I couldn't turn a blue T shirt into a white T shirt. I can turn a long belt into a short belt and that's quite common in belt shops. I specialise more in belts. I can keep kits of parts and make belts to any length up to a maximum.

If a shopkeeper can turn one product into another as with belt length or gift-wrapping, that's one relation between products; if not, I think of them as separate products within a family. Maybe that's why Americans keep using the term "SKU" or "Stock Keeping Unit", or maybe that's just a bit of jargon they like to use in America.

Is stock separated from other products back-up the supply chain? 

I cannot turn a size 8 into a size 9 by stretching. I cannot make shoes after an order comes-in.

Shopkeepers see a product as something that comes from up the supply chain.
Products have family relations to each other. Just as sheep are used to living in herds, shoes are used to living in size ranges. They go-about in pairs, like pidgeons, but before they are sold they also like to have a hurd like sheep or cows. A full size range has a higher vaue because it matches customer expectations. Sizes are linked further-up the supply chain in the way that the size range is available. Complexity lurks, un-stated, as something that I just worked-out as I went along last time I organised the way I do business.

Is stock linked to other products by supplier minimum orders?

One of my suppliers can send anything in the catalogue, whatever size it is, from whatever range, if I make a minimum order value. So the sizes are linked by customer expectation - the wish to see a choice of sizes - and by a wider family of goods from one supplier, and their minimum order for cheap delivery which takes two or three working days. That contradicts my statement that I can't alter a shoe after the order comes-in. If the wholesaler will send quickly enough or send direct to the customer, then the stock-keeping task is to know what's in their warehouse as well as my small stock room. I can advertise a product as in stock - perhaps with an asterisk to say that delivery is subject to confirmation and will take a few days, or with simpler software I can just mark it in stock and take a chance.

Is stock linked to other products by supplier constraints within an order?

One of my suppliers makes shoes in sizes. They will make 12 of a style - any size combinations - within a minimum order for free delivery which is 24. So the relations are style for a minimum order per style, and supplier for a minimum order per free delivery. There's also a 2-3 month lead time.

One supplier that I don't use sells shoes in pre-paks. So-many size 3, so-many size 4, more size 5 and 6, less size 7 and so many size 8. These are ordered as one product; they can't come in any other size ratio, but they are separate in their ability to be out of stock. Some combination of stock should persuade a shopkeeper to order another carton. I'm not sure how it goes.

Is stock linked to other products by supplier rules?

If I sold food or stationary, it would be normal for a supplier to sell things in minimums within the minimum order for free delivery. They would be packed in sixes and twelves and crates and boxes. The rule us that a supplier will not break-open a pack in order to reduce picking and packing costs; a wholesaler sells the whole pack. Hence the name. The rule can relate to a real pack, or it can be applied arbitarilly by the supplier.

I'm still confused but at least I have written the problem down.
I have not written a neat summery or solution.
I think programmers are confused in how to present their software as well; I haven't seen standard language used or explained.

Blog on a single page
the author sells vegan shoes online at Veganline.com , a UK online vegan shoe shop
related post: Free Fast and Pretty - which shopping cart?
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Sunday, 26 July 2015

80gsm A4 office paper in the UK - where's cheap?


Cheap paper

I have some other posts about ink-saving and how to save paper with different layouts.
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work -  recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free

Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket


0.5p a sheet on mysupermarket in July 2015. (and Wilko, not on mysupermarket.)
Wilko paper | Printer copier paper - grey packet | store locator - choose a large branch or click and collect. Grey packs are 0.48p a sheet; double-A is 0.5p a sheet. There are cashback offers on their order-online and collect service, and they take all major credit cards including cashback ones.
Sainsbury paper | Basics branded A4 paper | Store locator - choose a large branch or click & collect
Tesco paper | Everyday value range A4 paper | Store locator - choose a large branch or click & collect
Asda's graph shows no 0.5p offers on Logic A4 paper | Smartprice | "Copy Paper made in Indonesia" appears in their shops sometimes, un-known to their web site or mysupermarket, in a white 1 ream pack with a black and white label.

0.6p a sheet
Morrison's graph shows no special offers this year on their Morrison's brand A4 paper

0.7p a sheet Poundland - A4 pads compete better. £1 staplers and hole punchers. Ocado charge the same price for a sheet of paper.

Cheap prices tend to be in bigger supermarket branches under their economy brand, displayed on a bottom shelf behind a pillar, or sometimes stacked up as a pile-high sell-cheap offer at the beginning of the school term; they're not usually at the small branches unless you have arranged some sort of click and collect deal online. The brands are Sainsbury's Basics, Tesco Everyday Value, and would be Asda Smartprice if Asda sold cheap paper. Wilko's cheapest is a grey and white packet.

Supermarkets tend to take cashback credit cards, available in individuals' names, and offering half or one percent cashback as well as a months' credit if you buy the day after direct debit from your bank account.

Buying little and often allows less money to be held in the bank account, with a chance of investing spare cash in P2P lending accounts.

0.8p Argos and Ryman

Waitrose have no A4 paper in their Essentials range except A4 lined pads at 0.5p/sheet. In James Bond style emergencies like the need for an expense claim you can buy Waitrose paper at 1.1p. Her Majasty's Stationary Office is no longer a public sector stationary supplier, so might see James Bond scratching his head in Smiths who no longer try to sell A4 reams online, before he goes to Waitrose instead. Aldi Iceland and Lidl don't usually stock reams of A4 paper.
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work -  recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free

£12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT.

Office stationary suppliers have a stable minimum order for free delivery, listed here from July 2015. They vary their paper prices a lot over time and on different pages of the catalogue, or as a tempt-back offer for old customers, so you have to search for prices each time you order or just use supermarkets if you don't fancy searching.

If you often pass a cheap supermarket, the price to beat is £12.50 or £10.41+VAT for five reams, and you'll also have to make a larger order for free delivery.

If Wilko keep their £2.40 reams in stock and you are near one, then the price to beat is £12 or £10+VAT; otherwise Wilko charge £4 if you need delivery. Their prices-alongside for notebooks aren't good at 1p a page on a spiral-bound A5 notebook. It's possible to buy Silvine UK-made notebooks in packs of five for less, probably.

Small cashback offers come and go over time, but there is no harm in signing-up to Topcashback, Quidco, or both from this site while you think about it.
Searching in July 2015, none of them had an offer much cheaper than the main supermarkets for under £100; the only way to buy cheaper than the supermarket is to wait for a special offer.

Searching in early October 2014 I found Poundland advertising fictional 0.3p paper with 0.75p paper on the shelves. Late October 2014 I found Staples was top of the list on a search engine. At the time their usual price was at or just under £2.50 a 500 page ream including VAT on orders of 60 reams. A special offer in their clearance section showed reams at £1.99 for a short time - maybe only shown to people who have just searched for paper. There's also an offer of something like a membership card, after which the odd offer comes in the post. Coming back in February 2015 I see prices have dropped. Cashback credit cards might offer another half percent off.

A few years ago I used to use Viking, who have occasional special offers for existing customers and advertise cheap paper for new customers regularly. You may have to use a second address to and payment card to use offers like this if there isn't one for existing customers, but the existing customers' special codes used to last a few months after being printed on a mail-out, even if you had to type them into the web site rather than using the search box.

Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work -  recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free

Cheap A4 paper special offers

  • 1% cashback, for personal-name amex cardholders is available at some supermarkets. Some personal-name Visa and Mastercards give 0.5% cashback and nectar points can be worth a similar amount next time you order.
  • Bing and Google have the most obvious offers, aimed at new customers.
    Euroffice and their UKofficedirect sites have a pop-up offer for new customers on their site.
     
  • Most suppliers will send paper or email monthly junk mail to previous customers with occasional good prices for paper. Viking's offers for example used to have a special product number that was still valid for a few months after issue to buy paper more cheaply than the usual price. A search of their web site this 12/2015 found Item # Q2D-2047658 was 75 grammes, but if you can cope with that it's cheaper than supermarkets.

    On the other hand, glancing at the junk mail and binning it is distracting and takes time (as do nectar cards). There's probably a way to set-up email forwarding filters so that stationary offers go to one in-box to open only when needed,

    Cashback sites don't work well for a product search, so they can only be used when you have a supplier in mind and want to know if their price still applies to cashback customers, or not.
  • http://www.imutual.co.uk/office-supplies
  • http://www.quidco.com/office/
  • http://www.topcashback.co.uk/office-equipment/cashback/ - no product search 
    It would be great if you could sign-up to the bottom two from this page because they give commission and nobody has done so far - but another deserving referral agent is http://cashbackholic.co.uk/ who try to match well-known shops against any of the main cashback sites they are on. Plenty of obscure cashback sites are listed too, in case you have the patience.
Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work -  recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free

    Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work

    Larger organisations can buy more at once.
    With no experience of buying for a large organisation, I guess the following is worth a try.

    First, printing letters to post is a service that some companies do online. Most people don't do it for one or two letters because of the hassle, but the cost of time, stamp, printing and envelope may be more manageable, if not much cheaper, when out-sourced. At the same time a few books of stamps in the office for when this grand system fails would be a good backup. I worked at a place where we had second class stamps and stamps that could make a letter up to first class - however many pence that is. So if someone has a reason in their head to use first class, they can do it easily but otherwise letters go second class.

    Second (second paragraph not second class) some organisations expect their staff to buy stationary together as part of a big deal which is meant to get low prices, maybe by tender, from office supply companies that sell everything else as well as paper. These companies make the money back by charging £100 for a coat rack. It doesn't make sense.

    It could be possible to get a pallet of paper from a paper mill delivered to some central point, and for staff who travel around the organisation to take a few reams with them. This would benefit a UK paper mill, paying UK tax, even if it's no cheaper than the cheapest supermarket. The rest of the stationary buying could be left to individual staff, who know what they want and could claim receipts on petty cash or get the boss to buy things for them online with a company credit card. Unfortunately our government here in the UK is not capable of releasing the trade data that would help us work-out where the nearest papermills are that make cheap A4 paper in order for people to write trade directories and customers to ask what their minimum orders are for free delivery. If anyone is reading this because they write political leaflets, please pass the suggestion on to candidates, as my letter forwarded via an MP to the Department for Business just got a brush-off reply. Maybe you can try writing a better letter via Writetothem.com and see if you get a better result.

    http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Office%20paper%20and%20publications.pdf is a tax-funded publication suggesting that big regular customers can get paper at well under £2 a ream including VAT and probably delivery for a 200 reams at a time, which is a lot cheaper than the price I found for 200 reams on the list above. The document is vague about who the suppliers are and what their minimums are, and generally tries to promote recycled paper rather than products made by people who pay taxes to fund Wrap. It doesn't even promote products made in democratic welfare states. It promotes recycled paper. According to another source  "the carbon footprint of transportation is high, there are no recycled mills for office cut paper in the UK, the closest mill producing a recycled sheet is in Austria." . So this government-funded organisation works directly against the interests of its taxpayers. I don't know if they were crass or took a bribe, but probably just crass because there are similar examples on by other blog planb4fashion.blogspot.co.uk .

    The document was clearly written before the recession, at thee expense of UK taxpayers, and has been maintained by ministers of all three parties. It does not promote production by UK taxpayers; it promotes the opposite. It promotes the competition. You have to wonder if the writers took a bribe, or were just gobsmackingly incompetant. Maybe ministers and special advisers thought they earn revenue from their great intellectual property exports, and didn't check civil servants' work for detail. The document is vague about web links and minimum orders, so what there is doesn't date fast. It mentions paper suppliers as Robert Horne, Dixon & Roe, Antalis, Paperback, Guilbert/Niceday, Lyreco, Office World, Fenns, Viking, Xerox Office Supplies, Banner and UK Office Direct Limited.

    A WRAP spokesman said: “Liz Goodwin’s salary was £163,000. Her pay reflects that fact in all three years as chief executive Liz has met her objectives and WRAP is on track to meet all its business plan targets. WRAP is committed to delivering the best possible value for money and so Liz’s pay was recently benchmarked against similar jobs in both public and private sector. At WRAP’s Open Meeting Liz was widely praised for what she had achieved.”As a result of UK government buyers refusing to buy UK-made paper, one of the last producers has gone into administration by KPMG. Tullis Russell was an employee-owned company based in Fife, the Prime Ministers's constituency. The situation echoes the closure of Equity Shoes in Leicester, another employee-owned company, which went bust while their MP promoted Chinese competition such as Terra Plana as Secretary of State for Business, funding London Fashion Week. There is some overlap. Defra is the ministry that funds Wrap, and Defra funded sidelines of London Fashion Week and an organisation called Ethical Fashion Forum (catchphrase: "What is Ethical Fashion?") which also advised consumers not to buy british products from factories like Equity Shoes. I have a facebook page and blog about this sort of thing. If the salary of Liz Goodwin had gone towards either Tullis Russell or Equity Shoes, it might have helped them stay in business but honest and fair orders would have done the trick as well. I hope there is some way that UK or Scottish government can undo the damage before the machines are demolished, and promote UK buying of UK-made paper. I don't think it's likely but I hope. Meanwhile, the aftermath has to be dealt with and this is a post about how to promote startup busines and employment in less-likely places.

    http://www.mill-branded-guide.paperandprint.com/mill-branded-products/millproducts.cgi is a more specific document and could with luck contain the contact details of a UK paper mill that makes cheap A4 copier paper. It is aimed at printers. If the government has killed-off the last UK paper mill by failing to release information about which are still in business making what, and by promoting the competition, then you could try making your own paper by setting-up a factory. This is a US video about the process.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kt5dHMBvYM

    Printers may be able to print thousands or tens of thousands of sheets cheaper than the cost of buying ink and paper at home. Not much less. Possibly a bit more, but it saves a lot of work and gets their expertise in judging what kind of ink will work on what kind of paper if you use both sides. I discover this from searching online for A5 or A4 quotes on a constituency print-run of 50,000.
    Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work -  recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free

    recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free

    That's because people are embarassed to keep single sided sheets to print on the back. They should be proud. Estate agents sometimes send single-side sheets, as do people who want to invest your money for 0.1% a year while offering loans at only 2% a month. Lots of these sheets are blank on the back and capable or being re-used. If you have a basic roller-like inkjet printer, you can even save pages that have got half a sheet blank and use them for addresses.
    Cheap paper - Cheap 80gsm A4 paper for UK home users on MySupermarket - £12.50 paper is the price to beat @ £2.50 x 5, or £10.41 + VAT. - Cheap A4 paper special offers - Cheap paper for large organisations, and how DEFRA puts people out of work -  recycled paper looks expensive but some of it is free

    parcel tape

    Just noticed an offer on clearancexl of 6 x 66m = 396m @ £4 = 1p a meter. Unfortunately there's at least a £5 or £6 delivery charge which can also include some very cheap potatoes, near-to-use-by-date tins and whatever else takes your fancy.

    Wilko stay-low price brown parcel tape is 55m @ 55p = 1p a meter. In fact it says "60m approx" so you might be lucky, or you might find there's none in stock. It is sold as "in store only" and "check availability". A review says it can loose its grip an it is thin.

    Wilko transparent parcel tape is 100/66 pence a meter, but the stay-low priced
    19mm wide type is 100 / (4 x 33) or 0.0075p a meter:


    By the way I have just done a blog post about Lord Sewell, who seems to have done nothing wrong except to admit that his colleagues do F-all
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    Sunday, 19 July 2015

    choosing a UK business bank account



    Related:
    Choosing a UK business bank account <this page
    https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/07/setting-up-shop-with-uk-business-bank.html
    Free, Fast and Pretty: shopping cart software for ecommerce <links back
    https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/06/shopping-cart-software-for-ecommerce.html
    Simple Bookkeeping and Account Agregators <links back
    https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/12/simple-book-keeping-and-account.html
    Free Online Bookkeeping Software for Simple Accounts <links back
    https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2016/08/free-online-book-keeping-software-for.html
    Boring Economics is Interesting - long rambling post about being a UK economics student during the 1980s recession - no link back
    https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/10/boring-economics-teaching-is-interesting.html

    Choosing a UK business bank account - introduction

    "How do I choose a bank account for a tech startup in East London? I have no money." This question came-up somewhere and I had a go at answering:  A couple of other answers were "I have been refused". Maybe that refusal helps both sides. 
    Do you need a business overdraft? No. Do you need funding for assets? - Do you need a business name on a bank account? maybe not - Do you want to book-keeping aids to tag categories like costs and sales to pay tax? Yes. -  Merchant accounts and currency conversion - What government can do

    Do you need a business overdraft? No.



    You've read the news. You know the name Fred Goodwin. If you didn't work for him directly, selling dodgy banking products to avoid being sacked, you worked for him indirectly because your taxes bail-out his creations. Maybe you have dealt with firms that are crippled by dodgy banking products sold by the likes of Goodwin. Nobody needs the trouble of doing business with a UK bank.

    P2Pmoney.co.uk     has some better ideas for business borrowing. The one they like to promote is for established businesses on P2Pmoney.co.uk/compare/business.htm - not that it is a good one for lenders.

    I've read that Handelsbanken.co.uk and Aldermore.co.uk banks are un-typical if you really must get an overdraft, but working from home and spending nothing is a cheaper option. Handelsbanken are staff-owned, and use HSBC for their back-end software so the usual software could make sense of their statements for your accounts. The new Oaknorth Bank hope to lend to smaller businesses too.

    Business funding without funding


    Better still, keep a part-time day job until some money comes-in.

    If the business is a good one, money will come-in to re-invest and if not, not; a business plan may disagree but there is no need to agonise or pay money for more business plans.

    Porridge oats are under a pound a kilo as is pasta and some well-known root vegetables. If your new-found business partners are not amused at an offer to spli bulk packs of vegetables from Iceland, maybe they are not good at business. Unless they have some knowledge of value brands - that's another test.

    If you need to cover your own living costs while the business is small, you could try moving somewhere cheaper than Shoreditch like Ayreshire, County Durham, Bolton or Gwent where you will also find more available staff, but not probably not a day-job unless it is something you can do remotely.     hair clippers

    You could look-out for hair clippers like the picture on the right, and save the cost of haircuts. They come with a few clip-on things to cut at lengths an eighth of an inch apart, and you can get extra ones to cut up to an inch, which is called a number eight.

    You could look at builders and copy their style of clothes as well - some of them wear quick-dry clothes that dry on a hanger after washing in the sink.

    If your startup has anything to do with manufacturing, it would be good to be near the factories in your trade and save having to own loads of stock while it's on the boat from China. If it needs graduates in accountancy or computer science, you could experiment with Unistats to find clues about the areas with the cheapest graduate accountants or computer scientists. For accountants the areas are Colerane and Hull. If your business plans to sell stretch-fabric clothes, there is a factory in Gwent that makes them, in a postcode where Zoopla quotes 20% of the range housing sales under £50,000 and £500 a month an average rental price.   There is a list of factories like that on the new PantstoPoverty.org.uk web site. And in some postcodes it's worth trying to understand obscure government grants which don't apply in most areas and tend to be very specific. There is a map of postcodes in assisted areas.

    If your business plan says "spend a million pounds mainly on advertising a brand so we can sell our £30 T shirts before the competition", ask yourself: wouldn't people prefer to buy cheaper for lack of a million pound debt at the supplier? And when tech-hub startups move to Shoreditch they just put-up property prices and discourage the shoe wholesalers and bag factories that still survive there. If you have to move there, maybe you should sell shoes and bags from the wholesalers and factories in Shoreditch alongside your tech startup. The wholesalers sell blingey Italian shoes along Shoreditch high street.This guide to buying looks a bit complicated but everyone has their own style; you have to do a lot of work finding a supplier, and find out what they want to make in terms of what designs they are used to churning-out on their machines, what their minimums are for free set-up or free delivery, and what's a typical lead time. There was a childrens-wear sewing factory in Bentley Road off Balls Pond Road for example. They had no web site and were had to track-down, but if you wanted the quantities and products the wanted to make, they'd probably work-out a price and save you importing a container-load from China with a 3-month lead time. I think they were called Figgins and have moved to Essex; I don't know if they still want orders. Jumping back to tech startups, it might be cheaper to move to the welsh valleys or the north east for cheap housing when you go full-time, so you have lower costs and you don't crowd-out the firms already operating in Shoreditch.

    If you want a business loan for a small amount like £3,000, now that you have sourced your products from the UK and kept your day job part-time, you might try the loans available to lure the unwary into debt. There are lots of them. Cash transfer credit card offers are a good search, because balance transfer cards only allow you to transfer debt from another credit card, and it usually costs something like 2.4% via Paypal to take that credit limit out of the credit card account. Exceptions have cropped-up in the past, called "mule cards" apparently, but not very often as the Smiths lyric says.

    Credit cards for personal use try to make themselves hard to use for business. The statement data might be down-load-able to an accounts programme, but it will build-up a debt between the statement date and the date of the direct debt, and the columns will be presented in a bamboozling way. Some kind of accounts software is probably necessary to fight back. Or maybe a system of using two credit cards - one for the first two weeks of the month, paid-off in week four, and another for the second two weeks of the month, paid-off in week two. This is so much easier to write than to do in practice that I suggest software to keep track with the other idea as a sideline.

    Oh, an afterthought about cheap eating. It has to be fairly quick as well, if you are earning and possibly doing two jobs, so things like wholesale markets and grow-your-own don't really help, but there is a list of some cheap food shops at the end of another post about selling surplus food.
    Do you need a business overdraft? No. Do you need funding for assets? - Do you need a business name on a bank account? maybe not - Do you want to book-keeping aids to tag categories like costs and sales to pay tax? Yes. -  Merchant accounts and currency conversion - What government can do

    Do you need funding for assets?


    victorian machine sketched in black and whiteThis is an asset. You can see that it has scrap value and a possibly higher value as a second-hand machine, minus high transport costs and depending on the right market for sale at short notice. Like cars, but much more awkward with a narrower market and harder to move.

    If value can be demonstrated with photos and links to sites where such machines are traded, there is a good case to persuade people on a P2P funding site to finance your asset. Thinking of which, you should also buy your machines at the same places where your receiver would sell them, so you don't have to borrow so much money. This is a big deal and everyone has their own style.
    • Recession-people agonise for days and months about how to get things for next to nothing. They quite enjoy it, but it takes away time from other bits of the work. The process helps them understand the market for things relevant to their business, like the cost of repairs.
    • Boom people save days and months by buying things new on credit and earn the money back in time saved, or not, and they somehow expect creditors to go-along with this one-way bet in which everybody wins if things go well and the creditor looses if things go badly. Boom people tend to think that they have some niche market  like gastro-pub or super-soft matrass which allows an implausible mark-up.
    Sometimes conditions make recession people or boom people feel that they made the right decision, but I think the decision is bred-in from life experience and upbringing; reality doesn't change it and I don't know if boom people or recession people do better at business. You tend to find boom people on Crowdcube or Seedrs asking for another funding round; you tend not to find recession people; they are hidden at home or in cheap workspace. There's an article about some matress manufacturers who are just about in the middle - half way between recession people and boom people - and they seem to do OK. On the gross side, a company called Eve charges £500 per matrass, mainly for advertising on borrowed money. Another mattress manufacturer can sell a retail double for £50 £60 or £70 including VAT, and an ebay search for new double "matress made in" comes-up with similar prices.

    One piece of evidence is the number of stories of refugees doing well in business, often in Hackney or Leicester or inner-city areas and often by knowing how to do something in a smaller workshop, for smaller batch-sizes, and on a lower pay-scale than is normal in more established companies. Hugenots and Jews set the tradition. If you can find a Syrian refugee with factory experience making cotton or whatever else they do on Syria, you might be on to something. In any case, the workshop that can make things on a smaller scale than Ford or NASSA is quite likely in an inner city. Somewhere that council would like to demolish for car-parking and tech hubs, and move to an industrial estate a bus-ride away outside the ring road.

    Stock

    Making-it-up-as-you-go-along is a phrase we learn as children, and learn again in business to avoid the cost of stock finance.

    When making objects, it's good to be able to make top-ups and trials on the kitchen table while having a more efficient factory make batches of what sells. That keeps the factory happier and your stock cheaper to maintain, because you don't have a load of extreme sizes of a piece of clothing, hanging around, costing you credit. Buying from a wholesaler could be another option. Restaurant kitchens have intricate breakdowns of what is freezable or food, what is prepared before people order, and what is mixed-together and cooked on the day after the orders come-in, or maybe put on a buffet where people can see what's left as the food runs-out.

    Rent

    If you can't find a workshop to sell  anything at all like what you want, and still need an asset, then rent could be a problem as well. Ideally, you live somewhere with spare space like a farm or a place with a garage you can clear for your asset. This is unlikely in Shoreditch so there comes a point when your mum / flatmate / landlord / hostel / tent becomes full of the assets needed for heavy industry.

    You could google terms like "hackerspace" and "makerlab" looking for people who will let you store your asset or let you use theirs. Hackney is a hotbed for this. I have not joined any of these but can add a few early search results - http://openworkshopnetwork.com - http://www.hackspace.org.uk/ - https://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/open_dataset_of_uk_makerspaces_users_guide.pdf -
    https://maps.london.gov.uk/workspaces/

    You could, a last resort, you could try renting the cheapest space on Estates Gazette near Shoreditch, but that raises the problem of commuting to the darn place or leaving it empty when not needed, and of dealing with landlords. From a very little bit of experience,  I think London landlords will not get out of bed to pay-in a cheque for under £1,000 a month and some of them put every concievable unfair clause into the lease so you need to find a cheap virtual lawyer to check and try to get those clauses taken-out of the contract before you sign.

    Repairs

    If you have time, you should find out as much as you can about servicing the machines you have bought on ebay or apex auctions or for-sale co uk or whatever site. Otherwise you are asking lenders to fund a dealers' markup, which can't be sold if things go wrong. It's like something lost down the drain.

    IT and coms costs

    The lobbeys of concert halls and libraries are full, stuffed with people using free wifi. Whoever they are and whatever they are doing, some of them might be saving startup costs. On which point, Pete Foreman's PAYG tariffs guide is the best link on an otherwise rather vague page on this same blog about cheap used phones and pay as you go chips, which are another communications cost. The pay-as-you-go site sometimes lists options for a little free data roaming as well as low-tariff sim cards.
    It lists deals that change every year or two as well as more stable ones which I guess are the ones directly from Three or O2 classic.

    While thinking, you should sign-up with a free cashback site in case it happens to have cashback on something you would have bought anyway.

    A brand for increasing the price of T shirts

    If your asset is something like "a brand for increasing the price of T shirts", then it costs nothing to dream-up and might earn nothing if sold fast. This is why people tend to work in trades and professions and intellectual property; they hope to become self-employed without massive amounts of capital, rent, or staff, by living on their wits; they should not need funding. They should be able to do other things like doing a part-time day job and maybe sharing customers with others in the same position (I am going from T shirts to things like law and accountancy here but there is probably an equivalent for T shirts).

    There was a time when a brand like Clarks Shoes was worth more than expected and could be even more valuable if separated from expensive factories in the UK. That was a nieve time, and I hope that consumers are more savvy to the fact that the brand feels nice to wear because staff are paid a UK wage; another brand on a UK-made shoe should sell almost as well, while the famous brand on a Chinese shoe should sell much worse. I hope that's where the market is heading.
    Do you need a business overdraft? No. Do you need funding for assets? - Do you need a business name on a bank account? maybe not - Do you want to book-keeping aids to tag categories like costs and sales to pay tax? Yes. -  Merchant accounts and currency conversion - What government can do

    Do you need a business name on a bank account? - maybe not.


    I run an online shop selling nonleather footwear with a separate but personal-name account. A lot of bitcoin brokers do the same. I asked Bittylicious, the web site that works with bitcoin brokers, what personal accounts they recommended and was told that Santander is a favourite. My personal account is at another bank again, so there's no need to trouble one bank with a request for two similar but separate accounts. Separate bank accounts are required by common sense and minimum legal standards of tax reporting. I've never found banking a problem. If you set-up a face-to-face stall, then cash payments might be a problem and cheap cash sorting machines make it easier to bag and pay-in. Metrobank offers use of their machines free. If you want an account for vanishingly rare cheques made-out to your business name, then maybe someone with a business bank account can ask their bank to call it "trading as... x y and z" on the software. Once a customer has made the decision to pay them so-much-a-month, banks are less fussy about what's written on the name of the account. They might even write "trading as... x y and z" on the software title of your personal account, but their desire to get money for nothing might prevent them doing that and even prompt them to close your personal account.

    If your existing account allows you do download a spreadsheet of a years' transactions in midata format, that can be used to make account comparison web sites more accurate. TSB and Halifax came at the top of my lists, but Halifax prove a bit awkward for the overseas spending card I have with them so that leaves TSB.     https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-midata-vision-of-consumer-empowerment has the background and https://money.gocompare.com/currentaccounts/midata#/ does the comparison.

    If you limit your liability with a registered company, it's more usual to have a company account. You want people to know what they are dealing-with and that liablity is limited, just as they do. There is a work-around. Say your name is J Blogs (if that is your name - I don't know - but you don't have to say it aloud) you could have a company called J Blogs Ltd. That might help make things look cool to everyone, if you are using an account called "J Blogs". Maybe the bank will pay in cheques to "J Blogs" without the "Ltd", or more likely nobody will ever send you a cheque.

    The VAT system requires a bank account that any rebates can be paid-in to. "This must be an account held in the UK and the account name must match the business name you are registering with VAT", according to the guidance notes to the VAT1 registration form, on un-known authority and without detail about the closeness of "match". I emailed to ask, and got a helpful phone call a week later: "I can't say any more than what's in the handbook ... if we have to pay a company, then the bank account has to match the company name, and it's a company account then it would have 'ltd' as part of the name of the account". I guess that means it's worth a try calling a company J Blogs with a bank account called J Blogs. If there is an insurmountable problem worth more than the cost of a business bank account, then you can open one. Maybe in the future there will be a free business bank account available somewhere.

    You might expect a law that the account must be in a company name because there's law about letters emails and faxes, but not the name of the bank account. People here seem to have researched the subject and think the same. They and the staff of Companies House are sure that any law would be in the Companies Act, which you'd want to look at if you set-up a company. I think there are more general laws about not decieving people, and advisers like this accountant in brighton list some things to be guard against, somehow, if you look like the same thing as the limited company.
    1) Limited liability, maybe if a supplier doesn't update invoice information and calls you by the non-limited name. Then they can try to argue that they didn't know you were limited.
    2) Requests for extra information during a tax inspection of an inspector thinks it worth checking your personal accounts as well.
    3) Decisions about the rate of tax, if for some reason the company pays a lower tax than you do and HMRC think there's a false distinction.

    I don't know enough about tax to know what that situation would be, and the accountant's advice is to keep things simple-looking rather than have an account with "ltd" in the name in all cases.

    There's also a point made about grabbing money out of the account which gets interpreted later as something unexpected - a director's loan for example - which I don't understand, and applies whatever bank account you have.

    Update mid 2018 - Starling Bank now offer free accounts in a business name to smaller limited companies - I think the limit is something like ten staff and one director. The account looks as though it works on IoS and Android but probably not Windows. There is a free opening offer to other limited companies. Starling Bank works on MoneyDashboard for automatic categorising of expenses, although that program is aimed at private customers and doesn't do anything quite the way you want for business; there are probably accounts programs that work with Starling too.   Update mid 2017: Tide.co, Transferwise Borderless Bank Account, Bunq for Eurozone residents, and the more expensive Fire.com that has a £100 setup fee. Coconut hope to have accounts for limited companies in the future, after starting on freelancers.

    Tide.co costs 20p for most transactions in or out and includes a mastercard that can be used without charge. BACS inbound payments are a free exception, apparently, but as you have no control over whether banks use BACS or Faster Payments, that's not much help to know. Bank transfers to other currencies aren't yet available this July 2017, although rival Fire.com does offer them.

    There is a discussion on their comments page about when they might be able to accept HMRC refund payments such as VAT or whether there is any way of paying them in. The answer is yes.

    Just to be different, you share part of their Barclays bank account rather than having your own, but I imagine that you can pay-in cheques in your company name, and their logon page has a little bit of book-keeping software to categorise transactions built-in, so that's a good thing.    Transferwise
    Allows payments into its borderless bank account, but there is backlog of applicants and id-checking is slow. If you have a personal account and want to register again as a director of a business in the business name, the process stops on screen; the "save" button doesn't work. If another director does it, then the application goes OK if done from another browser.

    If you just need a business-name bank account for VAT refunds, maybe you could g
    When I first tried to sign-up it said
    Your GBP details
    Account Number
    1000xxxx
    UK Sort Code
    23-xx-xx
    Account Holder
    TW/J ROBERTSON
    Transferwise also has some odd terms in its agreement for European Economic Area applicans. None of these may use the bank account too obviously,

    1.3
    • (a) charities (unless they are established in Canada, European Economic Area (“EEA”), Switzerland, US or New Zealand);
    • (b) unregistered UK charities; or
    • (c) trusts (unless they are established in Canada, EEA or Switzerland).
    1.4  banary options, bitcoin and alternative currencies ... seeds and plants.
    1.5 You may only use your TransferWise Account Number (as we provided to you) to receive funds into your TransferWise Account for the following purposes:
    • (a) Receiving your own salary and/or wages;
    • (b) Receiving payouts from e-commerce and freelancer platforms;
    • (c) Receiving payments from family, friends or other people you know for personal purposes; or
    • (d) Receiving payments from your clients and other third parties for the purpose of business payments.
    1.6 You shall not use your TransferWise Account for the following purposes:
    • (a) receiving payouts or withdrawals from electronic money platforms/services/providers;
    • (b) receiving payouts from short term lenders; or
    • (c) setting up direct debits on your TransferWise Account.
    The "Can I pay by card?" page says yes for 1.7%  on a "business card", 0.3% on other sterling visa and mastercard, and 0% for debit cards. Similar slightly higher rates for euro.

    The pricing page mentions a 50p charge for transferring money to a UK bank account, or .6€ or US$1.30.  Inbound payments are the same unless made by debit card by the look of it. The page urls this summer 2017 are
    https://transferwise.com/borderless-account/
    https://transferwise.com/terms-and-conditions
    https://transferwise.com/help/topics/99/questions/2736136/borderless-account-pricing-limits
    ...but I hope you will use     Transferwise to sign-up for the usual reasons.
    http://www.bankingtech.com/570702/uk-challenger-banks-whos-who-and-whats-their-tech/ is a list. You'd think that someone could do it on the cheap or take-over part of a bank that's pulling out of the market, like Airdriesavingsbank.com, but no. (Airdre tried to offer a bundle of face to face services to a shrinking, aging customer base near Airdrie in Scotland. They required new customers to come to Airdrie for a face to face interview. They were last heard-of promising a merger with TSB after a marathon history as an independent bank after they lost the will to live a year or so ago).
    A glance at fees this August 2017 suggests £1.50 per withdrawal but generally pretty cheap and geared to currency transfer, and accepting payments from overseas bank accounts. I didn't get to the bit about debit cards but there seems to be one.
    https://www.bunq.com/en/business offer free eurozone personal bank accounts by the look of it, to residents of the European Union, and €12 a year company accounts in Austria Germany and the Netherlands this July 2017..
    Business customers have to meet some conditions on here:
    https://together.bunq.com/topic/who-can-use-bunq : "...
    - You are an authorised representative of the company.
    - You have a personal bunq account
    - You have an active registration number from the Chamber of Commerce in The Netherlands, a Handelregisternummer in Germany or a Firmenbucheintragung in Austria.
    - Less than 50% of the entity gross income consists of passive income. "
    https://together.bunq.com/topic/how-do-i-open-a-business-account-with-bunq_1
    " We also assess companies based on the risk profile, and can thus decide whether or not a company can open a business account based on certain characteristics (activities, shareholders, etc.). "


    https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk business instant access deposit account
    £5 a cheque but free online banking. So if you needed a cheque, which is unlikely, you could transfer money some other private account that offers a cheque book.   The spec. is a long piece of stuff that reads like the script of a childrens' TV program and doesn't get to the nitty-gritty. Or maybe something from a housing association. Does online banking include online payments to suppliers, or just something that "deposit account" implies, like transfer to another metrobank account? Could they change it at a whim with a bit of annoying language? You'd have to ask them, but the account could be good. It also pays just enough interest to cause extra book-keeping without being enough to buy a cup of tea to drink while you are doing the books.

    https://moneyfacts.co.uk/business/business-prepaid-cards/ includes cashplus, which sells itself as an alternative to a business bank account, able to work in a company name for invoices and mastercard payments or tax rebates, so long as you don't need to pay-in a paper cheque. It comes-up on the same searches as Tide.co and Transferwise Borderless Bank account. The fee turns out to be "    Card issue fee £69.00" in very small print on the back of the online statement, with a footnote "payable annually therafter".
    Business Account Finder - British Bankers Association is the link for comparing accounts in a business name. There used to be some "free forever" ones at RBS, Santander and HBOS, but after reading the first 21 pages of a moneysavingexpert thread I see that each bank withdrew their offer and they now charge £5.50-£7.50ish a month, sometimes with free extra automated transactions if you don't use any manual ones. Business Account Finder does not sort accounts for the cheapest standing charge, so you have to look at every single entry to find a free one and then check the bank's web site to see if the thing is still free.

    I have some hopes of an online-only Metrobank account but haven't checked yet.

    One user on moneysavingexpert suggested Cumberland Building Society's Business Bank Account - at the time they had a free offer to locals. There is still a free offer for schools on their web site, otherwise a calculator to work out monthly charges charging options for cash or electronic businesses with slightly different charges plus five or three pounds a month. "    If you are looking to discuss a current account outside of the Society’s operating area, please call our Customer Service Team on 01228 403141".

    Another money saving expert suggested Carter Allen who "traditionally have offered free banking to IT contractors, however you would now need to be recommeneded by an intermediary". A third mentioned ICCI who have a business account that seems to have no monthly fees but is geared to import / export companies and doesn't have much clarity attached about whether someone like a plumber in the UK can use it. There is a long PDF application form that asks for a solicitor or accountant to witness one or two things, and asks your existing turnover in thousands. It also asks you to repeat various names as directors, people of significant financial control, and so-on. All on a form that converts numbers into currency by mistake. I decided after a while that this free bank account wasn't available to me, but you may have better luck.

    Company Formation


    If your business registers as a limited company, there is a list of company formation agents that are sometimes cheaper than Companies House's own £13 charge and sometimes have cashback offers at banks. http://www.planwriter.co.uk/company-formation-agent.php has one or two, that turn-out not to exist any more on search engines, but if you search every now and then for a day or two then good offers come-up on the bing and google ads. If you search Companies House web pages for "company formation agents and secretarial agents", they have a full list of people hooked-up to their software. The most expensive was over £500; no cheaper ones emerged. If you have time to shop around, a better use of it is to use bing and google for a few minutes a day over a day or two. After a while, offers appear in the paid-for ads - my cheapest turned up on Bing, quoting £5 at The Formations Company.

    Bundled legal insurance and business banking with Co-Op and FSB

    If your business is large enough to employ staff, it might benefit from the bundle of services including a Co-Op business bank account (usually £5 a month after the first 18 months) from Federation of Small Businesses, who have a minimum charge that rises with turnover. You have to ring them to find out the charge. This bunch called Business Banking Insight phoned to do a business banking user survey, which didn't quite fit reality because if you have an own-name account and don't use business banking services, it's hard to rate your business banking services out of ten. People who actively chose their business bank and use it tend to give high scores. Whores bank is top of the list.
    Do you need a business overdraft? No. Do you need funding for assets? - Do you need a business name on a bank account? maybe not - Do you want to book-keeping aids to tag categories like costs and sales to pay tax? Yes. -  Merchant accounts and currency conversion - What government can do

    Do you want book-keeping aids tagging categories like costs & sales to pay tax? Yes.

    Online accounts software probably appeals to a low-budget tech startup more. It's easier to share with an accountant if you need to pay for help, or with colleagues if you aren't renting an office or working near each other. This link is to a separate post, just about free online accounts software. Isn't that good?

    Thanks for paying tax. You help pay for my government services.
    The bank statement is the most accurate and automated book-keeping aid for tax payers.

    https://www.gov.uk/simpler-income-tax-cash-basis suits small business

    If your turnover crosses the gov.uk/vat-registration-thresholds you have to do
    https://www.gov.uk/vat-record-keeping

    You need to download the bank statement each month (1507.xls as a file name for month seven in 2015 for example) and tag each line to a category before you forget what that mystery paypal payment was.

    Bank software often downloads bank statements in particular flavours of an un-documented format called .qif - Quicken Interchange Format - which is best avoided. Download a file in every other available format in case one such as .pdf or .csv has detail which another lacks.

    You also need one credit card per type of transaction paid with a credit card, such as one credit card for delivery costs and one for travel. Otherwise you need to account for each line of the credit card statements as well, and how they interact with the bank statement, which is fiddly work for no benefit. Look on moneysavingexpert for cashback visa and mastercards in personal names that might give you .5% cashback and up to one months' credit. These need have nothing to do with the business bank account except being set to withdraw the full balance from it each month by direct debit. If you try to include their statements in your accounting systems you'll discover gotchas to discourage business use, like the direct debit day being different from the statement day, but if you keep one card per type of transaction such as one for travel and one for postage, you don't need to worry so much about their statements.

    Barclays private accounts do allow some categorization on their online bank statements. Co-op / Smile used to be hard to download; you needed to cut and paste or trust waveaps to do it for you (see below) but most accounts now let you download a .csv file each month.

    Talking of accounting, a free spreadsheet for keeping track of each line of account is useful.
    Different software and different accounts programs go together better or worse.
    Specialised ones will recognise regular transactions. Extra-good ones will track enough for you to do a VAT return, which I've never done. There are free ones for your hard disc here and there. I once tried Acemoney which is free for a single bank account and nicely designed for PC or Mac; programs like Quicken that I used for a few years were a pain with their closed-source file formats designed to keep you loyal and their "sunset policy" to try to force you to buy more of their software every-time the sun sets. Grisbi Gnucash & Turbocash were a bit compicated for what I needed, but entirely open source and free.

    Waveaps is one of the few free online accounting programs on the tech radar list to have kept going for a few years, and it can scrape data from a large number of bank accounts. It states that it's working on systems to double-check data for errors caused by changes of format on online bank statements. Update - Pandle has a long-term free version too, without an automatic bank feed but with more carefully--expert-checked systems for UK VAT records. It's online like Waveapps and the bank feed costgs £5 a month with a few other bonus extras

    https://mybrightbook.com/ is another free online accounting app that has kept going for a few years. It accepts bank statement files as .ofx or .qif with a special converter for Co-op files. 

    Quickfile.co.uk, the online service, is the free accounts software that I use. Quickfile now charges £50 if you have more than 1000 transactions a year. The average is calculated each month, like VAT. That compares to zero for free software on your hard disc, zero for Waveapps, and zero for Brightbooks.

    When I used to use Quickfile I discovered this. It likes to set-up accounts for money invoiced and not yet paid or received; you have to try to stop it doing that or things get complicated. It also helps if you have pretend customers like "paypal", and "merchant account", to save electronic accounting of those accounts, and to have pretend suppliers like "office stuff", rather than build-up a list of every stationary shop you've ever used your debit card at. VAT accounting might complicate things a bit.

    Lastly, Quickfile will automatically download statements from one or two of the major UK banks: Barclays, Lloyds TSB Business Banking, HSBC Business Banking, Natwest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander Business Banking. These are done through their own Chrome browser plug-in.

    That list of banks is worth checking-out, because it saves you downloading and up-loading the data from your bank to quickfile each month. If you do, most banks and probably all business banks let you download the data manually, while more of them let you keep a copy via Waveapps. These are formats for uploading to quickfile: Excel (csv), Microsoft Money (ofx), Quickbooks (qbo), Quicken (qif), Text file (txt) - Santander only - Santander personal accounts provide this
    Do you need a business overdraft? No. Do you need funding for assets? - Do you need a business name on a bank account? maybe not - Do you want to book-keeping aids to tag categories like costs and sales to pay tax? Yes. -  Merchant accounts and currency conversion - What government can do

    Do you need an accountant? I don't have one.

    I don't know why people have accountants. Likely reasons include statutory account-signing for limited liability on a larger turnover, tax advice, spotting mistakes before the tax office, and out-sourcing of office work that is so routine that accountants know how to automate it.

    On the other hand, Waveapps is free and does a lot of the book-keeping work except payroll. [update: Waveapps stopped automated European bank data upload in September 2019, because of the hassle of transferring to the new open bank data system, and say they will not work with UK government's Making Tax Digital requirements, both because their income comes from america and they don't want to spend time on customers in Europe. Open Banking sounds cheap to go-along-with but anyway it's up to them]

    I've just come back with a meeting at Tax Assist who charge from £1295 per year for business accounts. This Guardian article suggests that a lot of people get deals around £10+VAT a month if paid annually, for one-person income tax returns under the VAT threshold, which could be good value for someone who's earning a lot and doesn't have a lot of time. Search "cheapest accountants" on Google or Bing to find H & Co at the same price - £8.34 a month + VAT minimum price for income tax.. This is H&C's price list, that's published with a hefty referral fee after each item.

    Limited Company Accounts
    £1,000

    Sole Trader Accounts
    £200

    Contractors and Taxi Drivers (Under 12k PA)
    £150

    Contractors and Taxi Drivers (Up to 50k PA)
    £200

    Similar searches come-up with the same kind of price, but presumably the name of the accounts package ought to be part of the search if you want someone who can log-on and get the gist quickly. Not much comes-up under "cheap accountant waveapps". Wave's own advert pages ought to be a place to look - specially in areas of high accountancy graduate unemployment like Hull and Coleraine, but the results are more restrained and often out of date.

    I have another blog post called "star courses" that says something about finding cheap accountancy graduates from Unistats data about their earnings, and don't know why the two findings don't match. I would expect to see people from Coleraine and Hull advertising on the pages of Waveapps and on Gumtree to offer themselves as book keepers and accountants, but that doesn't much happen. There is one cheap accountancy firm in Hull advertising on Waveapps. It could be that I am searching for the wrong things; one review site says that Waveapps is no good for VAT, so maybe the cheap accountants are busy on another piece of software.

    Merchant accounts and currency conversion. 

    Outfits like Paypal are a good start until you have some turnover. There is a new one for direct debits called Gocardless.co.uk which has one or two others working alongside for small commission between them. Whichever route you choose the charge to you is 1% 
    Stripe are a good bet for card conversion. Before them I used Elavon Merchant Services who, towards the end, offered a web service with no need to hire a terminal. Apparently this is called the mobile pay-as-you-go version and they tell me that I now pay as much for it as I do for Paypal on some cards - the fees are broken down by card with debit cards cheapest. Worldpay has just emailed to say that they offer pay-as-you-go prices as well. I don't know if they have a deal that lets you use a web logon to their mobile version and save the price of terminal, or not, but that's what I do with Elavon. A thid provider cropped-up when I told Wave Apps that I had a limited company. Their online offer to Stripe suddenly got cheaper, with the headline rate at 1.4% but higher rates for overseas cards and no cheap rate for debit cards, so it is more expensive than the 1.4% figure first looks.

    I don't know a site to publish prices given for card processing, but under 2% for credit cards is respectable, plus an amount for each transaction, and usually plus £15 a month for a terminal. There's a growing market in smartphone payment systems from the likes of SumUp, but they all assume you want to pay more than 2%, often plus a monthly payment, which personally I do not want to do. I want to sell UK-made goods on a lowish margin, and pay a little tax. I do not want to sell Chinese goods on a huge margin and not care how much paypal take, if there's a choice.

    If you can get customers to pay by bank transfer, that's free to most accounts but don't advertise bank details if it's easy for people to set-up fraudulent direct debits. They appear on your account with plausible names like "£30 National Trust" or "£29.45 Virgin Media", and you have to contact your bank to cancel them straight away. Usually you get your money back.

    Currency conversion. The P2P outfits Transferwise or Currencyfair will do a better job than any bank. Thomas Running's blog post about banking for nomads lists one or two "bank accounts for international travellers and nomads", excluding the UK's Ivobank which survived a year before it closed, but others may last longer. LHV Bank of Lithuania looked likely to offer a free euro account but needed an id.ee proof of identity, which costs just over €100. Then I discovered I was wrong, after buying the id but that was my fault.

    For import and export companies, a new outfit called something like B2B Euro Account offer a minimal euro account with next to no fees except 1% currency conversion - I don't know if it's useful to anyone but found it by accident.
    Good luck
    Do you need a business overdraft? No. Do you need funding for assets? - Do you need a business name on a bank account? maybe not - Do you want to book-keeping aids to tag categories like costs and sales to pay tax? Yes. -  Merchant accounts and currency conversion - What government can do

    What government can do

    This is mainly for businesses that make things or buy from businesses that make things.


    The Planning Act requires us not to do anything commercial in
    residential zones unless we have been doing it since 1964, This
    under-estimates the advantages to residential areas of seeing
    people at work and having a variety of people about. The act is
    less enforced than it might be; work at home is tolerated. But
    landlords can still put clauses in their tenancies to say that
    you should not run an alkaline works in your bedsit, or something
    like that, which makes things harder for tenants, ant it's hard
    for people with neighbours who complain about smelting or tyre
    recycling or perfectly useful things on their doorstep.

    A second problem is that businesses cannot find each other. Government
    has information about who pays taxes for what, whether companies
    or sole traders registered for VAT. Government doesn't find any
    way to get this information for free into trade directories so
    that someone who wants twelve pairs of shoes made in the UK, or
    a special widget, can't get it done in the UK. At the moment the
    Revenue and Customs Act forbids this kind of tax information being
    used for any other purpose - even tp answer freedom of infomation
    requests or go in something like Kompass Directory. The answer
    is to release it next to each company on the Companies House web
    site.

    A third problem is that something can be made in China, without
    the costs of a welfare state, and shipped to the UK practically
    free under an International Postal Union treaty that's meant to
    help developing countries, apparently. When the goods come-in,
    there is no way that anyone can check each envelope for VAT liability.
    These goods compete with goods sold in shops that have to pay
    VAT, rent, rates, insurance, and employ staff. There is no way
    that shops with these costs can compete with online imports that
    don't. You can't even compete on ebay if you try to sell the same
    thing second hand: your postage costs are too high. The answer
    is to have postage from China set at the commercial rate, plus
    a tax to reflect the lower costs of Chinese production that come
    from unfair competition; from the lack of democracy or a welfare
    state that are expensive.


    A fourth problem sounds a bit like the first one. Government often
    subsidises imports, sometimes, to reduce prices and inflation,
    and shouldn't do it in future.

    It's called Monetary Policy, it's managed by the Bank of England,
    and it works by government paying a higher rate of interest than
    it needs to do on government debt. So we all pay a bit more, overseas
    investors buy pounds to lend, and the value of pounds goes up.
    That makes it unfairly difficult for people to make things in
    the UK and compete with imports or when selling abroad. So: economists
    need to come-up with a better system for reducing inflation and
    admit that the previous one was not ideal if you live in the north
    of England or Wales or Scotland or you want to work in manufacturing.
    Nobody has ever apologised for this policy that closed a fifth
    of manufacturing in the five years after 1979 leaving a quarter
    of the workforce unemployed, sick, or on government schemes. According
    to economists and newspapers it was a success.


    Magenta 14's guide to security, from a post on Rebuildingsociety, posted here so that I have somewhere to read it more carefully - I haven't really got the hang. Rebuildingsociety now publish a guide to borrowers and lenders about security, linked straight from their front page.

    Magenta14: A wee guide to Security for reference.

    • magenta14
      May 8, 2016 at 14:39 Hi all,
      When I 1st joined ReBS in late February 2014 I found myself bewildered by the types of Guarantees, or combinations thereof, offered to secure my family’s funds. Like many perhaps it’s a rapid learning curve resulting in my largest single Default £400 + sustained in 2014. 18 months on those funds with Mowbray & Son’s are still outstanding. [Please take a wee look at that loan site for information on the work recoveries have done on behalf of myself and other Lenders...

      Though oft times a very tricky task to decide who to lend to so to help you make up your minds if you wish to lend then here's a guide to the Guarantee's to help you reduce your risk and give you a better chance of getting a little, some, some more. Or all of your funds back in the event of a default.
      Lending can be a seriously risky business so [when NOT if a 'marital breakdown' occurs make sure you are using the best protection to secure your assets.
      Happy reading and take care,
      James.

      A] Personal Guarantee.

      Note: Very Commonly offered to ‘protect’ a loan here at ReBS…You may wish to consider how financially secure the person[s] are when this level of protection is offered to protect your funds, would they be able to meet their obligations in the event of a Default.

      Is the Business Owner capable, really know their market, is their Business model built on a strong foundation.

      Definition – What does Personal Guarantee mean?

      A personal guarantee is an arrangement that is signed and verified by a borrower, or a third party, in order to accept the liability for one’s own or a third party’s obligations or funds payable. The lender, or the first party, that takes this guarantee from the borrower, or a third party acting on the borrower’s behalf, can attach the guarantor’s personal assets in case the borrower fails to repay the debt or fails to meet any of the obligations covered by the guarantee. The personal guarantee is significant because it acts as a signed blank check. If the borrower defaults on a payment, the lender is directly eligible for the named property or asset without being required to attempt to recover the payment from the borrower. This guarantee is the basis of lending to startups in the absence of collaterals.

      Divestopedia explains Personal Guarantee:
      When a firm wishes to borrow funds, a personal guarantee signed by the owners or promoters as well as a third person, in some cases, may be insisted upon by the lender. This is especially true for a startup. This guarantee is demanded in order to reduce the risk of a loan default. Many firms have a limited liability status, in which case the partners and shareholders have a very nominal liability. In such cases, the assets of the firm are pledged for a loan, and a personal guarantee, signed by the owners or directors, is the backup for a larger quantum of borrowing. If there is a personal guarantee given by a third party or the partners or directors of the firm, the personal assets of the guarantors can be attached immediately, which ensures the quick recovery of debts and other obligations, without even seeking recovery from the original borrowing firm. Normally, liquidating assets and recovering cash is a lengthy and complicated process, and a personal guarantee provides additional convenience to lenders. From the borrower’s point of view, personal guarantee is not the preferred option. Instead of signing a personal guarantee, a pledging of some specific assets as collateral can be considered by the borrower, in which case the borrower may save some of his or her assets and spousal assets, in case the loan is not repaid in time.

      A.1] What is Personal Guarantee Insurance?

      Here’s a link to follow to provide a wee guide on this product, hope it helps?
      http://www.begbies-traynorgroup.com/articles/director-advice/what-is-personal-guarantee-insurance .

      B] Corporate Guarantee

      Note: Certain Lenders at ReBS actively seek to secure this type of guarantee because of the enhanced protection it affords to their own and other peoples Lent Funds.

      Definition of “Corporate Guarantee”:
      A Corporate Guarantee is a guarantee in which a corporation agrees to be held responsible for completing the duties and obligations of a debtor to a lender, in the event that the debtor fails to fulfill the terms of the debtor-lender contract. Also known as a corporate guaranty.

      C] Cross Guarantee:

      Note: Certain Lenders at ReBS actively seek to secure this type of guarantee because of the enhanced protection it affords to their own and other peoples Lent Funds.

      Definition – What does Cross Guarantee mean?:

      A cross guarantee is an arrangement between two or more related firms to provide reciprocal guarantees for each other’s liabilities, fulfillment of promises, or obligations. This guarantee is agreed upon among related companies, such as groups of companies or a parent company and subsidiaries and affiliates. A creditor of any one firm of the group becomes the creditor of every other firm of the group.

      It is significant because the contractual promise reduces the risk of the lenders, thus enabling borrowers to negotiate for a better deal. Cross guarantee may be beneficial to borrower with respect to better interest rates, tenure of repayment, and/ or quantum of loan.

      Divestopedia explains Cross Guarantee:
      The place where cross guarantees become cross border guarantees might invite scrutiny of regulators of different countries. Cross guarantees must be disclosed under contingent liability, along with lawsuits and warranties with the balance sheets. Sometimes implicit cross guarantee may be implied merely by the passive association of a firm with a firm of global or regional reputation, and a higher credit rating may result from this situation.
      While drafting the guarantee agreement, it is customary to include a clause of indemnity to give additional advantage to the lender. In such cases, the courts may favor the lender by interpreting the agreement as an indemnity bond, which makes it unfavorable from the guarantor’s point of view. The capacity to give cross guarantee should be based on the article of association of the firms. If the directors are the beneficiaries of the guarantee, then the shareholders approval may be required. The lender can enforce a guarantee even if the security of principal borrowers’ assets is held by him.

      D] First Charge [Exceptionally rare here at ReBS].

      Note: Affords Lenders a high degree of protection in return for receiving a very favourable loan rate.
      A legal right under which the owner of the first charge has the right to decide on what to do with a property if the borrower fails to maintain the repayments i.e. the mortgage lender will in most cases hold the first charge on a property until the mortgage is fully repaid.

      E] What is a ‘Second Charge’? [Commonly offered at ReBS].

      Note: You wish to look for a high equity value in the Property or Properties being offered as 2nd charge security because in a default situation the 1st charge holder may choose to sell the Property below market value Just to recover their own funds. Please consider that the 1st charge holder is under no obligation to protect the interests of the 2nd charge holder.
      A Second Charge is a legal charge put on a property in favour of a lender, or creditor. A Second Charge comes second in line to a ‘First Charge’, which would normally be your mortgage.
      When the property gets sold, the First Charge – i.e. the mortgage, will be cleared in full before the Second Charge receives any money. The Second Charge would then be in line to receive funds from the sale, up to the full outstanding balance of the Second Charge.
      Any funds remaining from the sale at this point would be passed to the seller.
      In closing:
      For those of you like me who may struggle with all the various security types offered to you by prospective Borrowers at ReBS I have spent some time today seeking out the definitions that have been presented in the clearest English rather than something more complicated.
      [Life's too short, keep it simple, keep safe].
      Hope you find the information helpful, please feel free to retain for future reference.
      With Best regards, James.
      Vote This Post DownVote This Post Up (+4 rating, 4 votes)
      magenta14
      May 8, 2016 at 23:42

      F] Debentures:

      Note: A strong form of lender Security provided the assets covered by the Debenture are Really worth something under an auction or ‘Fire Sale’ situation following on from a Company Insolvency.
      Some fellow Members will check to see what’s covered [Captured] by the Debenture [to work out it's value] Before lending their funds.

      When lending money to a company (or indeed a limited liability partnership), lenders want to ensure that their interests are protected as securely as possible. Debentures are a common method of obtaining security, under which a lender is typically granted both fixed and floating charges over all of a company’s assets and undertakings.

      With their combination of fixed and floating charges, debentures are intended to meet the need of companies for increased working capital by allowing additional borrowing secured on the circulating assets of a trading business. A debenture is widely accepted as a necessity for many corporate lending arrangements, in particular where there is not enough security over property alone for the lender to feel comfortable.

      The key distinction between a fixed and floating charge is that a lender has control of the assets subject to a fixed charge, whereas the borrower retains control over those assets subject to a floating charge.

      Fixed charges are typically granted by a borrower over assets such as freehold and leasehold properties, and fixtures such as plant and machinery if these are owned by the borrower. Fixed charges can also be granted over book debts, uncalled capital, goodwill and shares.A debenture will also typically include floating charges over present and future move able assets such as stock and unsecured fixtures. Floating charges are less attractive to a lender than fixed charges as they rank behind preferential creditors and certain other creditors in the event of a default by a borrower. The borrower is also able to deal with the assets subject to the charge in the ordinary course of business, by selling stock for example, without obtaining the lender’s consent, subject to any restrictions to the contrary in the debenture itself. Bank debentures are normally expressed to be “all monies” debentures: that is to say, they secure not only existing loans but all present and future loan advances. The all-encompassing nature of debentures makes them an attractive form of security for lenders, but equally unattractive to borrowers.
      Unfortunately for the borrower, in the event of a default, the lender has the right to appoint an administrator or administrative receiver to realise any assets subject to a fixed charge, and will be paid out of the proceeds in preference to other creditors. In such circumstances the lender would normally gain control over the assets which were subject to floating charges, which would crystallise to become fixed charges, leaving the borrower unable to deal with the assets in the ordinary course of business.

      In order to be enforceable, security under a debenture needs to be perfected. This involves registering the debenture document at Companies House, and may also involve obtaining prior consent by giving notice of the security interests to third parties and the registration of the security interest in other public registers such as the Land Registry.
      [Life's too short, keep it simple, keep your assets safe].
      Best regards, James.

      Bad economics degrees

      International Student Course Satisfaction
      Table of feedback scores for the economics degrees for the universities that take most international students. Most of the courses are at the bottom of the league table for student feedback, but presumably make most money because non-EU fees tend to be double EU fees.

      Blog on a single page
      the author sells vegan shoes online at Veganline.com      , a UK online vegan shoe shop. Many of them are UK-made or European-made.

      O      h I've just done a post about Keele Uni Economics teaching in the early 80s which was so bad it becomes interesting to know how bad an economics course can be. One reason seems to the that the McGraw Hill Company publishes stuff like lesson plans and lecture notes to anyone to use while teaching from the textbook, so if as a teacher you make some excuse to cancel the more interesting bits of the course

      By the way I have just done a blog post about Lord Sewell, who seems to have done nothing wrong except stating that his colleagues earn £300 a day for turning-up and dong F-all, which everybody knows but his colleagues don't want published in The Sun
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