Going limited,
in the right order.

What order should you do it in?

1. 1

   Get the numbers checked first

   Have an accountant run your actual profits through both structures before anything is filed. Incorporating for a saving that turns out not to exist is an expensive way to acquire a filing calendar.

2. 2

   Incorporate at Companies House

   Choose the company name, appoint the director or directors, issue the shares and give a registered office address. It is an online filing with a small fee and usually completes within a day. A service address keeps your home address off the public register.

3. 3

   Open a bank account in the company's name

   This is not optional housekeeping. The company's money is legally not yours, and mixing the two is the most common mess an accountant has to untangle after incorporation.

4. 4

   Register the company for corporation tax

   Do this with HMRC within three months of starting to trade through the company. You will also need PAYE if you are taking a salary, and to consider VAT registration.

5. 5

   Deal with VAT

   The company is a new legal person, so it needs its own VAT registration. You can apply to transfer your existing VAT number using form VAT68 — which keeps the number but also transfers the registration's history, so take advice on whether you want that.

6. 6

   Move contracts, insurance and suppliers across

   Customer contracts, insurance, leases, trade accounts, domain and payment processor all need to name the company rather than you. Insurance in particular: a policy in your own name may not cover work done by the company.

7. 7

   Transfer the business assets to the company

   Tools, vehicles, equipment and any goodwill pass to the company at market value, which has capital gains and capital allowance consequences on both sides. Get this valued and documented rather than assumed.

8. 8

   Tell HMRC the sole trade has stopped

   Your sole trader business ceases on a particular date. You still file a final Self Assessment return covering trading up to that date, so keep those records exactly as before.

What happens to your UTR?

Your personal UTR stays yours. It is attached to you, not to the business, and you keep using it for Self Assessment for as long as you have to file one — which, as a director drawing dividends, will usually be every year.

The company gets its own separate UTR for corporation tax, issued after incorporation and sent to the registered office. Two numbers, two regimes, no overlap.

What actually transfers, and what does not?

What new obligations start on day one?

• —Annual accounts filed at Companies House, with a deadline tied to the company's year end.
• —A corporation tax return, and corporation tax paid within nine months and a day of the year end.
• —A confirmation statement every year, even when nothing has changed.
• —Real Time Information payroll submissions each time you run a salary through PAYE.
• —Your own Self Assessment return, now covering salary and dividends.
• —A statutory register of members, directors and people with significant control.

What do people get wrong?

The one that causes real damage is treating the company account as a personal one. Money taken out that is not salary, dividend or expense reimbursement is a director's loan, and an overdrawn director's loan account at year end carries its own tax charge. Entirely avoidable, and entirely common.

The second is declaring dividends without the profit to support them. Dividends can only be paid out of distributable profits, so paying one the company has not earned makes it unlawful and reclassifiable. This is where keeping the books current stops being administration and starts being protection.

The third is quiet: forgetting the filing dates. Companies House penalties escalate, and they arrive whether or not the company traded.

How does Bizzle handle the change?

The ledger carries across, so incorporation is a new entity rather than a new start — the sole trade closes cleanly with its final figures intact, and the company opens with the assets it actually received.

Company money and your money stay separated by the structure rather than by your memory: drawings, salary and dividends are recorded as what they are, so nothing quietly becomes a director's loan by accident.

Your accountant keeps their free login throughout, which matters most in the year you incorporate — the year with two sets of figures and the most ways to get it wrong.