The unglamorous operating system

The operating system of a young UK business is boring on purpose. Money has one door. Work has a scope. Risk has an insurance policy that matches the thing you actually do. Customers know how to complain, return, or cancel. Anyone you pay knows whether they are staff. If those five sentences are true, you can survive a busy month. If they are not, a busy month is how the wheels come off.

One door for the money

Open an account that is used only for the trade, even while you are a sole trader and the law does not force the separation the way it does for a company. Every sale in. Every material, fee, and stall payment out. Pay yourself by transfer to your personal account, on a date you can remember, and write the word "drawings" or "wages" in the reference so future-you is not an archaeologist. Companies must not treat the company account as a household purse. Sole traders who do it anyway make January miserable.

Reconcile weekly. Twenty minutes on Sunday beats a shoebox in April. If Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is in your future, the weekly habit is the part that hurts when it is missing. Software helps. A tidy spreadsheet is allowed to be the bridge if it is actually tidy and you know when the legal digital-record rules start to apply to you. See the dates in the structure essay and then check GOV.UK, because those dates have moved before.

A contract that knows what finished means

For services, a one-page agreement beats a handshake that both sides remember differently. Include the following and you will have avoided the ordinary disasters.

• Who is buying and who is selling, including the legal name if a company is involved.
• The deliverable, in concrete nouns. "Branding" is not concrete. "A wordmark, two colour options, and files for web and print" is closer.
• How many rounds of revision are included, and the fee for a further round.
• The timetable, and what happens if the client takes three weeks to reply.
• A deposit before you spend money or reserve dates you cannot resell.
• Who owns intellectual property, and when ownership passes. Usually: when the invoice is paid, not when the preview is emailed.
• A cancellation or kill fee.
• Whether you are selling to a consumer or to a business. The law is not the same.

Templates from another country smuggle in the wrong statute and the wrong court. If the job is large, ask a solicitor to look at your standard terms once. Reuse those terms. Do not renegotiate the entire law of England and Wales in the margins of every email.

Consumers get different rules

If you sell goods or services to consumers at a distance — a website, a phone order, an Instagram checkout — the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 will often give the customer a 14-day cooling-off period, with rules about what you must tell them and what happens if you do not. There are exceptions, including some goods made to a clear specification, some perishable goods, and some services if the customer has asked you to start within the cooling-off period and has acknowledged the effect on cancellation. "Often" and "some" are doing real work in that sentence. Read the exceptions against your actual product before you print a returns page that is either unlawfully mean or accidentally wider than you can afford.

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 sits underneath the quality of goods and services. Goods must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose, and as described. Digital content and services have their own sections. A cheerful caption does not contract out of this. Business-to-business sales are more willing to let the contract speak, which is another reason to know who is on the other side of the invoice.

Insurance that matches the work

Public liability covers injury or damage you cause to other people in the course of the work. It is what markets, kitchens, and shared studios often ask to see before they give you a key. Product liability matters if you make or sell physical goods that can harm someone. Professional indemnity matters if people rely on your advice, your design, or your specification. Employers' liability insurance is a legal requirement, with narrow exceptions, if you employ anyone in Great Britain. The penalty for failing to have it is not a stern blog post.

A policy bought because the premium was £9 a month and the questions were quick is not comfort if the activity you declared was "consulting" and the activity you do is hot fat in a borrowed kitchen. Answer the proposal form as if a claim handler will read it, because that is the genre.

The first person you pay

A friend who helps on Saturdays, uses your card reader, follows your methods, and cannot send a substitute is often an employee, whatever the WhatsApp chat says. Employees bring PAYE, a pension duties conversation, holiday pay, and that employers' liability policy. A genuine contractor has a business of their own, takes risk, and is not living inside your rota. Mislabeling the first to save National Insurance is an old mistake with modern data matching.

If the "contractor" is really you in a company, selling yourself to a larger client, you are in off-payroll territory rather than in a clever hiring structure. The structure essay touches that. Do not stack the two confusions.

Premises, landlords, and the home address

Trading from home can be entirely proper, and it can also breach a tenancy, a leasehold covenant, a mortgage condition, or planning rules once customers start visiting or the garage becomes a workshop with deliveries every morning. Read the tenancy before the first collection slot. Business rates can apply once you occupy non-domestic property. A market stall and a high-street unit are different kinds of commitment. The unit wants a deposit, a personal guarantee, and a forecast that survives February. Price that in the leap essay before you fall in love with a shopfront.

Data, in one short breath

Customer names, addresses, and order history are personal data. You need a reason to keep them, a way for people to ask what you hold, and a habit of not pasting the whole mailing list into a tool you do not understand. The ICO publishes guidance aimed at small organisations. Our own privacy policy describes this website, not your shop. If you start a mailing list, write your own notice. Do not copy ours and change the logo.

The one-page version

If you do nothing else this month, write a single page with six headings: offer, price, how money moves, what finished means, what insurance you hold, and who else touches the work. Pin it where you pack orders. When the page is embarrassing because a heading is blank, that blank is the next job. It is a better to-do list than another round of packaging photography.