[John Kelly]

Mark, not sure if having the exact same name apart from limited on the end would be sensible. Not sure if its allowed. However my accountant has one business with his full name and the other just the initials.
We did this for years. The cost of equipment, office etc was just split proportionately between the two.

[jasonl]

Chem dry had us doing this for for a few years , some stll do it ,, run one franchise for commercial ,and another for domestic, in the end it was too much hassle , a few people got cayght and fined and hit with some big back tax bills.

[John Kelly]

As long as one is a limited company which is a totally seperate entity in its own right and the other is a sole trader its perfectly legal.

[Karen Waterworth]

As long as one is a limited company which is a totally seperate entity in its own right and the other is a sole trader its perfectly legal.

John is right but, to spell it out and be clear you needed to point out "seperate entity" = one of the businesses needs to be not carpet cleaning and or nothing that you can clean with the equipment you use for carpet cleaning. ie one of your businesses is car selling and the other is carpet cleaning.

[John Kelly]

No Karen, it can be. We did this for years. Our accountant does it and we checked with the inland revenue at the time.
A limited company is a wholly seperate beast and even though you may be the main shareholder in law you are only an employee of that company. That company has no bearing on any other business activities you undertake as a sole trader.

[Hilton]

Lets get this straight,

There is nothing illegal about legally trying to pay as little tax as possible.

If you split your business in to a hundred different entities then thats entirely up to you so long as you do not break any laws.

Big business and the wealthy do this all the time, they afford to pay the right people to take care of this for them.

The Chem-Dry example above is ridiculous and they should have been held to account not the franchisee if they have acted under instruction from the franchisor. Its obvious if you have one named business carrying out similar work that you can not split in into two as domestic and commercial.

As already mentioned, just go Ltd with one if its in the same industry or if you want to own and run twenty business's doing diffirent things then thats perfectly fine as well.

[Helen]

PS   I belong to the Fed of Small Businesses and their latest mag says that most businesses should steer clear of flat rate schemes as they pay over the odds in tax. You have to enter all receipts and invoices anyway so why not get as much back as possible?

trevor

With some industries that would be true, but within the cleaning industry where overheads etc etc can be kept to a minimum then the flat rate scheme is ok. Of course you have to take into account how close you are to the "full" vat threshold, as to whether you would benefit from either scheme.

[Helen]

No Karen, it can be. We did this for years. Our accountant does it and we checked with the inland revenue at the time.
A limited company is a wholly seperate beast and even though you may be the main shareholder in law you are only an employee of that company. That company has no bearing on any other business activities you undertake as a sole trader.

Hi John, you have worded this as if in the past. Do you still operate this way now. If so have you checked with thr IR lateley. Just wondering, cos if you are and did, then it would clear a lot of "grey" areas up for us

[John Kelly]

We don't do that now as we no longer do carpet cleaning. Have a read of this and do some searching on the net. What I have found is that customs have won some and lost some. Also they can only register you for vat from the date of the direction and not back date it.

http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/channelsPortalWebApp.portal?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=pageVAT_ShowContent&propertyType=document&id=HMCE_CL_000086