7 Reasons to Choose Clarity365

Clarity365 is a cloud based business software management tool for your business. We have spent the last four years designing this with you in mind. The aim, to enable you to manage your business processes whenever you want, wherever you may be.

We have put together 7 reasons why you should choose Clarity365 business software.
To read the full article click here.

7 Business Expenses for the Self Employed

Small businesses and Sole Traders know how daunting Self Assessment Tax time can be. In this blog post we explain 7 Business Expenses that you can claim for if you are self employed. 

Read the full article on our Clarity365 blog here.

Case Study: Meet Dave

Meet Dave, a contractor from the Midlands. Travelling is part of Dave's job as he works all over the country. When it comes to filing his expenses he isn't the best and usually finds them scattered around his work van, clothing and even down the sofa. That was before Dave used Clarity365.

Since using the online business software he has saved £2,000 a year alone on expenses. Yes you heard it right. By using a trusty app whenever he is on the road, he can simply take a photo of his receipts and upload them to his account. He can even give his accountant access so that his financial records are all in order!

Want to know more? Read Dave's full story here.

Seven Step Process to Repeat Success

Seven Step Process to Repeat Success 

Creativity can be routinised, if you don’t believe that — see the coffee-induced brainstorming process Jony Ive, Steve Jobs and the Apple design team has used over the past 20 years giving birth to the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

An Italian designer on Jony Ive’s design team perfected Apple’s espresso ritual that bolsters their twice-weekly, 2 hour design meetings in their secure design studio in Apple’s Cupertino Campus.

“We can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare,” Ive has said.

“In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work.” — Jony Ive

If the Apple team is able to build a brainstorming “process” so meticulously that their espresso machine must drip for precisely 28 seconds or else the whole thing is for naught, then you can sure-as-hell build a process to perpetuate success around whatever you are doing.

A process should be built for anything that leads to success to perpetuate success. If it’s working, build a process for it. Improve upon that process — but define it first.

This is not a “how to be successful” process — that will come to everyone uniquely, this the process of how to take success and turn it into a perpetuated pattern.

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Defining your success — perpetuate it using systems.

The steps to defining your success are basically the most important of the whole operation. Essentially in this process you are defining what made you successful, then finding the patterns in that success — which will in turn perpetuate your success.

My example in these steps will pertain to blogging specifically, but could be applied to any situation — business, personal or what-have-you.

1. Define what made you successful — a voice (what you said), a perspective (how you said it).
2. Define why it made you successful — an audience (who you said it to), a medium (where you said it).
3. Analyze your content to notice patterns —  be meticulous, was your copy long-form? Was it short? Was it to the point? Was it entertaining? Was it clever? What made it tick?
4. Lay down core principles (establish your voice) —  style guidelines that you gathered from analyzing your content, create guidelines from what made your work successful. This will help establish your “voice” as a writer. Consistency will increase your following, create exposure and solidify a “brand” as it pertains to your content.
5. Define your future audience  — from defining what work made you successful you can establish who the audience was that you most deeply reached, and through that you can define what audience you will future go after. Perhaps you already have an idea of who you should go after if you have a business targeting a set group of people. Establishing “personas” will amplify any potential future success. Without a “core 1000" or a solidified target for your content, you will never reach anyone. It acts in waves that build to a snowball effect; when you target a certain group of people, a certain amount of people will react. When you have a solidified audience, you build upon that with more like-content, and they perpetuate your audience by sharing it (as it deeply connects with them). You will then reach a broader audience and can venture out into broader topics. You should always focus first on a very defined audience though.
6. Define future success —  how will you gauge success? Through social following? Through revenue? Through referrals? Through email-signups? This is crucial. If there is no measure of success there is nothing to work towards, thereby any “success” that you reach will be by utter chance. Defining a measure of success, while arbitrary, is pivotal to reaching success.
7. Plan goals based on your definition of future success — “I will write 4 posts a month targeted at freelancers with long-form copy that is informative, simplistic and insightful — with quotes from respected industry leaders to give examples. I hope to increase my following by 200 twitter followers in 2 months.” By reaching freelancers I will create more connections with people in my industry and help people improve at what I’m very passionate about. Be simple, yet descriptive with your goals. Make them count, don’t make them ridiculous but don’t make them vanilla either. It needs to be something seemingly out of reach but not beyond the scope of reason.

The TL;DR of this list is as follows:

1. Understand your current success
2. Understand what made you successful
3. Notice patterns in what made you successful
4. Create principles based on those patterns
5. Define your audience
6. Define your future success
7. Create goals and act towards your definition of future success

This is how you scale. This is how you perpetuate your success through the process of defining systems.

Again, this is not how to “be successful” that will come to everyone uniquely, this is the process of taking success and turning it into a pattern.

You (or your business) were a success for a reason, you don’t want to lose sight of that reason, you want to perpetuate it — to grow it, to define it, to take the guise off of it and let the world view it. This is essentially branding through your past success.

It’s building a brand off of your past-won battles and perpetuating it so that you will win every battle you face in the future. The one who loses in the end will be the one who didn’t define what made them successful to begin with.

For a real-world example, who better to guinea-pig than Apple? I already mentioned them once in this article, might as well go for it again:

Apple was initially successful because they made computers simple for the end user, while simultaneously giving a level of quality that was not present in their industry.

Have you Started Planning your Christmas Party?

Make sure it is just that, and not a reward!

Unlike entertaining customers, some of the costs of entertaining employees are generally allowable against business profits.

Generally speaking, as long as the total costs of your parties and other social functions, which you have attended in a tax year, are less than £150 (inclusive of VAT) per person attending, there will be no tax implications.

However, if the event is deemed to be a reward, bonus or incentive then employer would NOT be able to reclaim the VAT, and the employee will be liable for income tax as a benefit in kind.

Beat the tax man, by ensuring that everyone from the office invited to your Christmas party. Keep a good track of all the costs and ensure that they are below the HMRC threshold of £150 including VAT per person attending. This includes all the costs, i.e. room hire, meal, drinks, transport and accommodation.

Our Clarity365 project tracking functionality is perfect for tracking costs for each event. You can allocate all of the party costs and employee expenses, along with electronic copies of the receipts, so that you can demonstrate you are compliant with the HMRC Ruling. Helping you to enjoy the party without the risk of a tax hangover. ​

Tax Relief and Incentives for Business

Investing in Business has rapidly grown over the past years, particularly with the rise in cloud based business solutions and ideas.

Therefore there is a growing amount of diverse finance, as opposed to the traditional loan from the bank. Examples of this would be crowd funding and peer to peer lending.

Crowd funding has taken a huge rise as of late, everything from business propositions all the way to a very recent one where the Neath Community need to raise £11,000 so they can have their Christmas Lights switched on. In fact, thanks to Crowd Funding they have now raised £16,500 so it really does show an online support for new businesses and incentives whatever they may be!

The good news is that actually if your new business meets specific requirements then you may also be entitled to help with business rates or tax relief for research or development. This is all thanks to the wonderful people at Business is Great.

So why not check out their links and see what you could be entitled too today:

• Business rate reliefs

  An overview on which properties are eligible for discounts on their business rates, and how to apply for these reliefs
  

• Enterprise Zones

  There are currently 24 Enterprise Zones across the UK and they support new businesses through a range of incentives
  

• The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS)

  This aims to encourage investment in small and early stage companies by reducing the risk to investors of investing in these types of companies
  

• Employment Allowance

  Employers can reduce the amount of National Insurance contributions (NICs) they pay for their employees by up to £2,000.
  

• Annual Investment Allowance

  Currently stands at £500,000. How to claim, what is covered and how to calculate it
  

• Capital Allowances

  A tax relief designed to allow the cost of certain of your company or organisation's assets to be written off against its taxable profits
  

• Enterprise Investment Scheme

  Helps small companies raise finance by offering tax relief to investors who buy new shares in their companies. Check here to see if your business qualifies
  

• Venture Capital Trust (VCT) Scheme

  Designed to help smaller companies raise finance by offering a range of tax reliefs to investors who invest in VCTs, who in turn onward invest or lend to small and medium sized businesses
  

• Capital Gains Roll-over Relief

  You may be able to delay paying Capital Gains Tax if you either sell (‘dispose of’) some business assets or use all or part of the proceeds to buy new assets. This relief means you won’t pay any tax until you sell the new asset
  

• Research and development tax credits

  Small businesses can get 225 per cent tax relief on their research and development spending
  

• Patent Box

  Eenables companies to apply a lower rate of Corporation Tax to profits earned after 1 April 2013 from its patented inventions and certain other innovations.
  

• Social Investment Tax Relief

  This provides a range of income and capital gains tax reliefs which can be claimed by individual investors for investments they have made in social enterprises, with a view to helping people and communities. It is in place for investments made or capital gains arising in the period from 6 April 2014 to 5 April 2019
  

• Tax reliefs for the creative industries

  A group of five corporation tax reliefs that allow qualifying companies in the creative industries to claim a larger deduction, or in some circumstances claim a payable tax credit when calculating their taxable profits
  

• Entrepreneur's Relief

  When an entrepreneur sells or closes their business, they need only pay ten per cent Capital Gains Tax on any qualifying profits
  
  
  
  (source: http://www.greatbusiness.gov.uk/tax-relief-and-incentives-for-businesses-and-investors/)
  

Never Lose a Receipt Again with Clarity365