Hi Jaclyn,

you seem to have your head screwed on about this (I can see that you're an avide reader of the posts on the site) so not a lot of advice to give.

#3 you say PPI but that should read PII. Once you have your practice licence from the ICB you can get cheap PII via their pet insurers Trafalgar.

There is one gem of a question buried in there. Can you charge membership and practice licence fee's to your business.

In your case, yes. But one has to be careful with that answer as the key is that you will have started your business and the fee's are wholly and necessarily incurred for the running of that business.

That is quite different to a situation where someone is retraining to bookkeeping in order to start a business or change direction of an existing business. Until they start offering their services on a commercial basis, memberships and training costs are not allowable expenses.

Oh, you missed that one out. Once you start your business then further training specific to that business (Payroll, Self Assessment, ICB level III) would be allowable expenses of the business as they are incurred wholly, exclusively and neccessarily as part of the business. (You are enhancing the service that you are allowed to offer as part of an existing business, you are not adding new unrelated services).

That would have also been the case with anyone who was AICB in practice when the ICB changed the rules and you had to pass an additional exam to keep your practice licence.

Considering the above, might be a good idea to hold off from signing up for any more exams until you are in practice.

I must admit that it does confuse me a little where one uses a training provider for an exam such as the ICB that doesn't require you to have a training provider. In that case one could argue that the training providers fee's are not neccessary and are therefore not allowabe. So would training providers fee's be allowable or just the study material and exam fee's? Interested to hear other peoples views on that.

Good luck with the new venture Jaclyn. Just one minor issue. I didn't think that you could become AICB until you have passed both the manual and computerised level II in which case your not going to be able to set you business up until you've (fingers crossed) passed that one at the end of June. Does that muck your plans with these clients up at all?

All the best,

Shaun.