Head Hunting is a revolutionary new way to recruit employees at a fraction of the cost of other methods such as recruitment agencies and big job sites. As a Facebook application, Head Hunting allows you to hire new employees with a little help from your friends.

This week the service has launched into “public beta”, which means anyone can post and search job listings for free.
Although the service has only launched in a beta release, these exciting features for recruiters are now available:

1. Post jobs on Head Hunting
2. Share your jobs on your profile (in a profile box or on a tab), your news feed, with friends, etc.
3. Receive questions about your jobs (and easily publish follow-up answers)
4. Get a birds eye view of everyone applying for your vacancies
5. Easily promote your listing on facebook, your blog or your website

Browsing for jobs using Head Hunting

If you’re looking for a new employee but don’t have the time, money or patience for recruitment agents, then list your job on Head Hunting today.

The beta period is expected to run for several months. Any questions should be directed to lee@crossbonesystems.com.

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I’ve blogged about various online accounting packages before, but if you want to keep track of your company’s finances, and make your VAT returns effortless, KashFlow is the way to go.

Disclaimer: I am a satisfied customer of KashFlow. The links to their site that feature in this article are “affiliate tagged” which will also grant you a £1/month discount off the price after your free trial.

Registration’s what you need

If you haven’t already, the first step is to register for VAT with HMRC. The KashFlow website has an article discussing the merits and I’ve blogged about some in the past. Once you are registered you then need to submit a VAT report after a month; it details how much you have paid in VAT (on purchases) and how much you have collected (on sales). After the first month, you then need to submit a return every quarter. There are various options/schemes for being VAT-registered; in this article I’m only dealing with the Standard Scheme.

Once you have your VAT registration details, sign in to KashFlow. (If you haven’t used it before, sign-up for a free no-obligation trial). Go to the ‘reports’ section and select the VAT report, then choose ‘VAT settings’. Verify that you have entered your VAT registration number, and that the settings match your company.

At the bottom of the page, there is a place to enter your HMRC website credentials so that KashFlow can communicate with HMRC on your behalf:

Enter your credentials, and click ‘Update’. Then go back to the reporting selection and open the VAT report again.

Basic report

Select the date period you need to report on, (HMRC will have sent you a letter or email requesting your report for a specific period), and click ‘re-run report’. (This assumes you have been using KashFlow to record payments and sales, otherwise the report will be empty!). KashFlow will generate a fully compliant VAT report for you that should look something like this:

If you were to go to the HMRC website yourself and attempt to file a VAT return, you would see that the form to complete looks almost identical to the report above. However, things are much easier than that - click ’submit VAT return’ and KashFlow will send your numbers to HMRC.

The return

HMRC generally respond quickly but not quite immediately. You can track your return in the VAT report area of KashFlow:

Once HMRC receive the data from KashFlow and process it, you will receive an email confirming your successful VAT return - congratulations! From this point, you need to make the actual payment, using any of the HMRC’s payment methods.

VAT is just one of the many accounting features that KashFlow makes clear and simple. As well as trivial creation of invoices, quotes, recording of purchases and reconciling your bank account, it removes the worry of back-ups and helps you analyse your business’s finances with ease.

As well as powerful reporting features, the service also includes a raft of helpers, (such as generating professional email reminders for customers that pay late), that genuinely make managing your corporate finances a doddle.

Sign-up for a completely free, no obligation trial today.

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Here are my five killer reasons why the iPhone 3G sucks.

iPhone ruins a bright summer day

1. Smile, sucker!

Apple really dropped the ball on the built-in camera with this phone. If you’ve ever had a Sony phone then the iPhone will make you feel like you’ve gone back in time a few years. The camera lens is poor, its white-balance settings are dreadful and there’s no light on the back never mind a flash.

Once you’ve turned the device on its side, ready to take a picture (like you would any normal camera), there’s not even a button in a convenient place to press to take a shot! You have to touch the screen, which will cause the device to physically move, blurring your shot, unless you’re holding the phone in some kind of vulcan death grip.

Even if you persevere with the above, when it comes time to get your photos onto your computer, get ready for some pain. When you plug the iPhone in, up pops iTunes as normal. However, just as you go to use iTunes, up pops iPhoto! This happens every time you connect the iPhone to your computer, regardless of whether you’ve taken any photos in the last year.

Oh, and you can’t record video or do video calling at all either. On your brand new top-of-the-range 3G phone.

To sum up: the camera sucks, the photo syncing sucks. Roll on iPhone 3.0, where they might actually build a decent camera into the most expensive camera-phone on the market.

2. Crash test dummies

Games work sometimes, crash some other times.

iPhone 3G makes Windows Mobile look stable, crashing all the livelong time. I’m still looking forward to the first full day of use where my iPhone doesn’t crash. I’m sure it’s coming, oh yes, any day now.

Before the nay-sayers start up with cries of “you suck, I bet you just downloaded crappy applications”, most of the crashes I’ve seen are when using built-in applications like email or contacts. The most common crashes occur when I’m trying to play the two most popular games for the device!

The lack of stability is a bit of a shock against other modern Apple products. And I’m not the only one that thinks so.

3. Sat nav? What sat nav?

I don't think TomTom will be shaking in their boots just yet.

You might expect a device that contains a GPS receiver to be pretty good at tracking where you are. Think again. While the iPhone does manage to trace your location (albeit pretty jerkily), it seems wholly incapable of correlating your position against any directions it gives you.

If you look at the picture on the left, you might reasonably assume I was in Luton. You could be 30 miles away, (half way to London) and iPhone still won’t update its instructions. It will continue to insist that you should turn left at the end of your road, even if you’re on a major motorway while it tracks your position on the map!

The above is almost a moot point because of the appalling lack of legal navigation features that the iPhone ships with. Despite its blindingly fast ability to route you from one end of a country to another, it outright refuses to speak. So don’t even think about using it as a navigator in a car unless you have a willing passenger to thump buttons every time you make a turn.

4. Chaaaaaaarge!

Hello old friends!

The battery life on the iPhone 3G is a shocker. I’ve grown accustomed to getting a slightly increased battery life every time I upgrade to a new phone. My first phone was a trusty Nokia 8210 that would work for a couple of days before needing a recharge. More recent Nokias gave rise to periods as long as a week between recharges. Last year new Sony phones even started to go well into a second week without needing a recharge!

Sadly, with the new iPhone you’re looking at having to charge it up daily or every other day. And that’s even when you have bluetooth switched off, the brightness set low, and rarely use wifi.

I kid you not. Charge it daily.

5. Lock up your daughter

iPhone's incredible lack of bluetooth features

It’s hard to know whether it’s Apple, the network provider or a grand conspiracy that prevents an iPhone user from using paid-for wireless network services on a laptop.

This is a case of device locking gone mad - you can’t use the bluetooth for anything really useful. The only way to use your unlimited 3G or EDGE data allowance on a laptop is to “jail break” your iPhone, putting you into the realm of hackers. I normally have no problem with fair-use restrictions if they can help guarantee everyone gets a decent price and a reasonable experience, but this is a lock-in too far.

On O2, the iPhone plans also come with so-called unlimited wifi access to The Cloud and BT Openzone. But don’t think you’ll be able to use BT Openzone on your laptop either! It’s strictly phones-only there. I don’t know how anyone at BT managed to approve the word “open” in that product name while keeping a straight face.

Reductio ad absurdum

All of the above can (and probably will) be fixed in upcoming versions of the iPhone. A couple of months of extra polish from Apple engineers could easily make all the difference to the user experience. You can probably expect truly great things from iPhone over the next few years.

Next month; “Why everyone should buy an iPhone.”

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Paul lists thirty different ways of thinking about start-up opportunities. I was relieved (and spurred on by the fact) that my own in-development project fits into at least one of the categories!

I was also pleased to see that most of the focus isn’t on blue-sky wacky concepts. It’s a much better idea to build and sell things that attack existing well-known problems or solutions by doing something subtley different or simply better.

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At the end of the tax year, (ie. 5th April), you must file a return that tells HMRC the breakdown of the income tax and NIC payments you have made throughout the previous year. HMRC need this information because tax and NI deductions are paid to them monthly throughout the year without any additional details about the breakdown. (See part 1 of this article for more information).

Fire up the CD-ROM *and* your web browser

The tools provided by HMRC are perfectly adequate and manageable for tracking tax, national insurance, and filing returns if you only have a few employees, (or if, as the company founder, you’re the sole employee). However, one thing to be aware of is that filing your return is much easier online, but keeping a record of deductions throughout the year (with a P11 calculator/database) is not currently possible with the free online PAYE services that HMRC provide.

With the newly provided CD-ROM (for the 2008-2009 tax year), it appears that you can now file returns directly from the CD-ROM. The reason I find this strange is that CD-ROMs are very nineteen-nineties, yet the automatic filing is a brand new feature on the CD-ROM. It’s unclear to me why they continue to support the CD-ROM given how much development investment they appear to be putting into the online services.

14 is a magic number

A quick bit of background, so you’re clearer on what the HMRC forms are actually asking you. You need to file a P14 per employee, and then file a single P35 for the whole company. The P14 declares how much tax and national insurance has been paid for that person, and the P35 forces you to declare that you have taken care of eveything else, such as filing any forms about benefits. You’ll only need to tell them about benefits if you’ve already set up a benefits package for your employees or if you’ve been claiming expenses that are counted as a “benefit in kind”. Be sure to check elsewhere (such as with your accountant) to check if any payments you’ve made need to be declared on form P11D, which records benefits paid to employees.

Now, on to the act of preparing the return. Sign in to online.hmrc.gov.uk and access the PAYE service. If you haven’t already registered, see my PAYE guide, part 1 It’s important to ensure you’re registered well before the annual deadline, which is usually May 19th.

Enter the data

Unfortunately there is no way to automatically upload your company and employee personal data from the CD-ROM database to the online services, so you’ll have to re-enter employee details, (see the image on the left).

Once all your employee data has been entered in the system, file a P14 for each employee. This requires you to enter numbers from the P11 calculator on your CD-ROM. Fire up your CD-ROM, or use a hardcopy if you have one to hand - the P14 form on the HMRC website asks you to enter the numbers from particular columns on the P11, so it’s quite easy. The Employer CD-ROM should be able to prepare this for you.

Turn to P35

If you are an IT contractor, beware of the question “Are you a service company?” As a startup offering several products and services I am able to safely answer “no”. However, if you solely provide your own time as an IT service, you may fall under the “service company” definition and be subject to several (non-beneficial) tax laws. Consult your accountant for a more definitive guide.

If you have never paid yourself any expenses then you can safely declare that you do not need to complete and return a P11D form.

All in all, the PAYE return process is reasonably straight-forward. It’s full of a lot of tax jargon that can be quite intimidating, and the process is no where near as simple as being VAT registered. However, if you only employ yourself or a few employees, it’s perfectly manageable to run the process using the techniques described above (and in part 1 of this article) without spending hours per month filing forms.

Disclaimer:- This article is provided as a guide only. No liability will be accepted for any action taken as a result of reading this information. If you are in any doubt about correctly filing a return, please contact your accountant.

Comments?

Are you already using an affordable and/or fancy all-in-one package that takes care of book-keeping, payroll and HMRC returns? Share the details with us, below.

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The Midas Touch

This is effectively Dragon’s Den for the rest of us. The premise was simple - you have 5 minutes to pitch your company or idea to 5 rich people, who will then decide if they want to invest in you. The gotcha is that you have to do it in front of whoever happens to be watching and the conference/audience area was fairly sizeable - I think there were at least 100 people watching the talks (and responses) on average.

While it must take nerves of steel to speak in that context, especially to a large number of complete strangers, the one thing that I was very impressed with was the positivity of the potential investors. Even when they chose not to invest (which was most of the time I was watching), they were happy to dish out a lot of specific practical and pragmatic advice on how to succeed. There were no gimmicks for the camera and none of the character assassinations that you typically find in the TV editions of this format. I felt it was a very positive experience for all concerned and it seemed like a very good opportunity for anyone looking to substantially grow a reasonably established business.

Shop ’til you drop

While I’m intimately familiar with a lot of ecommerce systems and all the associated technology and developments around it, the front-end shopping basket is not something I’ve paid a whole lot of attention to. EKM Systems Ltd, a Blackburn-based web company, have built EKM Power Shop that focuses on nothing else.

If you’re looking to set up an Internet store selling anything from home-made scarves to reselling computer components, you can setup an online shop with them for just £19.99 a month, flat fee. The demo one of their guys showed me was very impressive - the speed with which you can be up and running was incredible compared to some free alternatives such as osCommerce. They also appear to integrate with just about every payment provider under the sun! Good stuff.

All about the numbers

Online accounting vendors were on every corner in the exhibition hall. I’ve been a user of an online book-keeping system for several months now, and when I signed up I thought I’d tried them all out. I was sorely mistaken! This industry sector is seeing a huge growth boom at the moment, with several accountants from across the country providing some excellent online DIY book-keeping services at good prices. The guys at Imbercal gave me a good demo and have a nifty website.

My personal recommendation is Kashflow, who surprisingly were not exhibiting at the show. Apart from an excellent clean user interface, it has a phenomenal number of features. Unlike some systems, it manages to keep things wonderfully simple, only revealing extra features as they become relevant. I’m an affiliate so you can sign up for a free 60-day trial and you’ll automatically get a £2/month discount if you decide to keep using the system when your trial finishes.

Print that

There were a lot of vendors selling print services, but the one that stood out was solopress. While their prices aren’t as cheap as, say, staples, the ease and range of print services available seems impressive.

Communities

VentureNavigator is a free online service aimed at helping you figure out how to grow your business or to kick-start one with just an idea. Their community forum, while quiet is one of the easiest to use I’ve seen in a long time. It’s run by the University of Essex, but is relevant to anyone in the UK.

Finally, I have to give some respect to Hannah McNamara for a very well-presented and entertaining talk on B2B networking.

Were you at BStartup 2008? Did you find any services that you now can’t live without? Did you see any talks with amazing insights? Share your experiences in the comments area, below.

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Cambridge start-up offers 24/7 Unix & Linux system support

Crossbone Systems announced on Friday the immediate availability of a complete operating system incident support package designed to assist with emergencies and skills gaps in companies with Unix or Linux servers.

At Business Startup 2008, founder Lee Mallabone elaborated: “Our support packages are available from our website right now. Customers can browse our service descriptions and get a clear picture of the support that is on offer. We’re pleased to announce a service that they can activate themselves immediately, giving instant protection to any ailing servers that may have been previously neglected.”

The support service, which is available in Standard, Silver and Gold packages, starts at just £499/month for email and telephone support during office hours. Companies who have found Unix specialist staff to be too expensive or hard to retain will find this solution particularly cost-effective. For companies that need a 24/7 protection, Silver and Gold packages are available and expand to include remote login protection for when your technical resources are already working to their limit.

Supporting your servers

Commenting on the announcement, founder Lee Mallabone said, “We’re incredibly pleased to be able to draw on our expertise and offer local businesses the protection and peace of mind they need to run Web 2.0 businesses. Today’s announcement is just the beginning, and Crossbone Systems will be releasing more products and services targeted at web and start-up businesses later in the year”.

For more information, visit www.crossbonesystems.com

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• Cambridge train station - no wifi
• 1 hour train journey to London - no wifi
• ExCeL public concourse area - no free wifi
• ExCeL exhibition hall - no free wifi
• London King’s Cross train station - no wifi (I’m not a first class customer)

To summarize, I had no way to access the Internet on my laptop without handing over a hefty monthly subscription to one (or more!) providers. All I needed was enough access to check my email and post some content to my website, and I only need it 2 or 3 times a year (for conferences). But it wasn’t to be. The ExCeL centre own provided wi-fi actually requires that you call a sales hotline - not very useful when you’re trying to post notes during a talk!

Exactly how are we meant to be taken seriously as a country that wants great technology companies to thrive when a startup founder can’t even check his email at a startup conference? Of all places, you’d think that a huge conference centre in the capital city might be a place that you’d find free Internet access, especially when the entire conference is designed to help foster early-stage businesses whose ability to trade can often be dependent upon their online activities.

While it’s easy to level criticism squarely at the BStartup organizers, it’s my experience that over-charging for wireless network access is a scourge that is completely endemic in this country and something needs to be done about it.

NB:- I should add that at FOWA last year, superb wi-fi access was provided for the full duration of the conference. Maybe the BStartup organizers need to have a word with Ryan and his team.

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Cambridge Web Heads is a new virtual community for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs in Cambridgeshire area of the UK.

As well as forum discussions, it’s a place to learn new skills and share your professional experiences of working with the web. With the profile features and personal blogging capabilities, it’s easy to network and exchange ideas with local professionals.

See you in the forums!

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