HMRC webinars

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Accounting tasks, taxes and compliance with financial reporting obligations can be very daunting, especially if like most startup founders and first-time freelancers, you’re not an accountant or have previous experience.

Fortunately for UK-based businesses, HMRC understands this and really strives to help you start off on the right foot. They have developed tons of materials for you to train in different aspects of tax and make sure you are complying with your obligations.

Some of the topics covered are self-assessment, being an employer, VAT, trading internationally and money laundering, and information comes in the form of webinars, videos, e-learning courses, toolkits and email alerts.

For more information and access to the range of HMRC training offers, head here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmrc-webinars-email-alerts-and-videos

Free IP protection course from IPO

If you’re confused about Intellectual Property (IP), don’t know how to protect your business idea or don’t even know if you can protect anything, the Intellectual Property Office (best known as IPO) has launched “IP Equip”, a free online course to teach you all about it!

From patents to copyright and everything in between, the interactive IP Equip course will teach you all you need to know in just over an hour. Plus is CPD accredited and you get an IPO certificate on completion.

Head here to start learning: http://www.ipo.gov.uk/blogs/equip/

Stats for all!

Stats

I only know a handful of people who genuinely get excited about statistics, but a lot of starting a business relies precisely on that.

If you truly think about it you need to gather data at every stage, and then some more! So, perhaps us entrepreneurs should all get more familiar with our statistical analysis tools.

For this purpose, I found the personal website of David Lane, a Stats and Management Professor at Rice University, with lots of info, tutorials and tools on statistics, with a mix from the quite easy to understand to the straightforward super complicated, but it’s up to you how you use it:

http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/

Enjoy!