So to get corporate insurance you will almost always need to go to a specialist insurance broker which obviously means looking at firms relatively close by your business premises.

However, it’s worse than that in that, for example, to shop insurance Glasgow, if you’re in a relatively specialised market niche you’d need to look for, say, insurance for contractors Glasgow. Well, “worse” in the sense that you may need to be more specific in your requirements of an insurance broker but if that broker is more familiar in dealing with your type of business you’ll generally save a lot of hassle in explaining what you do and won’t miss out on essential insurance that’s specific to your industry group. Not only that but the specialists will know more about the types of policy available to your industry niche too which can save quite substantial amounts of money.

Incidently, don’t be tempted to try to do the cheapo route of just using one of the personal insurance comparison sites as they usually don’t list essential items of business insurance and you could find yourself with an expensive problem should it turn out that you don’t have some legally required insurance or there’s an exemption in the insurance that you bought which means that you’re not covered for doing something that you do quite regularly. These things usually only become apparent after you need to claim on a policy which is obviously a little late in the day.

Related posts:

1. Travel insurance, house insurance and car insurance
2. Keeping your house and home insurance together
3. Isn’t Christmas shopping a nightmare?

The particular difficult with accountants is that there can frequently be tie-in, no-competition and no conflict of interest terms in their employment contract. So, it’s not quite so easy to move jobs or to find a new accountancy job even in normal times as it is with “normal” jobs and, of course, these are far from normal times so it’s that much more difficult these days.

That said, if you’re searching for, say, “accountant jobs Edinburgh” you will find jobs around with some of those at quite surprisingly high levels. What you will see though, courtesy of the contract restrictions above and, of course, non-disclosure that there’s very little meat to the job descriptions and you’ll usually need to formally contact the employment agency to find out more should you be attracted to one of those on offer. In many ways that’s something of a nuisance but unfortunately it’s something that isn’t easily avoided.

So, if you fancy being a qualified accountant in Edinburgh there are definitely possibilities, just allow for needing to contact the agency rather than relying on information on the website listings.

Related posts:

1. Rumour becoming reality in dire economic times

You might think that you only need one if you’re looking for outside investment. Not so. A business plan is the route map for your business and even if there’s only yourself involved, you need to have that map around.

With that map, you have the signposts that you need to ensure that you’re going in the right direction and, more importantly, it’ll help you pick up on any problems early on when you’re a better chance to correct them. It’ll speed up your decisions too as it makes it easier to make the yes/no strategy decisions a lot quicker.

Don’t think that it’s something that you just do for the bank and then put in the drawer. A business plan is a living document. Things change and you need to take account of that as the years go by. For example, your competitors will surely change over the years and change how they do business too; you need to reflect that in your own plans.

Which is a very long way of saying that you’d be crazy not to take Trump University up on their free course “How to Write a Business Plan“. And, no, it isn’t a course just for us MBA graduates but is something for everyone in business or who would like to be in business.

No related posts.

We’ve seen the pound move from a typical $1.50 to more like $2 these days and that’s obviously had quite a considerable effect on international trade between the two countries which has always been substantial. Although it’s clearly an advantage to tourists from the UK going to America clearly the move in the other direction has gone down substantially.

Within Europe the pound has gone from around 60p to the euro to more like 80p for a euro these days which, combined with the dramatic price increases in discount airline flights, has pretty much killed off British tourism in Europe this year.

But the impact on tourism is just one aspect (and a minor one at that) of the impact on the European economy. It might be great for the European tourists to have really cheap holidays this year but if the exchange rate continues at anything like the current level they’ll soon find themselves out of a job as their products are priced out of the range of export markets.

Related posts:

1. Things to think about when you’re buying or selling a property overseas
2. International property sales: don’t forget the exchange rate!
3. Interest rate or exchange rate: which is more important when you’re investing?

It sounds like an idyllic lifestyle, doesn’t it? You work one day a week and the rest of the week you can be sunbathing by the pool.

The snag is that you need to wash all the sheets and towels and carry out maintenance work during the week. OK, so two days work and five at the pool? In theory, you might get away with that though, of course, the guests will be using the pool too and, usually, expect you to do things for them like organise tours or the area, tell them all the best places to go and so on.

What’s frequently forgotten about in all this is the financials that go along with this lifestyle. From a typical six or seven person gite you can probably get around 700€ a week in the peak season. That size of gite equates to a small three bedroom house in size and, of course, amount of work to look after. In reality most people aim for a gite complex of around four or five gites. On the whole, you’ll eventually reach an occupancy of around ten weeks per year for the gites which translates into around 35,000€ a year of an income.

However, there’s the matter of expenses to consider. Bearing in mind that you only have four or five hours to reset the gite between guests you’ll end up hiring a cleaner to help you which eats into the income somewhat and you may need someone to look after the pool. There’s also the business of maintenance: unlike a normal house rental you’re getting a new set of tennants virtually every week and that tends to be quite hard on the furnishings so you’ll need to renew at least some items pretty much every year.

Oh, and don’t forget the taxes!

I’ll look at the normal alternative to this next time ie buying a B&B.

Related posts:

1. Buying a house in France: Post Office and Co-Operative bank accounts in France
2. Buying a house in France: French banking practices
3. Buying a house in France: Offshore banking

But, how do you do it?

Well, there are basically two ways that a B&B or self-catering complex can operate with a credit card.

1. Accept cards solely for deposits; and
2. Accept cards for all payments.

Naturally, it’s possible to start off just taking card payments for deposits and move onto accepting them for all payments. In fact, it’s useful to do exactly this to try out card payments for your business.

If you’re only taking card payments for deposits then you don’t need to sign up with a bank. The simplest way is to sign up with paypal for a business account. Payments received will cost you 3.4% plus 20p so if you take £10 will cost you about 54p (5.4%), £100 will cost £3.60 (3.6%) and £1000 will cost £34.20 (3.42%). These charges are similar to those that a small business would pay were they to do credit card processing via their bank in the UK but somewhat higher than the typical 0.75% for banks in France.

From these figures you’ll see that it’s best to use paypal for deposits. That way a typical 25% deposit will effectively cost you under 1% of the total bill for paypal processing.

You could use paypal to accept all payments this way but you would need your bookings to be paid 100% in advance to do that as you can’t easily use the paypal system to make on the spot payments (if you really have to you can do it by having the guest logging in using your Internet access and making the payment). So, if you want to accept all payments by card, then you need to get the little credit card machine although, in principle, you can run with PayPals virtual terminal option (£20/month) which gives you the equivalent of the little machine but using your computer to process the cards.

To get a credit card machine setup you need to have a business bank account and, in most cases, have had it for six months although for B&B and self-catering properties the bank will normally waive the six months requirement. In France, you’ll need to be registered and provide your KBIS.

Costs for this vary a lot. You can buy your own machine but they’re rather expensive (typically £300/£500) and therefore most people rent them from the bank (around £20/£30 per month). In most cases you’re better to opt for a fixed installation as the portable terminals can cost 50% more. Other things to consider are which cards you’ll accept. Normally Visa/Mastercard are sufficient (and will include Visa Electron and Maestro). American Express is becoming more popular but is usually more expensive than other cards. If you get a lot of Japanese then it’s probably worthwhile taking JCB. You can even accept various storecards but unless you’re in a shopping centre it’s probably not going to be worth the extra expense.

How do you do it? Open a business bank account then apply for the credit card facility at your bank.

One thing to watch is that you will need Customer Not Present enabled. This lets you charge cards without having the credit card in your hand. You’ll need this to take deposits.

Is it worthwhile doing though? Yes, it is. Sure it will cost you more but you can take that into account in your pricing. If you assume that a credit card payment will cost you 4% then adding as little as 2% to your prices will pay for it all in that not everyone will pay by card and many of those that do will use a debit card which’ll cost you less. So, if you’re charging £50/night that equates to adding £1 to your charges. Incidently, don’t try adding that £1 only to credit card customers as you’ll just end up driving them away.

Related posts:

1. Merchant accounts to accept credit cards
2. Taking your holiday money: using credit and charge cards
3. Reducing the costs of using your credit/debit cards abroad

However, they remain customers and one of the key things about that is that you need to get money off them for whatever goods or services that you sell, even if they are both a repeat customer and a large one.

One trap to fall into is to be more lax with the payment terms. Unless you habitually offer credit then you shouldn’t offer it to even the best of customers as sooner or later it’ll just cause needless friction between you and a good customer. If it’s pay on delivery for everyone else then that should be the case for even the best customers too as your sales contract probably doesn’t allow for any credit in such circumstances: a recipe for trouble collecting the cash if ever there was one.

So, yes, offer better discounts to better customers. Yes, offer, additional services to better customers. But, NO, don’t change your payment terms.

Related posts:

1. Taking your holiday money: should you take some cash?
2. Taking your holiday money: using cash cards
3. It’s getting serious when times are tough for accountants!

Now, you would sort-of expect that they would charge you if you’re depositing large amounts of cash in that there’s obviously work involved in handling it. You probably also know that they charge a percentage of your credit card sales too and that there’d be a charge for the credit card terminal too. But setting up the terminal? Providing the software for it? Surely not?

Well, if you plan on taking everything from your own bank, yes, you probably will be charged for setting up the terminal and you probably will be charged for the software required to run the thing too (anything up to $500). Not only that, but try accepting card payments online and you’re potentially talking another $500 for the software that you’ll need to accept those payments too.

That’s just for the standard Mastercard and Visa acceptances too. Add American Express or anything else and you add to your costs yet again. Even commonly used things such as the ability to process customer not present transactions is generally seen as another opportunity to charge you.

What the bank won’t be too upfront about telling you is that you can get a merchant account from a separate organization. There are increasing numbers of these outfits around and the market competition is driving prices down with the likes of First Data providing free setup, free point of sale software and 24/7 service (something that, quite surprisingly, isn’t always provided by the banks) and things that you might expect to be standard but usually are billable such as reprogramming of the terminal.

Related posts:

1. Accepting credit cards in a B&B
2. Taking your holiday money: using credit and charge cards
3. Reducing the costs of using your credit/debit cards abroad