Finance for Small Business by Emily-Coltman (right) is fourth in a 10 title Business Bites series, backed by Blackberry, published by Brightword, and already covering Twitter, Selling and Pitching Your Business.

"The UK's tax system is a wilderness"  says author Emily Coltman, "and in this book I aim to provide a map and compass to guide readers through, written in plain English and backed by more than ten years of acting as an accountant to small businesses.”

Her engaging definition for Sole Trader: "If it's just you, your computer and your dogs (who don't count as business partners even if you're going to spend most of the profits on feeding them) then this could be for you," recalls to Gaberlunzie, radio journalist Geoff Cameron, who would joke about his wife having to go out to work in order to support their ridgebacks!

Coltman, a Cambridge University graduate worked with micro-business clients, before starting her own business creating tutorial videos and then joined FreeAgent as its chief accountant. She is totally up-front about her affiliation and allegiance to Free Agent, but acutely aware of the limitations to on-line when discussing the desktop software packages as "of value in rural areas with no or slow broadband connection, where using an online systems wouldn't work."

Having examined business structures as partnership and limited liability partnerships and limited companies, she looks at the initial money, the paperwork, the simple accounts, tax, and VAT.
Do you need an accountant? and planning for the future wrap it up.

Coltman writes with judicious jargon busting definitions clearly and has an engaging turn of phrase, endearingly confessing in one footnote that "Companies House made me do the form again because I'd put 28th February instead of 29th February by mistake. For Pete's sake!"

She's also not above urging you "to grab a cup of coffee and/or large glass of wine and/or a gooey pastry, to fortify yourself to look at tax in the next chapter."

Among her acute nuggets of advice:

• "Don't bother with ring binders, you'll rapidly outgrow them."
• "Consider investing in a scanner such as Doxie (the size of a ruler)." And
• "Don't be tempted to bundle paperwork into a carrier bag and give it to you accountant once a year… (s/he)… will inevitably get extremely fed up with this..and end up giving you a quality of service much less than you and your business deserve."

"If you run your business from home," she warns, there is a large grey area around how much you can claim tax relief on as running costs of your home."

In her example "home running cost (mortgage interest payment, but not capital) council tax, electricity and gas, water rates and insurance at £2,400 divided by (say) eight room of the house, makes £300. Claiming 90% of office and 20% of the lounge, allows a claim of £330 for business use of home.

"Be prepared," she advises "to show HMRC inspector your calculations and why you've used the method chosen, " and concludes cheerfully "Good luck, go forth and calculate."

WORK PLACE PRODUCTIVITY
Next up, consider  Asana.  No, in this instance, while its named after the yoga pose, its all aboutworkplace productivity software and if like Gaberlunzie you have ever worked where meetings are a droning, ineffectual route to trying to get some teamwork going but end up being company politics this sort of socialising is well worth considering.

The background according to the San Francisco Chronicle  is its founder Moskovitz  (far left) who taught himself programming on the fly and after he and roommate Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of school and relocated to Silicon Valley, Facebook grew into a full-fledged business. 

Moskovitz would have one-on-one meetings with his direct reports, who would then spend two weeks meeting with their reports. "At the end of a four-week cycle, I would know what was going on the previous month."

He and a programming prodigy colleague Justin Rosenstein (above right) who shared a passion for yoga and figuring out ways to work more efficiently,  an issue Rosenstein agonised over for years and his first productivity software aged 11, was distributed on a disk to friends that let them select DOS programs, entering a number rather than type out lengthy command-line sequences.

In 2006 Moskovitz launched a skunk works to build apps that Facebook employees  used internally. By 2008, he was full time on the project. It included a discussion tool, a task manager and an employee directory. Facebook still uses versions of these apps.

At 27 Moskovitz with Rosenstein in November 2008, launched their workplace productivity software company Asana, essentially a superfast, Web-based to-do list that lets people create tasks, prioritise them, assign them to colleagues and follow the stream of work as it all gets done.

The founders don't claim that Asana's product ensures 'flow' but the goal is to create the conditions for it. Productivity software is only as good as the user's willingness to be productive.

Asana on a browser  divides the screen into three. Left to right, are Projects, Tasks and a running, refresh stream of what's getting done. Moskovitz envisions it as a home screen for work and for anyone that is trying to work with groups of people, has a distaste for drag-on meetings that stop you working at what you are both meant to and enjoy working on.

Quite how Asana gets monetised is a puzzle, but  they wondered that over Facebook in the early days.

The founders position Asana's to-do list structure as a starting point. Future modules are to be tailored to specific tasks such as performance reviews and recruiting and it will look for third parties to build add-ons, so scientists might craft their own lab notebook systems, artists cover their  interface issues and business people build systems to track sales leads.

Socialising productivity offerings


In addition to Office and Microsoft's Web-based products, Asana has other competitors that any SME might consider. That includes Salesforce.com's Chatter , Yammer , Jive , and Basecamp  all in the productivity-software market. No one has a precise value, but its market is worth billions  yearly.

If you want to consider productivity with Google  be prepared to wade  through an overkill of 260 apps!