About

Somebody had to make this understandable.

Starting a business in the UK is not hard. Working out which of the hundred things you keep reading about apply to you is hard — and getting that wrong is what actually costs people money.

CompanyPal asks you nine questions and gives you the short list. It tells you which items are a legal duty with a penalty attached, which are sensible, and which can wait — and it leaves out everything that isn’t yours to worry about.

What this is not, yet

Being straight about this matters more than looking finished, so:

• There are no provider recommendations on this site. No “best bank”, no “top-rated insurer”, no deals. CompanyPal has no commercial relationships yet, so any of that would be invented, and an invented recommendation in a confident voice is exactly the thing this site exists to be an alternative to.
• There are no accounts, logins or saved plans. Your plan lives in the web address and your ticks live in your own browser. Nothing is stored on our side unless you join the email list.
• The renewal reminders aren’t built. They’re the next thing. The email list is how you find out when.
• This is not advice. It’s general information about UK rules. It can’t know your circumstances, and for anything with real money riding on it you want an accountant or a solicitor, not a website.

How we’ll make money, when we do

Eventually, from providers — most likely a commission when someone we’ve introduced signs up. That’s the standard model and it’s the one with the obvious problem: it pays to recommend whoever pays most.

So the commitment, written down here before there’s any money involved and therefore easy to hold us to: where a recommendation earns us something, the page will say so and say what. Where the better answer for you is the one that earns us nothing — doing it yourself, or not buying the thing at all — the site will say that too. The plan builder will never change what it tells you based on what pays.

Where every figure comes from

Every number on this site is a statutory or regulator-published figure with a source. None of them are estimates and none are ours. Checked 17 September 2026.

Figure	What it is
£100	to register a limited company online with Companies House www.gov.uk
£50	a year for your confirmation statement, filed online www.gov.uk
£90,000	taxable turnover in any rolling 12 months — then you must register for VAT www.gov.uk
19%	Corporation Tax on profits of £50,000 or less www.gov.uk
25%	Corporation Tax on profits over £250,000, with Marginal Relief in between www.gov.uk
£5 million	the legal minimum for employers’ liability insurance, from the day you take someone on www.gov.uk
£2,500	a day — the fine for employing someone without it www.gov.uk
£12.71	an hour, the National Living Wage for 21 and over, from 1 April 2026 www.gov.uk
£10,000	a year — staff aged 22 to State Pension age earning this must be auto-enrolled into a pension www.gov.uk
£52	a year to the ICO if you handle personal data (£47 by direct debit, for most small businesses) ico.org.uk
£50,000	self-employment and property income — you are in Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, live since 6 April 2026 www.gov.uk

Most of these change at least once a year — National Minimum Wage every April, Companies House fees whenever they’re reviewed. If you find one out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it and re-date the page.

Who’s behind it

CompanyPal is built by Purple Imp, a Dundee digital agency. We build and run websites and software for small businesses, which is how we ended up watching the same people get caught by the same six things over and over again.

Questions, corrections or a provider who wants to talk: hello@companypal.co.uk.