Roome Consulting

After two years with the little hungarian - Edit, we, at Roome, said our fond fairwells as she turned her focus to her masters in international business. As the first Hungarian to study this masters at Kings college we like to think that we had a little something to do with her impending success and world domination.

So for all those wanting to talk about spondoolie and timesheets please contact Marcus at accounts@roome.co.uk , Marcus, joins us with his wealth of digital and media agency knowledge and his book keeping know how.

So its goodbye to the little Hungarian and hello to Marcus………….

Hello Cookie here, I occasionally post the odd thing to Roome’s blog, and today is one of those days. After searching the internets for a decent invoice template the other day, I only found garbage. So I decided to make a really nice looking one and throw it out there, might be of use to someone.

It’s probably only really suited to designer/illustrator types, as it’s a Photoshop file. Download it here. All the coloured shapes are just masked off flat colours so it should be pretty simple to change the colour scheme, stick a you’re own logo in etc. All the text is editable, although if you don’t want to change the fonts, you’ll need Knockout, Phaeton & Numbers Indicia.

Feel free to do with it what you will.

For those of you that work in digital advertising there’s a ray of sunshine today from Brand Republic who say that internet adspend is holding up better than predicted in these tumultuous times, while newspaper adspend continues to decline. Apparently global internet advertising will grow 10% this year due in part to “its transparency, accountability and flexibility”. Take a look at the article which also has some interesting facts about which countries have the largest ad markets and most growth.

Most of you will be aware that on Monday the man with the bushy eyebrows, or Chancellor Alistair Darling, announced his 2nd pre-budget report and I thought it would be helpful to outline how it might affect you.

The main tax proposals are:

• Reduction in standard rate of VAT from 1 December 2008
• Changes to personal allowances including prospective reduction in the basic personal allowances for individuals with income above £100,000
• A prospective new income tax rate of 45%
• Deferral of the planned increase in small company corporation tax rate
• New loss carry back provisions
• Details of changes to capital allowances for cars.

As a freelancer / consultant, if you have your own Ltd company and are VAT registered; VAT from Monday the 1st of December will reduce from 17.5% to 15% until the 31st of December 2009, at which point it will revert back to 17.5%, therefore all invoices you raise from Monday should have VAT calculated at 15%.

The 15% rate will apply to:

• Supplies of goods and services
• Imports
• Acquisitions of goods from other EC member states
• For more details of changes to the Flat rate scheme

The small companies corporation tax rate, which applies to companies with up to £300,000 of profits, increased from 20% to 21% from 1 April 2008. The intention was to increase this rate to 22% in 2009 but this has been deferred until 1 April 2010.

For a full break down provided by the brilliant people at LAWRENCE & CO