HMRC on-line: Root Canal or walk in the Park?

HMRC & On-line registration – letting them know about my company.

As this is my first brush with HMRC in a very long time my accountants were good enough to walk me through the process.  This was lucky as some of the answers would otherwise have been a virtual coin toss and undoubtedly have lead me to countless fun hours of unnecessary paperwork in the future.  My advice to anyone doing this for the first time is to ensure that their agreement with their accountants cover this activity.

The good news is that these days I could register for several tax activities at the same time by simply visiting https://online.hmrc.gov.uk

In half an hour I managed to register for:

  • VAT
  • Corporation Tax
  • PAYE

All in a very painless manner!

I did need several pieces of information to be able to apply and fortunately some are less critical than others. For Example  I am eagerly awaiting my bank details from Santander but fortunately was given the option to supply them later.

I did need included:

  • NI number
  • Home and Company addresses
  • an email address
  • phone number
  • Company Registration Number (CRN)
  • Company Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR)

The only thing that did have me worried was that at the very start you are assigned a User ID – a 12 digit number

I made a couple careful notes of this number as they don’t remind you and there is no obvious way to retrieve it if you forget to write it down.  I also had to re-input the number towards the end of the process.

So to sum it up – 30 minutes done and dusted!