Starting up, and the admin nobody warns you about
Business names checked against the Companies House naming rules rather than just whether the domain is free. Business plans, cash flow forecasts, break-even, margin against markup, and the freelance day rate worked back from the income you actually want.
Markup and margin deserve a mention on their own. A thirty per cent markup is a 23 per cent margin, they are not interchangeable, and quoting on the wrong one is a slow way to go out of business.
Markup is measured on what it cost you. Margin is measured on what you sold it for. Same job, same money, two different numbers, and the gap widens the higher you go:
| Markup on cost | is a margin of | Cost 100 becomes |
|---|---|---|
| 10% | 9.1% | 110 |
| 20% | 16.7% | 120 |
| 25% | 20.0% | 125 |
| 30% | 23.1% | 130 |
| 50% | 33.3% | 150 |
| 100% | 50.0% | 200 |
Read it the other way when somebody asks you to hit a margin: 20% margin needs a 25% markup, 30% margin needs 42.9%, and 50% margin needs to double the cost. The arithmetic is margin = markup divided by one plus markup, which is why the two never meet except at zero.
Looking like a real company
A logo you can download as an SVG with no watermark and no account. An email signature that pastes cleanly into Gmail and Outlook without a tracking pixel in it. A letterhead that carries the company number and registered office that the Companies Act actually requires on business correspondence, which most small companies do not know about until someone points it out.
Price lists and menus that pair with a QR code you own outright, which is a bigger difference than it sounds and is worth its own section below.
Legal templates, and what they are not
Privacy policies, website terms and cookie policies, downloadable in full with nothing paywalled at the last step, which is the standard trick in this category.
They are templates and they are not legal advice. A template cannot know your circumstances, and anything genuinely contentious needs a solicitor. What a template does do is stop you trading with no privacy policy at all, which is where a lot of small businesses actually are.
Knowing the numbers before somebody asks you for them
A cash flow forecast is the one thing every lender, every landlord and every serious customer asks for, and the one thing most small firms have never built. Twelve months in and out, exported as a PDF or a CSV, with no trial period and no login. Break-even sits alongside it: how much work you need before you are making anything rather than just busy.
Return on investment gets its own tool because the question comes up constantly and gets answered by feel. Whether the van, the machine or the campaign paid for itself is arithmetic, and it is worth doing before the next one rather than after.
Marketing you can do yourself
- Tagging a link, so your analytics tells you where traffic came from.
- Checking ad copy against the real character limits for Google, Meta, X and LinkedIn, rather than finding out on rejection.
- Turning a customer review into something you can actually post.
None of it needs an agency and none of it needs a subscription. It is the handful of jobs that sit between having a business and having anyone know about it.
Why the QR codes here do not expire
Almost every free QR generator makes a dynamic code, which is a redirect through their server dressed up as a QR code. It looks free and it is, right up until they switch the redirect off, start charging to keep it alive, or go out of business. By then your code is printed on a menu, a sign, a van or ten thousand leaflets, and it is dead.
These are static codes. The destination is encoded in the pattern itself, there is nothing in the middle, and nothing to keep paying for. The trade-off is real and worth stating: you cannot change where a static code points after you have printed it, and you get no scan statistics. For a menu, a wifi password or a review link, that is the right trade. For a campaign you need to redirect later, it is not, and you should use something that admits it is a redirect service.
| Static, what these are | Dynamic, what most free tools give you | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it points | Encoded in the pattern itself | Through somebody else’s server |
| If that company folds | Still works. There is nothing in the middle | Dead, wherever it is printed |
| Change it after printing | No | Yes, which is the real reason to use one |
| Scan statistics | None | Yes |
Not in the United Kingdom? What this hub does and does not cover
The paperwork sections above are British: Companies House naming rules, the registered office and company number that the Companies Act puts on your correspondence, HMRC registration deadlines. None of that travels, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
What does travel, and what is built for the United States specifically:
- The arithmetic is the same everywhere. Margin against markup, job costing and overhead recovery, minimum job charge, the effect of a discount or a price rise. Money behaves identically in every market and those tools carry no country at all.
- Getting an EIN, which is free and immediate from the IRS. Worth saying plainly because an industry exists charging for it, and the FTC wrote to those operators in April 2025.
- Beneficial ownership reporting, where the useful answer for most US companies is now that they are exempt. FinCEN narrowed the rule in March 2025 and made that final in August 2026.
- Whether a contractor payment needs a 1099-NEC, and how long to keep records against the IRS periods.
That last one carries the fact most worth having. The 1099-NEC threshold everybody quotes is $600, and it is no longer $600: for tax years beginning after 2025 it is $2,000, with inflation adjustment from 2027. A retainer of $150 a month needed a 1099 every year up to 2025 and does not now. Almost every page in this category still says otherwise.
Australia and Canada currently get the universal arithmetic here and not the paperwork. That is an honest gap rather than a plan to leave it there.