Operations Guide

This guide is for members of the ops team. It covers the overall remit of the team as well as common and recurring processes that it is responsible for.

Objective of the Operations Team

Objective: To enable Life Itself and associated initiatives to operate efficiently and reliably, providing a high degree of integrity around payment, compliance, HR etc, as well as maintaining and making available key information (e.g. finances, metrics) to others.

Way of being: a smoothly oiled machine. Effective and Efficient.

Key results:

  • Being legally compliant
  • Providing management information efficiently and appropriately (e.g. timely, needed info) e.g.
    • Are we P&L positive?
    • Are we on track?
    • Being able to report to external stakeholders (such as funders where we have them) in a way they and we are happy with
    • Doing this efficiently (we perform these tasks cost and time effectively)

Key dates

  • HMRC corporation tax payment due by 30 Sep
  • Companies House annual account filing due by 30 Sep
  • Companies House confirmation statement due by 29 Nov
  • HMRC corporation tax return due by 31 Dec

Finance

Day-to-day Tasks

See here for a comprehensive list of Finance user stories and processes.

Management tasks

Quarterly

  • Profit and Loss reconciliation
  • Balance sheet analysis

Annually

  • Submit annual accounts to Companies House (due by 30th September)
  • Pay corporation tax bill (due 1st October)
  • File confirmation statement (due 29th November)
  • File corporation tax return (due 31st December)

See here for more guidance.

Explanation of key dates
DateWhatWhere
1st JanuaryStart of accounting period
31st DecemberEnd of accounting period
30th SeptemberFile annual accountsCompanies House
1st OctoberPay corporation tax billHMRC
29th NovemberFile confirmation statementCompanies House
31st DecemberFile corporation tax returnHMRC

NB: We file at Companies House and HMRC together.

Every year, Life Itself makes up its annual accounts for the period 1st January to 31st December. This is an account of how much money has been received, how much money has been spent (collectively referred to as the "Profit and Loss" or P&L for short), and how many assets and liabilites the company has on hand at the end of the year (the "Balance Sheet"). An asset might be a piece of property, a car, or the cash sitting in the bank, while a liability might be any outstanding creditors (people/firms who are owed money by the company) such as a mortgage.

See here for a more detailed explanation of assets and liabilities. Read more about how we prepare our accounts and how to do so using Xero.

Accounts are filed with Companies House each year at the latest 9 months after the end of the accounting period (in our case 31st December), so for us our Companies House deadline is 30th September.

In addition, we file a confirmation statement by 29th November each year, which ensures the information HMRC holds about Life Itself is up-to-date.

Furthermore, we have to pay our corporation tax bill by 1st OCtober each year, 9 months and one day after the end of the accounting period, and we have to file our corporation tax return by 31st December every year for the previous accounting period. The tax return is our account of how much corporation tax we owe, and must be filed no later than 365 days after the end of the accounting period.

Processes

In addition to the tasks above, ops handles:

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