I've been a sole trader for 4 years working in education, community and private settings to provide music and digital media related activities for clients. For the past 6 months I've been searching for an opportunity to either stop what I'm doing and do something else for work or take on premises and develop my business ambitions. It's not viable for me to continue as a sole trader - I make plenty of money, but my sanity is under threat so I need to change things around a bit and share my work.

Well in the past two months I've found a suitable premises and a couple of prospective partners as well. We've agreed verbally with the landlord and he's waiting for us to make a decision on the identity of the leaseholder before he issues us with a lease so the 3 of us need to decide whether to incorporate and form a company or to stay unicorporated as a partnership.

Financially things are risky for all of us personally. I'm putting money in to set the place up, one of the partners isn't (but has exceptional skills and some good potential contacts) and the other is also putting money in (though not as much as me) and our business plan indicates that the first 12 months cashflow will be quite tight - to the extent that we are anticipating being very very skint personally for a while. There are income streams that I have guaranteed during the first 12 months, but not enough to guarantee a comfortable cashflow if we are to be paid regular wages.

Incorporating looks like a minefield, what with salaries, minimum wage and NI not to mention the paperwork, but it seems the proper way to do things, especially where the lease is concerned and for wives and family's sake of mind because of liability.

I've had a bit of advice from a friend who is an accountant, but she says that the form of the business and the best way to organise the cashflow where wages and dividends are concerned could be complicated. She wants to help and says that it could be expensive for me to employ an accountant at this stage.

I need some help here - especially with regard to how we work out wages - which all the partners/stakeholders expect to be on the level of pocket money to begin with. In the next few days I would have liked to have made a decision about incorporation and registered everything so we can sort the lease out with the landlord and start to get the premises shipshape.

Having the premises ready for project work is key because there is not a suitable facility at home to consider working without a space where we can bring clients and make noise.

Any idea/comments would be very much appreciated.