This page describes the employment and workforce compliance obligations of Avvyland Limited, the United Kingdom company that operates DomiDo. The team is a small mix of United Kingdom-resident salaried members and remote equity-only contributors, and that composition shapes the rest of the page: the classification regime decides which statutory protections engage for each contributor; the Pay-As-You-Earn, pension, and Working Time obligations follow from those classifications; the Employer of Record arrangements absorb most of the country-specific complexity for non-United Kingdom contributors; and the Enterprise Management Incentive scheme carries the equity-grant side without dragging the platform into early income-tax or social-security charges. Specific employment contracts and country-specific Employer of Record agreements are project deliverables and are not drafted here; what this page captures are the operational requirements that the human-resources, payroll, and share-scheme processes have to satisfy for those documents to be valid when they are signed. Locations are confirmed before grant for every equity-only contributor so that the right classification test and the right Employer of Record contract can be applied from the start rather than retrofitted later.
Before any equity is granted to an equity-only contributor, Avvyland Limited runs a written employment-law classification review per the United Kingdom case-law tests for the contributor concerned. The relevant tests cover control, mutuality of obligation, integration, and financial risk, and they are applied through the authorities that have shaped them — Ready Mixed Concrete, Autoclenz, Pimlico Plumbers, and Uber BV v Aslam — together with the country-of-residence equivalent test for each non-United Kingdom contributor. The output of the review is one of three classifications: employee with full statutory rights under the Employment Rights Act 1996; worker with National Minimum Wage, Working Time Regulations, and anti-discrimination rights; or genuinely self-employed contractor on a business-to-business agreement. The contractual label that the parties choose is not decisive on its own, which is why a counsel sign-off is required before grant; classification review is a hard launch blocker rather than a process that can be deferred until after grant.
For non-United Kingdom-resident contributors the review also applies the destination-country test where one exists. Germany's Scheinselbstständigkeit doctrine, France's salariat déguisé, Spain's false self-employment doctrine, Italy's parasubordinato classification, the Netherlands' DBA Act, and the United States' state-by-state independent-contractor tests — California's Assembly Bill 5 "ABC test" being the most prominent — all default to employment status in the absence of strong contrary evidence, which is why Employer of Record engagement is the recommended mitigation rather than a relabelled self-employment contract. Every classified employee or worker receives written particulars on the first day of work under section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996, or the country equivalent where the worker is engaged through an Employer of Record whose local employment contract satisfies the obligation. Reclassification events — for example, a status review that moves a contributor from "self-employed" to "worker" — log an audit-trail event with the rationale for the change, and the reclassification record is retained for six years so that any subsequent challenge can be answered against the original review.
Where a contributor is classified as an employee or a worker, Avvyland Limited or the engaging Employer of Record ensures that pay per pay-reference period meets at least the relevant statutory rate, and equity is not an acceptable substitute for cash pay below the rate. The current rates, effective 1 April 2025, are £12.21 per hour for the National Living Wage for workers aged twenty-one and above, £10.00 per hour for ages eighteen to twenty, and £7.55 per hour for ages sixteen to seventeen and for first-year apprentices. The rates are re-verified each April when the new figures are announced, and the compliance calendar surfaces the next April uplift in advance so that payroll updates are scheduled rather than rushed. Penalty exposure for non-compliance reaches up to two hundred per cent of the arrears together with public naming under the gov.uk name-and-shame scheme, which makes Minimum-Wage compliance a reputational issue as well as a financial one.
The Minimum-Wage regime intersects with the equity-only contributor model wherever a contributor's classification slides toward "worker" or "employee". Where that exposure exists, the available mitigations are genuine self-employment supported by case-law evidence, a director-as-office-holder structure in which the director is not an employee, or a salaried employee on a deferred-cash arrangement in which cash accrues at the Minimum-Wage level and is paid when cash flow allows. Each mitigation is evidenced rather than declared: the case-law evidence is recorded against the relevant contributor, the office-holder structure is documented in the company secretarial records, and the deferred-cash arrangement is set out in the engagement contract together with the accrual ledger that tracks it.
Auto-enrolment under Part 1 of the Pensions Act 2008 applies to United Kingdom-resident employees and workers aged twenty-two to State Pension Age earning above £10,000 a year. Qualifying workers are enrolled in a qualifying scheme with minimum contributions of eight per cent of qualifying earnings under the standard scheme — three per cent employer and five per cent employee. A contributor whose only compensation is equity sits below the trigger and is therefore not subject to auto-enrolment, but if cash earnings accrue under a deferred-pay arrangement and later cross the trigger, auto-enrolment engages, potentially backdated to the original engagement date. Avvyland Limited submits a re-declaration of compliance to The Pensions Regulator every three years, and the compliance calendar tracks each scheme's next re-declaration date so that the deadline is met by scheduling rather than by remembering.
Every employee or worker receives at least five-and-six-tenths weeks of paid annual leave per year under regulations 13 and 13A of the Working Time Regulations 1998. Paid leave requires payment at the worker's normal hourly rate, and equity is not an acceptable substitute for that cash entitlement; holiday-pay accrual is tracked per worker in a continuous ledger that records both accrual and use. Rest-break requirements apply alongside the leave entitlement: eleven consecutive hours' rest per twenty-four-hour period, twenty-four hours' uninterrupted rest per seven-day period (or forty-eight hours per fourteen-day period), and a twenty-minute break for any shift over six hours. Where a worker has opted out of the forty-eight-hour weekly limit, the opt-out is in writing, voluntary, and revocable by the worker on at least seven days' notice up to three months, and a register of opt-outs is maintained so that the right to revoke is administered rather than negotiated each time it is exercised.
Every employee and worker receives a written statement of particulars on or before the first day of employment under section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996. The statement contains the items required by section 1(4): names of parties, the date employment begins, the date continuous service began, the scale or rate of remuneration, hours of work, holiday entitlement, sickness entitlement, the pension scheme, notice periods, job title or description, place of work, collective agreements, and terms relating to work outside the United Kingdom. Itemised pay statements follow under section 8 from the first pay run onward, so the day-one statement and the itemised payslips together cover the contributor's full statutory information entitlement from the start of the engagement.
For every non-United Kingdom-resident contributor, Avvyland Limited engages through a recognised Employer of Record provider rather than contracting directly. At least two quotes per country are obtained so that the provider selection is made against real alternatives, and the Employer of Record becomes the legal employer in the worker's country. Employer obligations — local payroll, withholding income tax, social security, statutory benefits, and severance accruals — sit with the Employer of Record by virtue of that legal employer status, which is the principal reason the structure is used in preference to a direct self-employment contract. Per-country onboarding documents the country of tax residence, the visa and right-to-work status, the expected weekly hours, the job-function description used for the permanent-establishment risk assessment, and the Employer of Record contract terms covering notice period, severance entitlement, leave entitlement, and termination protection.
The onboarding playbook flags the country-specific quirks that the legal employer has to handle behind the scenes. Germany's enforcement of Scheinselbstständigkeit is aggressive and is paired with the Lohnsteuer withholding obligation that the Employer of Record handles for the company; France's URSSAF social security and Code du travail rules add a parallel set of obligations; Spain's TGSS and severance accrual add another; Italy's INPS and the mandatory severance under the Trattamento di Fine Rapporto add a further layer; the Netherlands' DBA Act sits next to a lower permanent-establishment trigger than most other jurisdictions; Ireland's real-time Pay-As-You-Earn modernisation pushes reporting cadence in line with the United Kingdom; and the United States layers state-by-state nexus on top of federal permanent establishment so that the choice of state matters as much as the choice of country. For United Kingdom workers who are temporarily in another country, an A1 certificate (or country-bilateral equivalent under His Majesty's Revenue and Customs' CA8421 process) keeps United Kingdom National Insurance Contributions live and avoids a double social-security charge for periods up to twenty-four months; beyond twenty-four months the local social security typically applies and the worker transfers to the local Employer of Record.
Avvyland Limited meets the qualifying-company test under Schedule 5 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 before granting any Enterprise Management Incentive options. The qualifying conditions require the company to be independent, to carry on a qualifying trade, to have a United Kingdom permanent establishment, and to meet the gross-assets, employee-count, and group-structure tests; each condition is evidenced before grant rather than assumed. The post-Finance Act 2026 Great Britain limits apply from 6 April 2026: the per-employee unexercised options limit at market value at grant is £250,000 (unchanged), the company total grants limit is £6 million (raised), the company gross-assets cap is £120 million, the company employee-count cap is fewer than five hundred full-time equivalent, and the option exercise period is fifteen years. Northern Ireland-incorporated companies retain the previous limits, which is not applicable here because Avvyland Limited is incorporated in Great Britain.
Each option holder meets the qualifying-employee test independently of the company-level test: working time of at least twenty-five hours per week, or seventy-five per cent of total working time; holding fewer than thirty per cent of the company's ordinary shares; and not being a director of a connected company who is also an employee. Equity-only contributors who fail the working-time test cannot receive Enterprise Management Incentive options and receive unapproved options instead, which carry a less favourable tax profile but remain a usable instrument. The Enterprise Management Incentive conditions are residence-neutral, but the holder's eventual tax treatment depends on residence at exercise and at sale; United Kingdom income tax applies on the proportion of the gain attributable to United Kingdom working days under the apportionment rules in section 41A of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, while Capital Gains Tax on sale follows the holder's residence at the disposal date — United Kingdom residents may claim Business Asset Disposal Relief subject to its conditions, and non-residents typically fall outside United Kingdom Capital Gains Tax but face local-jurisdiction tax with treaty mitigation. Because the residence position drives the eventual outcome, non-United Kingdom-resident option holders receive personal-tax advice before grant rather than after.
Before each grant cycle, Avvyland Limited obtains a pre-cleared Actual Market Value from His Majesty's Revenue and Customs' Shares and Assets Valuation team via Form VAL231; the agreed valuation is valid for ninety days, which sets the cadence of the grant programme. The Employment-Related Securities online account is registered before the first grant, notification of each grant runs through the annual Employment-Related Securities return by 6 July following the end of the tax year of grant, and the Articles of Association are Enterprise Management Incentive-compatible — drag-along, good-leaver, bad-leaver, and share-rights provisions are reviewed by legal counsel before the first grant rather than at the moment a grant is made. The headline tax treatment is that no income tax and no National Insurance Contributions arise at grant; at exercise, no income tax arises if the exercise price is at or above the market value at grant, and any discount triggers income tax on that discount; and at sale of the shares, Capital Gains Tax applies, with Business Asset Disposal Relief eligible at the favourable rate when the five-per-cent holding, the trading-company test, and the twenty-four-month holding period are all met. Without Enterprise Management Incentive treatment, exercise itself triggers income tax and National Insurance Contributions on the spread, which is the principal reason the scheme is used.
While Avvyland Limited qualifies as a small company under section 382 of the Companies Act 2006, the Personal Service Company contractor is responsible for their own off-payroll-working ("IR35") status determination under Chapter 8 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003. Avvyland Limited is therefore not required to issue a Status Determination Statement or to operate Pay-As-You-Earn on deemed-employment payments while the small-company exemption applies. Even under that exemption, every Personal Service Company engagement is documented with a written engagement contract, an explicit status statement from the contractor, and evidence supporting the assessment, so that the audit trail is in place if the position is ever queried.
The exemption is not permanent. When Avvyland Limited crosses the section 382 thresholds for two consecutive accounting periods, Chapter 10 of the same Act engages and Avvyland Limited becomes the deemed employer with full responsibility: issuance of a Status Determination Statement for each engagement, operation of Pay-As-You-Earn on the deemed-employment payments, and a forty-five-day window to respond to a contractor's challenge of the Statement under section 61T of the Act. The platform's human-resources and payroll systems are ready to integrate with His Majesty's Revenue and Customs' Check Employment Status for Tax tool for the post-Chapter 10 environment, and the pre-launch readiness work identifies which contractors use Personal Service Company structures and collects the basic inputs (substitution, control, mutuality of obligation, basis of payment) that the Status Determination process needs.
Employer Class 1 National Insurance Contributions apply at fifteen per cent on earnings above the secondary threshold of £5,000 a year with effect from 6 April 2025 under the National Insurance Contributions Act 2025. Employee Class 1 National Insurance Contributions for 2025/26 sit at an eight per cent main rate between the primary threshold of £12,570 a year and the upper earnings limit of £50,270 a year, with a two per cent additional rate above the upper earnings limit. Employment Allowance is £10,500, and Avvyland Limited claims it only where it qualifies; under section 2(4A) of the National Insurance Contributions Act 2014, a company cannot claim Employment Allowance where the only employee paid above the secondary threshold is a director. To claim, the company has either at least one non-director employee paid above the secondary threshold during the tax year, or at least two directors each paid above the secondary threshold, and eligibility is confirmed for Avvyland Limited's specific structure rather than assumed. Pay-As-You-Earn Real-Time Information is submitted to His Majesty's Revenue and Customs on or before each pay date — a Full Payment Submission per pay run and an Employer Payment Summary monthly where adjustments apply — so the reporting cadence is the same regardless of payroll volume.
Several obligations sit on the watchlist because they engage at scales that the team has not yet reached. The Apprenticeship Levy under Part 6 of the Finance Act 2016 applies to employers with a United Kingdom pay bill above £3 million a year at half a per cent of the excess and is not engaged at the team's current scale. The Modern Slavery Act 2015 section 54 transparency-statement obligation engages at £36 million global turnover and is not engaged at any foreseeable scale. The founders' personal-tax positions track the Business Asset Disposal Relief and Investors' Relief rate path, which steps from ten per cent before 6 April 2025 to fourteen per cent from 6 April 2025 to 5 April 2026 and to eighteen per cent from 6 April 2026 onward; the lifetime limits sit at £1 million for both reliefs, with Investors' Relief reduced from £10 million by Finance Act 2025 with effect from 30 October 2024. The personal allowance is frozen at £12,570 a year under Finance Act 2021 section 5, with the freeze extended to 5 April 2028 by Finance Act 2023 section 5 and further extended to 5 April 2031 by the Autumn Budget 2025 measures, so personal-tax modelling uses that frozen threshold across the relevant horizon.
Founders taking salary are on Pay-As-You-Earn from month one of payment, and the compliance dashboard surfaces the post-National-Insurance-Contributions-Act 2025 picture explicitly: the previous low-salary-plus-dividends strategy now generates employer National Insurance Contributions from the new £5,000 secondary threshold rather than from the previous higher figure, which shifts the optimum salary point. For a small-and-medium-enterprise claiming Employment Allowance, the optimum salary is closer to the primary threshold, but founder-only companies may not qualify for Employment Allowance under the section 2(4A) carve-out, so the optimum depends on the specific structure. Personal-tax advice is taken per founder rather than applied as a single rule across the team. Until the company is profitable, dividends cannot be paid under section 830 of the Companies Act 2006, so founders may take all drawings as salary — deductible against future losses — or via director's loan, subject to the deemed-distribution rules that apply to those balances.
The employment audit log records the events that make the regulatory position reconstructible: each classification completion, every reclassification together with its rationale, the day-one statement issuance for each contributor, every Employer of Record engagement per worker per country, every Pay-As-You-Earn Real-Time Information submission per pay run, the auto-enrolment assessment per worker per pay-reference period, every Enterprise Management Incentive grant notification, and each Actual Market Value pre-clearance per cycle. The log is retained alongside the contracts and personal-tax advice so that a single retrieval window covers the contributor's classification, the contract that gave effect to it, and the lifecycle events that touched it afterward.
Before the early-launch go-live the following items are confirmed against the launch-gate checklist with explicit met-or-not-met status: the classification review for each equity-only contributor; the day-one statement template; the Employer of Record selection per non-United Kingdom country with at least two quotes per country; the Minimum-Wage exposure assessment; the auto-enrolment scheme selection and staging; the holiday-pay accrual ledger; the Enterprise Management Incentive-compatible Articles of Association; the Form VAL231 pre-clearance for the first Actual Market Value; the Employment-Related Securities online account; the working-time-commitment declarations from each option holder; the personal-tax sign-off for every non-United Kingdom-resident option holder; the Employment Allowance eligibility analysis; the A1 certificates for any United Kingdom worker temporarily abroad; the off-payroll-working evidence document; and the live Pay-As-You-Earn Real-Time Information system. Each item appears explicitly on the checklist rather than being inferred from the absence of an objection, so a missing item is visible as a missing item rather than as a silence.