08 Jun 2026
Like many startups, we wanted to put in place an employee incentive scheme to help recruit, reward and retain key employees.
A quick Google search revealed a promising one-stop-shop platform offering a quick and easy way to implement such a scheme, though closer inspection of their terms yielded some concerning caveats, and our 15 years of experience running an Enterprise SaaS business have taught us (sometimes the hard way) that when it comes to legal and financial matters, it is best to err on the side of caution and invest in professional advice. After all, as the infamous idiom goes, “if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”
It quickly became clear, from talking with our advisors, that setting up an employee incentive scheme was no exception.
Did we want to offer direct shares or share options? Had we considered the benefits of holding a joint s431 election or the need to run a PAYE payroll to enable our ERS return, even though we did not yet have any salaried employees?
These were just a few of the myriad points we needed to consider to ensure our scheme was fit for purpose and, most importantly, compliant.
As an AI-native startup, we believe passionately in the transformative power of AI, examples of which my co-founders and I have written about in previous posts, though when it comes to matters which require experience to handle effectively, as well as accountability for any advice that is relied upon in the handling, the human touch is essential.
LLMs excel at text-based reading comprehension and recall, but their accuracy drops on highly technical, multi-step processes, unfortunately inherent to matters legal and financial.
As demonstrated by a ruling made against Air Canada, which tried to avoid responsibility for the output of their chatbot by arguing it was "responsible for its own actions”, in the era of AI, organisations remain responsible for the decisions they take, and HMRC, for one very important thing, has zero patience for monkey business.
Author: Benjamin Colchester
