A small office can move over a weekend without losing a working day. Pack on Friday afternoon, load on Friday evening or Saturday, unload on Sunday, and have your IT support in on Sunday evening. What decides whether Monday works is mostly done in the four weeks before: access, inventory, IT and paperwork.

The lifting is the easy part. The building is usually the hard one.

This is the checklist we would work through for an office of a few rooms. It assumes you cannot afford to close on a weekday, which is why most of our commercial jobs run at the weekend.

1. Pick the weekend, then book the building

Choose the date first, then book everything the two buildings control, at both ends:

The goods lift, if there is one. Many shared and serviced buildings only allow moves in booked slots, and some do not allow them at weekends at all.
The loading bay or service entrance.
Parking. In Newcastle city centre most streets are permit-controlled. The council's parking dispensation lets a vehicle park where it usually cannot while loading or unloading, it lists removals as a reason, it costs £30 per vehicle, and you apply online at least 3 working days ahead (Newcastle City Council, dispensations and suspensions).

Then tell us the slot times. A move working to a two-hour lift booking is planned differently from one that is not. Our parking and access guide has the rest, and our Newcastle page covers the city's streets.

2. Ask the building what paperwork it wants

Managing agents and commercial landlords commonly want evidence of the removal firm's insurance before they let a van near the door, and some want it days in advance.

Our answer: we carry £5 million public liability and £20,000 goods in transit cover per claim, and we will send evidence of either on request. Ask us as soon as you have a date.

3. Write the inventory, and include the heavy things

A fixed price for an office is priced from what you tell us is in the building, so the invoice matches the quote you took to your finance team. That only works if the inventory is honest — and complete.

Count:

Desks, chairs and screens, and whether the desks come apart
Filing cabinets, and whether they will be emptied
Server cabinets, safes and heavy plant — these must be declared in advance so we bring the right equipment and crew. Undeclared, they may have to be booked as a separate job.
Anything in a store room, a basement or a loft that nobody has looked at in years

Office moves are quoted by hand rather than through an online form, because access, out-of-hours working and the building all change the job. A short video walkthrough of every room is the quickest way to give us all of it.

4. Book your IT support for Sunday evening

This is the honest downside of booking us for an office: we do not reconnect IT. We can disconnect equipment and move it safely, but bringing a network, a phone system or a server back up is specialist work and belongs with your own IT provider.

So:

Book them now, for the new premises, after we have finished rather than during.
Photograph the back of every machine and the comms cabinet before anything is unplugged.
Check the broadband is live at the new address before the weekend, not on Monday morning.

5. Sort the paperwork that follows the address

Some of this has deadlines, and none of it is something a removals firm can do for you.

Registered office. If your registered office is moving, tell Companies House. GOV.UK says the address does not officially change until it is registered there, and Companies House then tells HMRC (GOV.UK, change your company address).
Trading address. That one you tell HMRC yourself, and Companies House comes first if both are changing (GOV.UK, tell HMRC about a change to your business).
VAT. If you are VAT-registered, HMRC wants a change of main business address within 30 days, and a penalty is possible if you are late (GOV.UK, changing your VAT details).
Everything else — the bank, the insurer, your suppliers, the Google listing, the website footer and the email signature.

6. Pack by desk, label by room

Give each person a box or two and one rule: their own desk, labelled with their name and the room at the new office. Shared things — the kitchen, the stationery cupboard, the files — want one named person each.

Two things that save time on Sunday:

Number the rooms on a floor plan of the new office and put the number on every box.
Keep the keys, the passwords and the cheque book with you, not in a box.

7. Plan the clear-out at the old premises

If furniture is not coming with you, decide what happens to it before the weekend rather than after. A commercial clearance is priced by volume alongside the move itself. Our waste carrier registration is CBDU574812, so anything being disposed of leaves the premises legally, and you get the number for your own records.

8. On the weekend itself

We work from 6am to 10pm, seven days a week, and charge the same for a Saturday, a Sunday or a bank holiday as for a Tuesday. That is most of what makes a weekend move possible for a small business — the out-of-hours surcharge most firms add is not there.

On the day:

Have one person on site at each end who can make decisions and has the floor plan.
Walk the old premises with us at the start. We photograph the items, the access route, the lift and the loading bay before and after, so if a landlord later raises a mark on a corridor wall, there is a record of what it looked like when we arrived.
Do a last walk-round before we lock up — cupboards, the comms room, the bike store.

What if something changes?

Changes are free with at least 48 hours' notice. A 30% deposit holds the date and the balance is due on completion. Access problems we were not told about — a bay that closes at six, a lift out of service, a long carry from the nearest legal parking — can change the job and the price, which is why point 1 comes first.

More on how we handle commercial work is on our business removals page.

When you have a weekend in mind, tell us about your office move.