Join in if you are self-employed and work from home

tyllwyd

skintjenny wrote: »

in reality i only need perhaps £100 to start up, then £1000 per month to cover my personal and business expenses- is that still a lot?
does everyone on here have a business account and a personal account? because we were told on the course to have seperate ones, but im wondering if thats really necessary?

£100 to get started doesn't sound too much. £1000 per month might be a lot - it depends very much on what your business is! £1000 net per month is £12K per year, so that's £15K gross, plus expenses, of course. So you need to be making on average about £290 profit per week - do you think that is realistic? And remember you won't be working every week of the year, so if you work, say 48 weeks, that's more like £310.

I don't think it is a legal requirement to have a separate business account, but if you don't you may find that your personal and business expenditure gets all muddled up and it will make life much more difficult when it comes to doing your accounts at the end of the year. Again, it might make a difference what kind of business you are running - I get paid by cheque or bank transfer once or twice a month, never cash, so it is easy to keep track. If you are making sales and money arrives in dribs and drabs, and you have to buy stock, for your own sanity it is worth keeping it all separate.

BlondeHeadOn

skintjenny wrote: »

does everyone on here have a business account and a personal account? because we were told on the course to have seperate ones, but im wondering if thats really necessary?
looks like everyone is having a very productive day- go us!

I have two 'personal' bank accounts, one that really is 'personal' and the other I opened to use for all 'business' transactions. I just transfer from one to the other for drawings etc. It makes keeping track of business accounts very simple.

I didn't want to pay the charges for a proper business account, so when I started up I decided to try running things this way for a while and see if it worked - and it does, for me. And in good MSE style, my banking is all free!

I mostly get paid by cheque or BACS transfer, so that is all very easy.

I think I'd get very confused if I was mixing business and personbak expenditure in the same account - this way they are separate.

The accounts are HSBC and First Direct, by the way.....

HTH

BlondeHeadOn

..... Just to report, spurred on by the thought of having to post again on this site if I hadn't done it, I - the great procrastinator - have .....

.... wait for it ....


..... finally DONE MY FILING !!!



I am now feeling very virtuous.

Purpleroses

Purpleroses wrote: »

anyhoo back to work, not too much to do today:

[strike]update accounts[/strike] done
[strike]send out invoice[/strike] done
clean, pack and post suit. delayed until monday so suit doesn't get creased in box over weekend
[strike]e-mail agent[/strike] done
[strike]finish last sample card[/strike] done
[strike]tidy shop[/strike] done

just going to tidy the office and finish filing now and that's it for the day.

ps well done blondeheadon for finishing your filing :T

Darth_Trader

I thought I'd join in here, having found this thread at lunchtime today. I'm self-employed from home (or wherever!) doing internet selling and content publishing. I got into it last year after redundancy from the old career (which took 14 years of training, and only lasted for seven before all the jobs disappeared to Asia).

Year one was bad from a revenues pov, due to dodgy IT - which I'm currently sorting out. Positive spin: at least it got me used to working 100-120 hour weeks!

So far I've used other companies' platforms for selling, in order to avoid tying capital up in inventory (eg eBay thru Squidoo, Amazon, CafePress); and published on equivalent sites (eg Squidoo, Hubpages, Triond etc). This upcoming tax year I'll 'get professional' and start my own sites on separate web hosting so that third parties aren't taking a slice off all my income streams. Any ideas on a decent UK web hosting co? I'm thinking of eukhost at the moment.

And to chip in with some books I have found useful enough to now require replacement due to broken spines and general tattiness through extensive use:

Think & Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill) - first published in 1937 and most contemporary 'self-help' books on the subject borrow from this one.

Teach Yourself Entrepreneurship (Alex Macmillan) - I especially like the bit contrasting Employee thinking and Entrepreneur thinking.

Leap! Ditch Your Job, Start Your Own Business & Set Yourself Free (Ian Sanders) - title says it all really!

Start Your Business Week By Week (Steve Parks) - a nice, well-structured step-by-step guide for people in employment , but wanting to go it alone.

And now I'm off to figure out what I need to do to get a decent Wordpress theme on non-WP hosting. TTFN.

cheekymonkey20

RIGHT sorted everything out at work.

Heres the situ.. this morning about 8.30 i recieved a phone call from my manager saying that the big boss wasnt happy about yday, and that he had saved me from the big boss sacking me for having half a day cuz i fainted. He then said he wants to talk with me cuz my figures were !!!! (word for word). Obv was really upset and called the big boss to hear it from the horses mouth. He wasnt aware of the hours i worked, the fact that i hadnt had any lunch breaks or anything and told me to rest up and we'll start on monday afresh like i should have done, hes gonna sit down with me and do things properly, he is also getting rid of all the managers due to missmanaging staff. So I am very pleased with this now. How it should be.

Going to frankie and bennies tonight, and just about to have a bit of a tidy up. Then tommorrow gonna do some reading up on some insurance policies.

Hows everyones day going??

xxx

Seaxwyn

skintjenny wrote: »

does everyone on here have a business account and a personal account? because we were told on the course to have seperate ones, but im wondering if thats really necessary?

I don't - for years I had just one bank account, now I have two but they are both business and personal. As I keep good records of all business-related income and expenditure I've never seen this as a problem.

I sometimes think of opening a separate business account but I am put off by the thought of the time delays involved in transferring money from one account to the other - it already takes long enough to get paid! And I can't really think of any strong advantages in having separate accounts. I have been successfully operating as a sole trader since 1996 and have never had any questions from HMRC.

Seaxwyn

skintjenny wrote: »

in reality i only need perhaps £100 to start up, then £1000 per month to cover my personal and business expenses- is that still a lot?

Remember that if you need £1000 per month then you need to earn £1300/month, because you need to save money for tax and NI.

Ballymackeonan

It's been one of those days where I started with not enough sleep and things went downhill from there! Nothing seemed to go smoothly. At the same time, there was one "up" as well as the "downs" - one of my client companies has recommended me to a bigger business, referrals like that are the best - and cheapest - advertising!.

Recommendation -

A really useful book - Marketing Judo (John Barnes/Richard Richardson) - "building your business using brains not budget", especially good for start-ups, and an interesting read as well.

On cashflows, if you can manage it, do a couple of versions - optimistic and pessimistic - and try then to do a realistic one between them! It isn't just for before you start, you should refer to it regularly as your business develops and see how things have changed from what you thought would happen... If it's better, what are you doing right, if it's worse, what action do you need to take?

I'm attending a seminar on Open Source software on Monday evening and will be looking at the open source accounts programme over the weekend, will report back on how easy or otherwise it is to use. That's what self-employed weekends are like.... especially since the weather looks likely to be foul. I already use Open Office for some things - particularly if I need to send a document as PDF as you can export in this format from the word processor and that saves having to buy Adobe!

nbedin

Kelie
Can't you get mobile Broadband to work at all, from a dongle?
Nigel