Self-employment or not bother?

Baking_Mad

Hi, not sure if I'm in the right place to ask but hopefully someone can help

I've been thinking for a while to run a small business from home buying stuff wholesale and reselling on ebay

What puts me off is the hustle of self assesment with HMRC. To be honest, I'm not even sure how it would work, my questions are:

1) For the self assessment would I need to print off every single ebay/paypal receipt?

2) what can I claim as expenditure (outgoings) when it comes to ebay? would that include postage costs/ebay/paypal fees? or none?

I would really appreciate any help with this. Thanks

InsideInsurance

1) For self assessment you dont need to provide anything with the form and if your turnover is under £75,000 (from memory) you basically only enter 2 numbers (revenue and allowable expenses totals). They do naturally choose to validate some returns for one reason or another and it is only if this were to happen that you'd need to be able to provide evidence to support your numbers

2) what you have mentioned + cost of whats sold + potentially a proportion of household costs if they are key to the business (eg part of your broadband fees, mileage to getting to the post office etc)

Baking_Mad

Great, thank you very much. One more question, should I be randomly chosen to present the supporting information, i.e. receipts , etc would I be able to retrieve these details from ebay several months after the sale of an item took place? I might be wrong but I was under impression that ebay only keep the record of transactions on your account for 6 mths?

SeduLOUs

You should never rely on somebody else to keep your information for you. You can download all of your ebay invoices either as pdf or excel file and you should definately do this, even if only for your personal reference.

Baking_Mad

Thanks for this. Any chance you could explain in more detail how to do this? or perhaps give me the link to ebay explaining how to print off the invoices. Sorry, I never even knew you could do that, I just thought I'd have to print each transaction receipt separately.