Maximising income - Mystery Shopping? Surveys? (Part Two)

josie

Yes, I quite often get dollars - helped towards my NYC shopping trip earlier this year. Just watch out on the ones where you have to use a debit card, as your bank will charge you for this as a cash advance - don't ask me why, when it's a debit card anyway!

Having said that today when I did one and had to pay by debit card it came up as a cash withdrawal on the receipt, so don't see why that would be a cash advance. It'd be like withdrawing the amount to buy the currency, surely?

I stick to only getting currency when you can pay cash. The current PIMS walk in mail ones are debit card only.

josie

Timmne wrote: »

It's a funny one really - I usually just claim the minimum I need to spend - i.e. £5.00 and use that much as the expense in my accounts and then whatever I spend over that is out of my "capital account" (i.e. take it away from cash but not from profit)....

SO if I'm off out for a MS meal and get reimbursed £30 for it and I spend £40 then I just include the cost of £30 in my accounts and the extra tenner just gets lost in my own finances!

Make any sense?

Thanks.

It's a funny one as in the Post Office for example you have to spend a minimum of £5, well in actual fact if you're buying stamps (often the only option, unless it's a stand alone PO) you end up buying books and it comes to more, so is it legit to claim £5.50 or whatever instead of just the straight £5?

Likewise for a meal for two, as you say, you might go over the allowance of £30 and spend £40, so would that be considered a tax dodge to put down the expenses as £40?

bonniethemadcat

Muddymouse

Open two windows so that you can have the test in one window and the training notes in another to double check you have the right answers. Make sure you read the questions carefully because some are written confusingly and although one answer may look right it can actually be another i.e all of the above answers. They use these questions when you get accepted, in the tests before each assignment. HTH

catwoman150

josie wrote: »

Yes, I quite often get dollars - helped towards my NYC shopping trip earlier this year. Just watch out on the ones where you have to use a debit card, as your bank will charge you for this as a cash advance - don't ask me why, when it's a debit card anyway!

Having said that today when I did one and had to pay by debit card it came up as a cash withdrawal on the receipt, so don't see why that would be a cash advance. It'd be like withdrawing the amount to buy the currency, surely?

I stick to only getting currency when you can pay cash. The current PIMS walk in mail ones are debit card only.

Is that not a bit suspect as you only have to buy something for a £5 or do you spend more than that when you get dollars.

josie

catwoman150 wrote: »

Is that not a bit suspect as you only have to buy something for a £5 or do you spend more than that when you get dollars.

Yes, I usually ask for $10 for a present to put in someone's card and they give me a nice crisp one as it's for a present! Mind you, currently $10 would cost you less than £5, given the fab exchange rate, so might have to go up to $15. Well, next hol is skiing in France, so will get 10 euros and that's just over £7. But you could go for the same story, to get a 10 euro note.

Lu_T

Hi Catwoman

You should be able to get some advice from the tax office. My understanding is that you can claim 50% of the cost in the first year, then 50% of the remainder for so many years before finally writing it off. So you can offset £24.98 in this tax year, £12.49 the year after, £6.25 after that etc.

Do get some clarification though. HTH

BTW I've just been accepted for GfK/NOP and Optimum Contact. Might register for GAP too. Thanks for all the advice. I've completed the GfK questionnaiare today (after a few tries!) and it has gone through fine. It did have a bit of a fit at one point though as I had one Q wrong, changed 1 answer and it said I had 3 wrong! Have e-mailed but since got all of them right.

L

Timmne

Lu_T wrote: »

Hi Catwoman

You should be able to get some advice from the tax office. My understanding is that you can claim 50% of the cost in the first year, then 50% of the remainder for so many years before finally writing it off. So you can offset £24.98 in this tax year, £12.49 the year after, £6.25 after that etc.

Do get some clarification though. HTH

L

Lu T is talking about initially 'capitalising' your printer and then depreciating it over a few years. As depreciation is not allowable as a deduction for tax, it's really not worth the bother.

If you did do this you would have to firstly capitalise it, depreciate it and then remove the depreciation from the net profit again to calculate what are the tax equivalent of depreciation, called capital allowances, and charge these to the net profit for a taxable profit. For a £50 printer this is totally not worth it, as the result is the same (well, the rates are slightly different but over say three years, the result will be almost identical. The calculations for this are not worth getting to grips with, for a potential tax saving of £5-10 in the first year (this saving is offset in the next couple of years too).

So my advice remains that you should just set the cost of the printer against your income (if the printer is purely for MS use) or if it's going to be used by you personally, charge your MS accounts with a cost per page for the printing.

A_little_stressed!!

I still cannot get into Retail eyes & have to input a report tonight! I used the IP address posted before which took me to the home page, but git IE error on the next page! HELP!

Timmne

josie wrote: »

Thanks.

It's a funny one as in the Post Office for example you have to spend a minimum of £5, well in actual fact if you're buying stamps (often the only option, unless it's a stand alone PO) you end up buying books and it comes to more, so is it legit to claim £5.50 or whatever instead of just the straight £5?

If you have to spend £5.50 minimum to complete the job then I can't see any issues with that - it's all in the explaining to the tax man in the unlikely case of an investigation

Likewise for a meal for two, as you say, you might go over the allowance of £30 and spend £40, so would that be considered a tax dodge to put down the expenses as £40?

Probably so, but it depends what you bought I suppose.... you could have bought the more expensive options of all the items they asked you to buy, in which case it could probably be seen as allowable. If you'd gone over because you went all out and had loads of drinks, big desserts etc that weren't in the brief then you should probably just charge the £30 to your accounts in the example above.

You can see that I use the words "probably" etc a lot - this is because it's all in the opinion of the particular tax inspector a lot of the time, usually in situations like this. Just make sure you only claim what you genuinely think is fair/right!

wax

A_little_stressed!! wrote: »

I still cannot get into Retail eyes & have to input a report tonight! I used the IP address posted before which took me to the home page, but git IE error on the next page! HELP!

I am in the same boat, I have 2 assignments to enter. I spoke to them earlier and they just say they are aware of the problem and are trying to get it fixed.