2nd income query

Damoclese

I was hoping to possibly make a few extra pounds producing spreadsheets for small businesses that may not have someone to do this for them. Excel is my main strength, so being a Virtual Assistant is not really an option - especially as i have a fulltime job and was hoping to do this in my spare time.

I've just read the sticky on tax etc and now am completely lost as to what i should do. I don't even know if there is a market for this. I've put a small web/blog page together stating that i am available for anyone requiring my services (BT tradespace) but don't know if i can actually do this now.

Do i need to set myself up as part-time self-employed or can i wait and see what happens? Will people contacting me require a VAT number etc?

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

jessicamb

Damoclese wrote: »

I was hoping to possibly make a few extra pounds producing spreadsheets for small businesses that may not have someone to do this for them. Excel is my main strength, so being a Virtual Assistant is not really an option - especially as i have a fulltime job and was hoping to do this in my spare time.

I've just read the sticky on tax etc and now am completely lost as to what i should do. I don't even know if there is a market for this. I've put a small web/blog page together stating that i am available for anyone requiring my services (BT traderspace) but don't know if i can actually do this now.

Do i need to set myself up as part-time self-employed or can i wait and see what happens? Will people contacting me require a VAT number etc?

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

If you only have a small amount of income to declare then you can inform the inland revenue of how much you owe them (and pay them!) through a letter. Maybe you could try that until you have established that there is demand for providing this service

Grass_Stained_Feet

Just thought I'd say something here, I think there is a demand for this, our company (although not me personally) employ a perosn do do this, it is slightly more complicated than just excel...she programmes our excel to extract info from both our microsoft access and the internet to fill in spreadsheets, and to also help us out with the way we work access. She also makes it so that we can create things like proformas/invoices just by clicking a menu option she created for us. (Not entirely sure how this works as Im not technically inclined but basically we have her programme installed on our comps,which we update every now and then and it makes our excel all special and nice lol)She works freelance and from home, although she is around in working hours and she is on call (i.e if something falls down or we want something sorted we just ring her house phone!), however we have recently been getting someone to do simpler excel stuff for us, luckily enough he was working for us as a temp previously and just fell into that role for a while after his temp contract was up, but had he not been there someone like you would have been useful, as the I.t person I speak about above is understandably quite expensive.

I am sure there are companies who would want this kind of service, although I can imagine finding them and then marketing yourself would be the tricky part....