As a serial freelancer, I have often learned the hard way about how to get ‘good’ at being self employed. Over the last year, I have developed and delivered a new workshop called “Being Really Good At Being Self Employed” and I’d like to share the resources I have prepared here to help other freelancers (and especially those just starting out in self employment).
If you’re not sure what counts as self-employment (and what doesn’t), here’s a set of questions that might help define and make sense of it all!
If you are self employed in the UK, you’ll need to submit a tax return to HMRC before 31st Jan each year (online). Some people find this pretty stressful, but keeping your records up-to-date should make the whole process far easier. This guide gives useful steps to easy record keeping to make it as stress-free as possible!
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Doing Your Tax Return (slides) – Rachel Dobbs
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Self Employment: Allowable Expenses – Rachel Dobbs
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Self Employed Tax Checklist (example) – Rachel Dobbs
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Self Employed Income & Expenses Spreadsheet (example) – Rachel Dobbs
Are you are new to being self-employed or are asked to submit an invoice for the work you do? This quick guide shows you what you need to include, and how to chase the late payments.
This set of resources explains:
- how to calculate your day rate – the price you’ll charge for delivering a service, when people are buying your time
- how Cost Plus pricing works – the price you’ll charge customers for a product, when people are buying your stuff.
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Pricing Your Work & Your Time (slides) – Rachel Dobbs
Portfolio working describes an approach to freelance and self-employed work. This might mean working with a range of different organisations, clients or individuals. Alternatively, portfolio workers might secure income through a mix of different activities, self-employment and part-time employment contracts.
This set of slides talks you through the benefits & downsides of this way of working and gives some useful suggestions for how to manage it better.
Precarious work (self-employed, freelance, zero hours etc) is becoming increasingly the norm for countless workers. With this in mind, how can we ensure that the work we do does us more good than harm? This self-care checklist offers an easy way to choose your next gig as a precarious worker.
This set of resources gives some useful info & advice on how to manage your time as a freelancer. Most importantly, it also gives a clear description of how to break down tasks & prepare your own workplans to make sure you get things done – on time & without stress!
If you find these resources useful, let me know in the comments below, or on twitter @RachelDobbs1. All of the resources I produce are available to download for FREE, but if you’d like to contribute to my future projects, say thank you or just do something nice for a fellow creative practitioner, feel free to donate by clicking the button below…