This week I tuned in for an IdeasTap webinar about the mysterious "Big T", aka the tax man. Listening avidly from the bus on the way home from work, Tax Talk For Freelancers was delivered by Alistair of Bambridge Accountants and was packed with useful nuggets of golden info for independent creative business folk.
All this bookkeeping financial stuff is definitely a topic which makes more sense to me when somebody vocalises it, as letting myself pour over guidelines and terms can create more questions that answers. After just over a year as a sole-trader and having submitted one fairly straightforward initial tax return, things had naturally gone up a notch and I wanted to get more savvy about record keeping and good financial practice; something that can be hard to come by as a free resource and even harder to digest.
The session was incredibly useful, and tied up some loose ends for me in terms of things that may or may not be expenses, how really to calculate the use of your bedroom as an office, and whether some of the more enjoyable parts of the illustration lifestyle can be considered work.
Here are the top 5 things that I learned:
