- Original Poster
- #1
I also think I may have taken some really bad advise.
I'm 19. I have a part time job, and also do lots of IT work on an hourly rate.
I was advised at some point that I don't need to declare myself as self-employed if I'm earning less than 5k a year.
Knowing I'm coming near this point, and that I suddenly have a lot of projects starting at good rates this year, I thought I best register myself soon!
Today I recieved my first cheque from a company made payable to my 'company' name, whereas before all my payments have been made out directly to my person and I've put them directly in my personal account without giving it so much as a second thought.
I don't have a business account, and my account isn't set up as a 'trading as', so I know I cannot put that money in the bank!
This gave me the perfect prompt to set myself up as self-employed and open a business bank account, low and behold however I realise you're meant to register yourself immediately or face penalty fines, help!
To make it much worse I think I took my first (albeit very small) payment back in march 2008! I've just contacted my bank and asked to have a full statement from feb 2008 (charged me £5 for that one!), as I haven't kept any logs of my payments and know I may have missed the occasional invoice to one company in particular.
I'm starting to think I've made a pretty big mess here, panic ensues. I don't actually have much money in my account right now, so facing possibly big penalty fines could be a freaking nightmare. Annoyingly I'm sitting on quite a lot of cash in cheque form that I can't access!
How should I best proceed, and how much am I looking at paying out in penalties.
Freaking out here a little bit :|
I'm 19. I have a part time job, and also do lots of IT work on an hourly rate.
I was advised at some point that I don't need to declare myself as self-employed if I'm earning less than 5k a year.
Knowing I'm coming near this point, and that I suddenly have a lot of projects starting at good rates this year, I thought I best register myself soon!
Today I recieved my first cheque from a company made payable to my 'company' name, whereas before all my payments have been made out directly to my person and I've put them directly in my personal account without giving it so much as a second thought.
I don't have a business account, and my account isn't set up as a 'trading as', so I know I cannot put that money in the bank!
This gave me the perfect prompt to set myself up as self-employed and open a business bank account, low and behold however I realise you're meant to register yourself immediately or face penalty fines, help!
To make it much worse I think I took my first (albeit very small) payment back in march 2008! I've just contacted my bank and asked to have a full statement from feb 2008 (charged me £5 for that one!), as I haven't kept any logs of my payments and know I may have missed the occasional invoice to one company in particular.
I'm starting to think I've made a pretty big mess here, panic ensues. I don't actually have much money in my account right now, so facing possibly big penalty fines could be a freaking nightmare. Annoyingly I'm sitting on quite a lot of cash in cheque form that I can't access!
How should I best proceed, and how much am I looking at paying out in penalties.
Freaking out here a little bit :|
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