This part of our website looks to help the person who is self-employed and who “works for him- or herself”.
Often it is hard to know whether you are employed or self-employed, especially in those industries or businesses where employers have strong control. But it is important for you to understand, not only for tax, but also for employment law purposes. We have therefore provided guidance which will hopefully answer the question for you in our Employed or self-employed? section.
Assuming that you are self-employed then we want to show you how to check your Tax allowances and tell you how to go about Checking your National Insurance contributions.
In our section on Business profits, expenses and capital allowances we discuss how you register with HMRC, deal with pre-trading expenses, work out your taxable profits and how to deal with capital spending. If your business runs into problems you also need to understand how to deal with Losses.
One of the extra tasks that greet the self-employed is the need to complete a Self-assessment tax return. The self-employed have a lot of control over their businesses and HMRC want to ensure that the correct information is being given to them, this can lead to the business dealings being investigated and we provide a guide to dealing with the consequences in our section on Enquiries, penalties and debt.
If you want to set aside monies for your retirement by way of pension then the rules for personal pensions and retirement annuities (where no employer need to be involved) are the same for both self-employed and employed. You can find more information in the section Pensions for the self-employed.
Finally we give you a few pointers as to where you can get further information about how to deal with any Value Added Tax liability.
