The reality of being your own boss is daunting. Suddenly, every hour counts for your earning viability, which can be ground to dust with a badly planned schedule. This includes your finances too – payments, invoices and tax returns are just a sliver of the obligations you’ll meet. Everyone, no matter their affinity with self-employment, can shave time off their accounting and bookkeeping. We’d like to throw a few suggestions at you, just to kick off those changes…
1. Ditch paper receipt collection
It’s the 21st century: paper should only be used for sketchpads, memos, and meaningful letters. This is pertinent, because receipts for your freelance transactions can hit you from dozens of angles through the year.
All of them have to be analysed for HMRC; when you’re compiling that Self Assessment return, there might hundreds of disparate scraps in your drawers. We suggest going digital instead. With a tool like FreeAgent, you can whip out your phone, photograph the receipt, and store it until the assessment deadline calls. Physical, manual organisation is a bygone issue.
2. Don’t do your bookkeeping in big batches
Our brains get sluggish when we drown them in data. We’re naturally more alert when approaching a task in sharp, rapid-fire bursts of energy. In terms of your bookkeeping, there’s a temptation to hold it off, week after week, until you set aside a whole Sunday for account management.
But this is detrimental to the speed at which you’ll accomplish it. Chipping away at your finances – with, say, an hours’ attention every week – cuts that mountain down to a nice, scalable duty. It’ll keep you from getting tired, frustrated, and bogged down in more detail than you can handle.
3. Automate your finances
With a bit of foresight, the self-employed can tighten their timekeeping on several fronts – most notably the ways you can control cash coming in and out of your account, without investing extra time and energy in the process.
Unsure whether that new client is going to meet your invoice deadlines? Write a financial penalty in the invoice small-print, to reduce the likelihood that you’ll need to chase payment. You could even automate regular invoices, to cut down the number you need to create each month. A few small tweaks to your finance management can make a world of difference to your workflow.
4. Hire an accountancy firm!
It’s a no-brainer, really, to take on specialist assistance with the stuff you really shouldn’t fret over. Bright Ideas Accountancy want to let you keep making cash, free from the headache of paperwork. We offer basic or premium packages to self-employed professionals around the UK, lending our skills to your tax returns, bookkeeping, expense claims and IR35 compliance, whenever you require our help.
So don’t burn out: pick up the phone instead, and call Bright Ideas on 0161 669 4221 for a no-obligation chat. Our talent is your time-saving; there’s a lot we can do as your earning potential ticks over…
