Tag: business

Net gains (3)

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www.why not?

Every creative freelance should have a website. This need not cost a fortune or involve paying someone else to build it for you. These days it is relatively simple to build a basic website of your own, using templates other people have designed that you can tweak to suit your own needs.

Short URLs

The first thing you need to think about is your domain name: this is the words and letters that appear after the www. in a URL (the address on the internet showing at the top of your web browser).

Although you clearly want your name, or your business name, or something easily identifiable as you, you also want something short, if possible. It's much easier to give out a short, memorable, domain name than a long one. You will also be able to set up email addresses using your domain name and short email addresses are better than long ones as there is less scope for people inaccurately typing in the e-mail address.

I learned this the hard way so I have gone from chris@ whealassociates.com to chriswheal.com and finally to wheal.co.

What you need for a website

These days there are web hosts that provide all you need. A basic hosting package can cost a little over £2 a month. Registering a .co.uk domain name will cost about £7 a year. So for about £35 a year you can have your own website, which you can add to and edit without paying anybody else.

A web host that provides a control panel interface will often allow you to install a free content management system, such as WordPress or Joomla. The content management system effectively is a website building tool. Within WordPress, for example, there are hundreds of free themes (templates) that you can choose from, many of them with significant flexibility in terms of layout, colour and fonts.

You don't need much on your website. You need an "about" page that perhaps includes your CV. You might want to include some examples of your work and some endorsements or recommendations from clients, for example. Your website need only be three or four pages to cover most of this. Feel free to add more.

Change is the only constant

But what your website must do is change frequently and the easiest way to do that is to blog. You do not need to blog about every tiny thing you do but try to update it with something newsworthy or a relevant comment as often as you can. Set yourself a target of at least twice a week.

You will also need to ensure your website has plenty of links to other relevant websites, particularly websites that include your own work or for whom you have worked as clients. You might also include newsfeeds (RSS) and your own social media status updates (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have easy to follow instructions to create your own status update widgets to go on your website).

It is also worth spending a small amount of time making sure your website is search engine optimised. Most content management systems have plug-ins (extra functions) freely available that enable you to write extra information to help search engines find you. But more on that later…

The taxman cometh (3)

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Get an accountant

Every creative freelance should hire an accountant to do their accounts and file their tax returns.

Many freelances refuse to pay an accountant, preferring instead to struggle through their self-assessment form themselves. Well good luck to you, if that’s you.

That’s exactly what the government wants you to do because it knows you will not be deducting all the costs and making use of all the allowances that you could have used. You will be paying more tax than you should have done and Chancellor George Osborne will be delighted.

I’m good a maths. I understand numbers better than most journalists (many of us think of ourselves as wordsmiths first and foremost). I’ve worked on several financial and accountancy magazines and websites. I’ve interviewed chancellors of the Exchequer, accounting standards setters and bigwigs in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. But I pay an accountant to go through my books and put everything in order.

Pay for professionals

Actors hate it when non-Equity extras get used, when the am-dram queens think they’re as good as drama-school trained professionals. Journalists get riled when teachers get the job of covering sports matches or students get to write gig reviews, just because they’ll do it for the free entry ticket rather than charge a proper fee. We’ve all seen the well-meaning amateur make a hopeless hash of a job we could have done to a professional standard.

Well, it’s the same with accountancy. Being good at maths doesn’t make me an accountant.

An accountant will be able to do your accounts faster and more accurately. They will know the tax allowances that benefit you. They will know what expenses you can legitimately offset against your income and those you cannot. And they will know where to find answers to questions much faster than you can.

 Knowing the market

If you use an accountant who knows your sector and has other clients in similar lines of business they will know the specific schemes that operate in your sector – film and TV have their own rules, for example - and what others in your field have successfully claimed or unsuccessfully tried to claim.

And there is an additional benefit of using a professional accountant: should the taxman investigate and discover your accountant has got things wrong, you can sue your accountant – those regulated by their professional bodies are required to have professional indemnity insurance to cover just such an error.

Next: How to choose your accountant.

The taxman cometh (1)

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Happy new year

Today is the first day of the new tax year (it runs to 5 April 2013). As of today you can earn £7,440 over the next 12 months without paying any tax.

But that is £7,440 after expenses. That’s after you have deducted the cost of travel, of equipment, of any studio time or other professional services you might have needed during the year. It’s after you have deducted the cost of working from home (if you do). It is even after you have deducted the costs of being a member of the appropriate union.

So April is a good time to start thinking seriously about how you keep your accounts, how you organise your financial affairs and how you operate as a business. That is key: as freelances, we are small businesses. When it comes to money we need to think of ourselves not as creative people but as businesses that provide creative services or products.

By the end of April I hope to have given you plenty of ideas about how you can make more of the money you earn yours by keeping better records and using the full range of tax allowances and benefits available to you.