First Time Out On My Own

It's been a crazy month! From leaving the world of engineering, to finding what I thought was a fairly good techy job, leaving that after a week, going into the temping world (yawn) and now all of a sudden I am fully self employed and already busy.

There's a nice gap in the market it seems. There are people out there being priced out of PC maintainence by the shop fronts, and many complaints of insatisfactory work being undertaken. The only logical thing was for me to step in, get some businesss cards printed and start filling in the gaps. I've found self marketing a lot of fun, with a fair bit of leg work and driving involved.

I've had everything come back at me, from senior citizens who need help getting on line, to naughty kids who end up with nasty colds and flus on their laptops.

Once you get into it, the process of becoming self employed is not so bad, the only bugbear is having to wait for my unique tax ID number to come through (I've only been on PAYE before). I now have this strange etheric conection to all my reciepts and bank statments, and at this stage look forward to being my own accountant.

Oh yes, while I am small I will be using my current account for business, because having a business account is not a legal requirement. All you have to do is highlight expenditure and income on your statements with a highlighter pen, along side keeping records in a cashbook or software. (check out PC utilities for some pretty good freeware).

Being mobile, my only real overheads are petrol, and when a customer does ask me to bring a machine home, then I'm allowed to calculate how much electricity I'm using in relation to work time.


So at the moment it seems the way to go is to do it all your self whilst you are starting out. When things get silly then bring in the accoutants etc.