Joiner charging £15 for invoice

[clothearedpotatohead]

Had someone come out a couple of weeks ago to do a small job.

Quoted £55. Came and did it, all good.

Asked after if he needs my email for the invoice. Crickets.

2 weeks later he’s come back and said it’s £55 cash or £70 with an invoice. “Let me know which works best for you”

I think it’s bullshit. He obviously doesn’t want to declare his income (again, bullshit – pay your taxes) and if he wanted to charge £15 for an invoice he should have said so in advance.

I would just pay cash and not use him again if that doesn’t sit right with you,
particularly given it’s such a small amount of money.

No. Wrong. The person charging is liable for VAT. He can choose to pass this on to the customer but must declare so and provide a VAT number.

Literally said this in the post and in subsequent posts.

I asked him immediately after the job was complete if he needed my email for the invoice. I was ready to pay immediately.

(We were in contact via text and had spoken on the phone and he knew I wouldn’t be there in person.)

He just didn’t reply. He didn’t ask for cash, he just disappeared.

He has reappeared today, 2 weeks later, to arrange payment.

That is a huge leap, you know nothing of this man's life.

You do realise that he might not be VAT registered?
You only have to be VAT registered over a certain threshold.

He might be.
He might not be.

What he might be doing is not declaring it as taxable income. Receipts and invoices complicate that - numbered receipts, numbered invoices etc. Also payments into a bank account need to be explained.

If there weren't any issues with the tradie and his work then I'd happily pay his preferred way - whether someone declares all of their income is the least of the problems with the building trade these days. I don't think it's worth making a stance over such a small job.

I've actually taken to offering cash bonuses for workers if a job is started and completed within agreed timescales and to budget. I paid £300 cash on top of a 1.5k job (on the books) and it's the first time in a loooong time that the tradesmen were there on the agreed day, finished on time and exactly per quote. Cash is king.

He should have been upfront in the beginning when providing a quote

X for no invoice/cash
X for invoice/receipt

Then you could accept or decline based on the quote and/or his morals relating to cash in hand work.

I would just pay the original fee because I wouldn't want to pay the extra money now when it was never discussed. I wouldn't use him again because it's underhand and cheeky to do this so late on.

Some people are happy to take a risk and pay cash in hand to get a job done because at the moment many people just cannot make ends meet, and that includes tradespeople.

So many people don't understand how VAT works - and don't realise that not all people are VAT registered.

It's easy to fiddle the books - and it makes no difference if you are VAT registered or not.

Pay in cash. No invoice. No receipt. It never happened.

The average persons knowledge of how business works in the UK is approaching zero from the wrong side. It's certainly not entrepreneur-grade.

The threshold for having to pay VAT is £80,000 a year

Its not about vat its about undeclared income.
Id ask for an invoice and then id report him to Revenue.

I don’t think I’d have the heart to report him to HMRC

If you are quoted a price for goods or services, it is by default VAT-inclusive unless specified otherwise.

so if he didn’t tell you £55+VAT then he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He cannot just add on a figure for VAT. It is up to him to account to HMRC for the VAT from the £55 he gets from you.

Do not pay him more, no matter what method you pay by!

Often the only way these small businesses manage to survive is by doing a certain amount of cash in hand jobs. Remember millionaires manage to avoid paying huge sums of tax 'legally' whilst us PAYE idiots are paying every single penny.

The tax-avoiding millionaires, whilst infuriating, are a complete red herring. The fact that some people commit murder doesn't make it perfectly fine for you to go around 'just' punching people in the face. Lots of people earn low incomes but still pay their taxes (if they earn over the tax-free threshold).

Like any business, if you can't survive on the prices that you're charging customers, you need to increase your prices. It's not like people will suddenly stop needing tradespeople and you'll go out of business.

I also wonder how many of these businesses are below the threshold to be VAT registered, but still regularly try it on to get an extra 20% themselves on the pretext of (non-due) VAT. Either way, I think it's disgusting to give somebody a price, with no mention of VAT, and then spring it on them after you've done the work. Just because it's money that you have to hand straight to the government, it's still part of the price that your customer has to factor into the cost of the work, before deciding whether to go ahead.

Like with estate agents, there are lots of very honest, diligent, law-abiding tradies out there; but the many dishonest ones bring shade on the whole profession.

Also, I understand that tradespeople like to be paid immediately on completing the work - who wouldn't? - but even people working PT on NMW have to wait until the end of the month to receive their pay, so I don't see why tradies should feel entitled to immediate settlement.

It makes me think of occupations like waiters/waitresses, taxi-drivers, hairdressers and others who widely get/expect tips - with people justifying that they 'need' them to survive as they are so low-paid - but nobody has an answer as to how cleaners, care workers, McDonalds workers, Amazon delivery drivers etc. are expected to be able to survive without having their pay boosted by regular tips.

If you are quoted a price for goods or services, it is by default VAT-inclusive unless specified otherwise.

To be a pedant, only in a consumer setting. Business to business and commercial quotes may exclude VAT.

I realise I may have been a bit harsh on Joe Soap about understanding VAT. After all, Gordon Brown forgot to include VAT when he priced the 2012 Olympics up. We've all done it.

That was in my old job - when I was given my first real budget, I had to ask clearly - does that include or exclude VAT

That seemed to be a hard question for them to answer

That’s why it doesn’t make any sense to quote a non-VAT price to an individual for a job on a residential property.

If i didn't need an invoice for my own tax i would have just asked for bank details and done a transfer

I wonder if he has a business bank account or if it's all one account?

Of course, he may not even use an accountant and just declares his income. So no one actually checks the receipts, invoices and matches up payments to work done.

If he is vat registered then he is adding on more than the vat. Vat of £15 would be on a £75 job not £55.

He is clearly not wanting to declare the income.

He is very wrong to quote a price for the job then add on more when you want an invoice.

I would report him to trading standards and HMRC. How many other people is he ripping off? What if this was someone elderly or vulnerable?

To be a pedant, only in a consumer setting. Business to business and commercial quotes may exclude VAT.

True, but a great many sole-traders and small businesses who almost exclusively deal with individual consumers do regularly rely on pulling the VAT hoodwink.

Call me a cynic, but if anything, I'm guessing that companies that do work for businesses are probably much more diligent at making clear upfront whether extra VAT is due or not - as they know the big businesses won't just shut up and pay it when it was deliberately skated over and not stated/included in the first place, in the way that Hilda in Cheam who's just had her gutters cleaned out might not feel able to question them or object.

We already know that a great many dishonest tradies will charge as much as they think they can get from the customer - especially if they are elderly or perceived as vulnerable - without any relation to the true cost of the work.

A big business probably won’t care about whether VAT is included or not as they are going to be VAT registered themselves and therefore it makes no difference to them.

They will if they're led to believe that the quoted price already includes VAT, so they've budgeted less as a total cos to them.

And they'll definitely not be happy if the tradesperson isn't VAT registered but has still tried to charge them an extra 20% for spurious 'VAT' that obviously cannot be claimed back.

But in this instance the trader is no better of worse off whether you pay cash in hand or £70 on record. It is either the tax man wins or you do!