muddle through self assessment or accountant?

[stilllovingmysleep]

Hi just wondered if most of you freelancers (who don't earn enough to hire an accountant) manage to do the self assessment on your own or is it really hard? Where can I find some tips?

Have a go at doing your return online, by yourself. Then print it out and book an hours time with an accountant. They can talk thorough what you've done, answer any questions etc.

Then go back and make any changes. It's much cheaper than getting an accountant to do the whole return, you are still benefitting from their advice and you are learning how to manage the process for yourself.

I did this for my first two returns and I'll probably do it again this year, just to make sure I'm not getting into any bad habits.

Oh and the fact you have employed and self employed doesn't make things more complicated so I wouldn't worry about that.

You don't need to have a local accountant really. We have a few London based clients looking for a cheaper non-local service and I work in a practice oop north.

Unless your business is very document heavy (loads of bits of paper/receipts) then you can usually communicate everything perfectly via e-mail and the occaisional snail mail envelope

I agree with you GirlfromIpanema: it seems (from my search so far) that accountants outside London quote much lower fees than London ones. So I think that's what I'll do in the end. Fine to do it all via phone / email I think (I don't have complicated issues in any case).

I think it is easy, but I have straightforward affairs and very few things where I have to think 'should I claim for that?'. Three different income sources, 3 pages on online tax return, job done.

the harder bit is keeping all the records and pulling the info together, and the one time I had an accountant I still ended up doing all that anyway.

the online tax return software works very well, and if you do it all about July it whizzes through; I've had overpayments back in 3 days.

We hired an accountant in London for DH's self employed tax return. First one turned out (when we needed certified documents for mortgage application) not to actually BE an accountant. Or not what the bank considered an accountant. Even though she called herself one. So we had to pay an (expensive) firm to rubber stamp all her work. Then moved to the expensive firm, who charged through the nose, insisted we could claim dodgy things like TV licence back (you might get ideas from watching tv, yes?....errrrr........no), and then told us we had to take out insurance to cover ourselves in case the Inland Revenue investigated us (which to be fair they should have done if we had claimed the stuff the firm were telling us to claim). So now we do it ourselves. The IR have made two errors in calculating our tax based on our forms - we queried both and received an apology. I think we are better off without the accountants.

Janinlondon - you can clearly fallen foul to a large problem, anyone can call themselves an accountant which is why I always advise people to go to a properly qualified Chartered accountant. We can all sign mortgage references, those of us who work outside the big Lonson firms are not the ridiculous prices you will have experienced.

In terms of tax investigations insurance, it is a common thing as investigations can go on a very long time and became very costly even if there is nothing wrong. I don't sell it myself but do advise clients to get it with their annual business insurance.

Doing it yourself is a risk.