HELP PLEASE BECAUSE I HAVEN'T A CLUE

[pinksancerre]

I work f/t for the NHS. I have been offered extra work speaking at conferences for private companies. I spoke to my manager about it who suggested I do the speaking privately ( she has done the same) and take AL from my job. This is because the amount of money I will earn will be much more valuable to me than my employer. (we are talking less than £1000 a year)

So how do I do this legitimately. I have to produce an invoice and what do I do about tax etc.

bumping in case anyone knows

it depends a bit how much you do.
if you do a very small amount of ad hoc freelance work you don;t need to do anything - except tell HMRC that you'll need a tax return for the relevant tax year. they'll send it to you and you can then fill in your extra work under the section on extra income. in fact, if it's less then a grand then some tax offices just let you do some form of declaration without filling in the full tax return. (the upper limit for this is in the region of £3k - I know because I came in about £50 over!)

best thing to do now is phone HMRC and check. however I would warn you that this seems to be one area open to interpretation and you can get different opinions as to what you need to do from different advisors. I earned about £3k lecturing one year and was first told the above. then when I called a year later about getting the actual tax return form sent to me to fill in I was told that I should have registered as self-employed. I phoned back 5 minutes later to get the view of a third person and they told me not.

when it came to filling in the tax return it was also a mite confusing (though this could well have changed by the time you do one) because it wasn;t immediately obvious where to put it - the examples of extra income didn;t seem to encompass this kind of work at all; and the self-employed bit made no sense at all - and again different advisors told me different things. but eventually one said very firmly "it's ok, if you click on the extra earnings bit freelance work comes up as an option". she was right. and it was in fact extremely straight forward.

Thank you - Will call HMRC tomorrow.

Sorry - another question

Can I just send an invoice on a letter with my home address?

my invoices look like this (although a tiny bit prettier)

Hat Woman
3 High Street
Cambridge
email@email

INVOICE

Date:

to: client name and address

For: just being there: £3,000,000

Please pay to:
Toy Town Bank
Account details

Payable by: date (=30 days after invoice date)

Thank you