Hello again H/A!
After being laid off early this year, I decided to take my chances as a Freelance Web Developer and things are going pretty great so far. I've managed to figure out how to write invoices and such, but I still am not quite confident that I'm doing everything correctly.
So far I've only had a few small clients and now I'm 2 weeks into my first in-house contract and I need to submit my first invoice. Of course I forgot all about getting a GST number and now I have to take care of that mess.
To prevent me forgetting anything else important like that in the future, and just to get some tips on how to run things better overall, can anyone recommend any books or online resources?
There are a million "How to run your own business" books out there, and I figure I would come here for some recommendations on something a little more focused on Freelance web development (or similar) and that actually has some quality information inside.
What say you H/A?
Posts
All I'm doing right now is making sure I keep all my reciepts for work related purchases (like the second monitor I just bought) and keeping detailed invoices as organized as I can.
I'm not sure what to do beyond that though. I figure when it becomes tax seasons again I would definitely get some help.
For you, as you're making invoices, I'd recommend holding on to your invoices. If you want to make things simpler, make some summary pages as well and when you go to whoever will be doing your taxes (when you're running a business you do NOT want to be doing your own - as a security thing if you overstep your boundaries and its nice to be able to say "H&R did it, not me") You should be perfectly fine in that regard, so long as you keep in mind that any paycheck you got back at your job probably already had taxes deducted off of it, whereas now you have to hold on to money to pay the tax man. Personally I have no idea how much to hold on to as I haven't been in that position before, but I'd say try to keep as much as you can in a savings account for the first year and see how much of it they take, just so you can figure out how much to save next year.
Also, this has nothing to do with taxes but might help you none the less. Check out this website: Rent A Coder. It allows you to bid how much you would do each coding job for, and could probably find you some good work if you run out of stuff to do. Some of it is website related, some isnt.
Do it.
Do it now.
It will give you a massive tax break, and you'll be able to more easily deduct your work related expenses like your monitor.
You would basically be insane not to start an LLC.
Whats an LLC? And are you sure it's Canada relevant?