I am currently permanently employed (full time) with a company and after having worked in the industry for over ten years I have decided to start doing freelance work (not a LTD company - I do not need to do this as I do all my accounts so I have not registered with company house - plus I work on my own so would be a sole trader) in my free time. I am going to register myself as self-employed (even though I have a full time job) because I will be getting extra income (I definitely have to do this by law).
I am currently not VAT registered and therefore will not charge my clients 15% VAT (and clearly mark on my quotes and invoices that I am not vat registered).
Question: - My main question is is it correct to simply put on my documentation "I am not vat registered" and that is all I need to do?
My turnover will be less than the £67k threshold. I know one advantage of being vat registered is that I can claim back vat on company related expenses.
Question: - In order to do this would my company have to be registered as a LTD company and if I am vat registered under the "flat rate" scheme can I only claim 11.5% back as opposed to 15%?
I know I can register online to become self-employed and also to become vat registered.
Question: - After registering online to become self-employed how soon afterwards can I register for VAT?
Question: - If I register online for the flat rate vat how long does this take before I get a VAT registration number?
Question: - And am I right in charging my client full 15% vat if I am registered under the flat rate vat scheme ?
Any income (total turnover) I make from my freelance work is going into a separate bank account so I can clearly see what I have earned as a freelancer, so tax returns should be a bit easier to calculate.
I personally would charge a set fee (either per month as mentioned above) or per hour. It brings in more business for you. Definitely agree with above - do NOT teach them to edit it themselves - asking for big trouble unless they already have someone inhouse who is a budding programmer who has at the very least HTML skills. It will cost them more in the long run if it all goes wrong and the whole site needs re-designing down the road. I'm assuming it would not be huge updates - probably not even to the design, just text and photo updates - a bespoke content management system would be the way to go but this normally requires a backend database (which would hold the page attribute data). I would stick with the charge per hour for updates/maintenance.
