let's just ignore the fact that I accidentally put a lot of makeup on
today as you can tell from the title of today's video its not the most fun it's
the dreaded time of year I need to submit my tax return and I decided this
year to film the process and talk you guys through it because I get a lot of
questions about it hopefully teach you a few things and how you can do your own
and yeah let's go so this year for me is actually the first year I will pay tax
in previous years I've not earned enough money to be taxed so this year it was a
little bit different for me and it was very very daunting so I actually went
over to a skillshare on Skillshare alongside different courses in like
Photoshop graphic design all the stuff I've spoken about before they also have
like business-related stuff so they have things on entrepreneurship finance
accounting and obviously right now accounting is what I'm doing and I
actually use a software called QuickBooks as well and they have courses
about QuickBooks and how to use that successfully to record your tax so the
lovely people over a skillshare have actually given me a treat for you guys
so the link down below will give you a two month free premium membership to
Skillshare so with that membership you get access to all the classes all the
workshops and you get to trial Skillshare completely for free so
whether like me you are trying to do your accounts or you're just starting up
and you want to learn some new skills then you can head over to Skillshare and
find the perfect class and creative community for you the first 500 of you
guys to click the link in my description and claim the two months free premium
subscription will get a free premium subscription that was a very long-winded
way of me saying that wasn't it basically be quick because it's only
gonna be for 500 of you guys I am going to now talk through how I managed to do
my accounts yesterday thanks to the help from Skillshare and we're gonna we're
gonna get it done hopefully I can help you guys out and make this less daunting
as I mentioned I use QuickBooks to do my account
and QuickBooks is basically an online service that helps you keep track of
money that comes in from your business and money that goes out for your
business I highly highly recommend QuickBooks I think it's like seven pound
a month for the self-employed one that I have and it's so so worth it it's just
made this whole process so much easier in previous years I had a spreadsheet
and I would record I'd try to do it every month but I always got really far behind
and I'd record my incoming so what I'd earn in my business and then I'd record
anything that I spent to aid my business so like printer ink paper a new camera
battery a tripod stuff like that those are things that I can claim as an
expense and if you want a little bit more of a breakdown on how to do your
accounts I do have another video on it which I will leave kind of on screen and
in my description when I was filing my tax returns I went into QuickBooks
and because QuickBooks constantly records and monitors my bank accounts
basically I already knew that it was pretty much sorted and ready to go for
when I needed to file my tax return so I just went through my existing expenses
checked that they were all going into the right system and if I show you now
you can categorize things as business or personal so as this bit of an example so
I have my iTunes Spotify subscription which I've categorized as personal and
then underneath I went to Morrison's and bought an Easter Egg and I will
categorize that as personal because obviously I can't claim an Easter Egg as
a business expense and then I'm just transferring money between myself and
then I got an Etsy payment so I have an Etsy store and this classes as part of
my business income so because it's in green that's income and I'm going to
click business and then it categorizes itself into your business income so yeah
it's really really easy I check it like maybe once a week and after a while it
kind of learns your habits and it'll recognise which
websites are business and what websites aren't but you do need to go through
and check them but honestly it's the quickest thing ever and I've never known
anything so simple and you can also record your mileage so if you drive for
your business you can put your mileage into it and it will work out because you
get like a forty five pence per mile deduction off your tax I believe so
definitely look into that I didn't know that was a thing and I've been
self-employed since I was 16 which is like six years now oh my god that's
weird but yeah once you've done that the basic kind of frame work of your taxes
QuickBooks will put it all into a document so I'm gonna blur out the
figures because obviously it's personal to me but it gives me a self-assessment
summary for the whole year so this is my tax year that has just ended and at the
top it says what my turnover is so this is the complete amount of money that I
have taken in as a business this year so underneath are my business expenses so
in my expenses are things such as printer ink paper tripods I don't know a
desk for my office stuff like that you can categorize as an expense any time
that goes in and out of my bank account I will put it down as a business expense
so in here it categorizes like various petrol costs under Bella which is my
cars name yes my car has a name and then phone bills advertising I do a few
different advertising things on like Facebook and Etsy so that goes through
there and then different subscriptions so I obviously pay for my website every
year that's a business expense and basically it adds up a total sum of what
your business expenses are so for example purposes if I took in 20
thousand pounds worth of income from my business and I spent five thousand
pounds of that money on business-related things business expenses then I deduct
that and then I've got fifteen thousand pounds left so that fifteen thousand
pounds is what the taxman is looking at that's what you're going to get taxed on
and you do have a personal allowance so I think you can earn up to like eleven
thousand or 12,000 pounds before you get taxed so because I've only got 15,000
pounds in my little pot after I spent my money I'm only gonna get taxed
on like that 3000 pounds so the tax man will take 20% of that 3000 pounds I
really hope that makes sense because it confuses me
so now because QuickBooks has worked that's out you can obviously do
that yourself like I said for the past few years I've done it myself I did it
in a spreadsheet and I just literally went down my bank account checked my
Ingoings incoming against my outgoings and then worked out that figure I'll go
on to the HMRC website which pains me I'm not gonna lie it pains me so what I
did I went over into self-assessment and because I have already registered as a
freelancer self-employed person I already have an account if you haven't
got an account you can sign up and I think it does take a couple of weeks for
it to all register so don't leave it too late because I think they have to send
you passwords and stuff through the post so once I've signed in it says at the
top that I have to submit my taxes for the year 2018 to 2019 and I actually
have until January of 2020 so to submit it so I am incredibly eager submitting
them literally two days after the tax year ends but I just wanted to pay my
bill and get it over and done with and hopefully because I'm uploading this
video now you guys will know way in advance the HMRC website will ask you a
bunch of different questions and obviously these will differ depending on
your situation and your circumstances so it'll ask if you're single if you take
any child benefits if you're a carer stuff like that it'll ask you questions
and it's all tick boxed and what I actually really find so helpful is that
there is a little kind of circle next to all the questions we have a question
mark can we not there's a little circle with a question mark on it and if you
click that it will define what it means it will break down that question because
there are so many terms in accounting that no one at school ever taught me and
then you go down and it creates an online forum with the various sections
that you need based on the answers you gave to the to the previous questions
I didn't actually realize how hard this is to explain out loud so once I've got
my little form I go through it I'll fill it in with my name my name my National
Insurance number my address all that kind of stuff and you basically
categorise all the different earnings and then there's one section which is
the most important bit which is the figures on your income and your net
profit so that's what the taxman works it out from so I filled all that in and
I literally just looked at my QuickBooks document that I saved on my laptop and I
copied the numbers over and because QuickBooks had worked it all out for me
I don't need to do anything else and it was great and then obviously I have my
tax bill let's pretend it's 1,000 pounds actually no let's pretend it was 2,000
pounds the taxman wants me to pay 2,000 pounds you don't have to pay that money
instantly you've got a certain amount of time to pay it I will leave some more
information down below about the dates and stuff but you don't have to pay it
instantly you've got quite a while to pay that so don't worry I just wanted to
pay and get it over and done with so again I go back into my online profile
waved a very sad farewell to my hard-earned money and gave it to the
government yay I have now paid my tax bill for the
year 2018 to 19 however something I wasn't aware of is that because I am
self-employed and if you are also self-employed in the UK this will apply
to you and because this is the first year I will actually have to pay tax in
very simple terms you kind of pay ahead a year so they want you to be ahead of
your tax bill so this year my tax bill is 2,000 pounds but in reality I'm gonna
have to pay 3 because they like me as a self-employed person to be 1,000 pounds
ahead of myself I did not know this fact until yesterday when I submitted it and
it told me that and again I'd have to pay that figure instantly I have I think
I have two dates throughout the year that that bill is due so it's due in
five hundred-pound chunks throughout the year
and next year but that's another thousand pounds that no one told me about so
hopefully if you are in the similar situation to me and you've not yet been
taxed as this freelancer and you weren't aware of that hopefully now you are so
just bear that in mind the first time you pay your tax as a self-employed
person it's a little bit of a kick in the teeth it's a bit of a double whammy
tax bill because you have the initial figure plus a thousand pounds to keep
you ahead which angered me a lot I feel like I've rambled a lot but if there are
any questions that I have missed and first do go and watch my previous video
about kind of submitting your tax return because I went into it in different
stages in that video so I might cover something that I've missed today and if
not comment down below and I will try my best to answer have I got anything else
to tell you ooh the final thing I also do a thing called cash basis accounting
and Google it I didn't know what it was until recently once again why don't we
get taught this at school so yeah that's it
if you have any questions like I said please do ask me I will try my best to
answer again never been an expert don't think I ever will be but I'm just gonna
document my journey of my freelance life and hopefully we can learn some things
together along the way I hope you've enjoyed this video I hope you've learned
a lot and I'll see you soon hopefully for a more interesting video next time I
don't have to do my taxes for a whole other year woo