Working from home

Flipflop

Hi, I would like some advice with regard to working from home. I have qualified AAT technician and Payroll
and Sage, I have had a years worth of office experience, but am still not that confident. What are my options with regard to working/advertising for working from home. Book keeping, VAT ? I have three school age children so
need to work around them. HOw much can I charge, what can I do?

Any help gratefully received

stevo5678

Hi, it's a bit tricky as it's your experience that counts for more than the AAT at this stage when it comes to being self employed. The AAT would be a good passport to gain further experience ideally in a small firm of accountants. That would be the ideal path.

If however you have little choice but to do some work from home I would advertise as a book keeper with rates anything from £12 - £25 an hour, probably £12-15 for you to start. You can't go too far wrong with Sage, so I would build on this by looking for Sage book keeping jobs and at the same time increasing your experience and confidence. Most book keepers get work from word of mouth, I would suggest writing off to all the local small firms offering Sage book keeping services at what ever rate you choose. If you get any work and do a good job it may eventually snowball into the hours a week you require. Payroll has to be good string to your bow at present also so mention this.

Be confident but know your limitations at this stage of your career.

Hope this helps

Monsoon

I agree with Stevo, but for one thing: don't bother with Sage.
It's good software, but their pricing is as ancient as they are.

There are plenty of excellent alternatives:

VT Transaction+ - will integrate with final accounts production software as and when you build up to that. This is what we use and it's just plain bloomin' brilliant. Buy once, that's it. For as many clients as you want.

Then there are the online software offerings - Xero, Accounts Portal, etc.

It's worth looking around and not just plumping for Sage because that's the name everyone knows

stevo5678

I only mentioned Sage as in our practice 95% of clients who have an accounting system would be using it (from about 700 clients). Some use other systems such as QB's, Tas and other adhoc ones but most common in my experience is manual Excel sheets or Sage.

Whether this trend is changing or not, I am personally yet to see but it may depend on the size of your clients. In our office the smaller clients have no system (IE bank statements etc thrown in a bag at year end) and the larger ones lean to Sage with not much in between.

Monsoon

Stevo that's fair enough - bigger businesses may well just go with Sage.

At the level Flipflop is describing, I'd definitely go with one of the alternatives though - at her level of experience, the bigger clients who will have Sage automatically are unlikely to be the ones she's attracting. Indeed in our practice we have very few on Sage and we have a good range of clients sizes.

Flipflop - that's in no way a criticism - if you're new and lack confidence then you want to start with your local plumber and local micro-businesses, and take on the simple ones, as opposed to starting with complicated ones that will bake your noodle. Trust me on this one ;-)