Grey Areas of Self Employment

One of the difficulties with working for yourself is defining your working hours and also deciding what is actually work. Often clients want you to work when it is suitable for them and whilst I try to accommodate as many as possible, I have found over the years that it is better for my own health to try to be fairly strict about working hours (and no I haven’t perfected that yet!). When I opened the Clinic I decided that I would open on one evening a week and quickly found that I ended up working a 12 hour day. Not good. However by changing the night to a Tuesday I found that it worked. I always go to a Pilates Class on a Tuesday morning and only start work after lunch so to continue on into the evening simply made a normal day of it. Interesting the sort of controls that are needed.

One of the grey areas of self employment is Administration. Today I have only worked on 4 clients and so don’t feel as though I have been very busy with work BUT looking at it logically I have also written up client notes, entered income and expenditure into the accounts system, run a quick stock take so I know what supplies I need to order, and found some home remedies for chilblains which apart from appearing on the Foot Notes, ( also acts as CPD or Continuous Professional Development for me. A lot of small businesses do struggle with their Admin and so to help me with mine I contacted Paperclip, a company run by Anne Batty that specialises in helping with Admin work. Anne and I met on Monday and after a couple of hours she had not only identified areas that she could actually do for me, but had also come up with simple solutions to difficulties that I have been having with keeping on top of my paperwork. Actually talking things through with someone who has that type of experience was so helpful. Later the same day I received a report about the things we discussed and I have asked her to prepare some costs for two areas that I want to press ahead with. It is sometimes hard to realise that simply because you are self employed, it doesn’t mean that you actually have to do EVERYTHING yourself.