Sarah Ingleby

When you're self-employed, there's no manager telling you to go and have your lunch, no colleague dragging you away from your desk for a coffee, and no fixed clocking-off time. That freedom is exactly why so many of us chose this path; but it also means the responsibility for protecting your own downtime sits entirely with you, and it's a responsibility that's remarkably easy to neglect. If you've ever eaten a sandwich one-handed while replying to an email, or realised at 3pm that you haven't...

If you've ever logged into the HMRC website, typed in your figures, and hit submit, you'd be forgiven for thinking that's a digital process. You did it online, after all; no paper, no post, no queuing. So why does HMRC say that doesn't count as "digital" under Making Tax Digital? Here's the distinction that trips almost everyone up. The True Meaning of "Digital" Under Making Tax Digital (MTD), "digital" has a very specific meaning: it means an unbroken electronic trail from your original...

Let's start with something nobody really tells you when you first go self-employed: the business side of running a business is a full-time job in itself. You're brilliant at what you do. That's why you went out on your own. But between the invoices, the receipts, the expenses, and the looming deadline of a self-assessment tax return, the financial admin can feel like a permanent pile of washing that never quite gets done. The good news is that bookkeeping doesn't have to be complicated. For...