The Mock Turtle

I am a normal employed full-time office worker and have volunteered my admin services for a local organisation ONE day a week.

I was expecting to help out for free but they are insistent on paying for my services. I would be classed as a `contractor' and would submit an invoice on a monthly basis to which they would pay me by cheque.

I am now totally at sea. I want to make sure this additional income is properly declared but slowly getting myself tied up in knots on the HMRC website. I do have an online account but not sure what to do for fear of doing the wrong thing. I just tried calling HMRC to speak to someone but had to ring off after holding for 45 minutes as supposed to be doing some work!

Does anyone have any idea what would be the best way to deal with this?

(Should I just keep ringing HMRC hoping that eventually someone will answer!)

Essentially, yes, call HMRC, sorry. I'll warn you though, whenever I do this, I get through to a nice person, we sort things out, they fix their mistakes etc and then a month later I'll get a letter as though that conversation never happened and round and round we go.

It depends on whether you're through you personal tax allowance or not but as you also have another job then I imagine you are. You want to register with HMRC as a Sole Trader and then, assuming you go over your allowed tax, you'd need submit your sole trader accounts once a year. I believe you can start this process all online if you want to avoid the annoying HMRC phone call.

https://www.gov.uk/set-up-sole-trader

Thank you Luce for this.

So you do eventually get through to HMRC ... o boy!

As Luce says you're going to need to register as a self employed sole trader and ultimately fill in a Self Assessment tax return. I would think you can do ithe registering all online without a tiresome phone call. HMRC are currently notorious for their appalling waiting times and desire to force everyone away from calling and make them deal with chat bots. I registered back in the dark ages though so I have no recent experience to go by.

Talking of the dark ages... they're paying you by cheque??

I used to do something similar in that I was employed ft and did email advice for another org. For them I was self employed. I registered for self assessment and then submitted my assessment once a year. It was pretty straight forward. Because I already earned over my tax allowance I paid full tax etc on my self employment

Many thanks to everyone who came back to my question.

Whilst in the midst of my panic yesterday, Mr Bedford suddenly remembered that his nephew is a fully qualified accountant (who has this morning pretty much confirmed what everyone helpfully advised on this thread).

The organisation I am (hopefully) working for from next Thursday is a campaign team for a local parliamentary candidate (that does not belong to the party of extremely wealthy donors) getting prepared for whenever the next GE will be called ...

If it helps, I had a little panic about how I was going to work all this out without painful telephone calls then I remembered that my actual Dad was an accountant!