Greetings. What a great website – just what I was looking for, as I’m desperately in need of some good advice! Basically, I’ve found myself recently redundant, a slightly bitter affair that left me with only a small percentage of my contracted severance pay. Anyway, I’ve long decided the office is not for me; I’m a solitary type of person with enough experience and hopefully talent, to go my own way. Essentially I have two basic questions, and perhaps a few more that I might save for another thread: Firstly, when you let IR know you’re going self-employed, do you have to state the specific nature of your business, or can you go by the generic term - e.g. “sole trader”? The reason I ask is because I plan to be a little diverse – I can get work through my contacts to do some freelance web design and photography work, but my main interest is in the traditional arts, and I plan to paint more than anything else, though that will probably not be my main source of income as freelancing will inevitable pay better. BUT, I am also using my redundancy time in creating software, again based in the arts. So to get back to the question, if I had to describe the nature of my work, what should I write? I realise artist’s have a few exceptional rules under the self-employment regulations, though I am not too concerned about having to average out payments due in times of possible hardship, and having to put my job description down in some other terms. (as long as I can still claim expenses against buying art supplies of course!) My second query, which is causing most of my anxiety due to my ignorance in the subject, is book-keeping and tax returns, having been a PAYE member in my short working life. I’ve no doubt I can keep and maintain well organised records of my expenses and sales, but taking a peek at IR’s SA103 form, I’m more than a little daunted about attempting to fill it in myself! Reading many of the other threads, it seems hiring an accountant is a good route to take, and it seems many accountant’s rates are quite reasonable. Please correct me if I’m totally off the mark here, but if I were to say file for self-employment in May or June of this year, would I only need to start worrying about tax returns and working out one of the NI contributions (I could be totally wrong, but I think there’s one you pay twice yearly, and the NIC2 which is a weekly direct debit?) in April 2005? If that is the case, can I just approach an accountant around the time the tax returns are first issued, and simply handover all my receipts, invoices, statements and my book work, and expect to pay a fixed sum and have them deal with the IR and the tax return on my behalf? Or presumably accountants might charge hourly depending on the quality of book-keeping you provide them? Many thanks in anticipation to anyone who is kind enough to reply.