Permitted Work - varied earnings.

calcotti said:

darinfan said:..there's no mention of averaging earnings over a number of weeks or months. ..And yet I thought it was pretty normal for earnings yo be averaged for self employment, and I asked about the possibility of that in my covering letter.  

Self employed earnings are based on annual earnings divided by 52. Obviously initially you have no accounts that they can refer to as evidence to check that you meet the rules.

darinfan said:
They want me to give evidence of my first payment of earnings, although that will cover a month rather than a week.  However, I can break earnings down into weeks and print them off easy enough, and so will do that,I think, to prove that the payment I receive isn't for a single week!

if the payment is for a month just tell them that. Is the payment made against an invoice you issued?

darinfan said: And there was me thinking it would be straightforward!! 

Unfortunately it isn't.

The payments are through royalties on book sales. And so there is no invoice.  It simply depends on how many books I sell - in the same way that anyone making crafts depends on sales for income. They know that as I made it clear in the covering letter.  Payments are made a couple of months in arrears, but I am given notification of amounts long before that, and so can send those off.  

calcotti said:

If this is not your first payment I would be inclined to send them the last three payment details and the advance notification of the future payments and they can then average out the payments to demonstrate that you are getting below £152/week.

Do you do annual accounts for HMRC?

Not yet.  But I will need to.  They are only notified when earnings go over £1000.  They will be notified by dwp anyway now, so I need to inform them of self employed work at some point this week or next 

Thanks for the advice.  I shall do as you suggest. 

Hannah_Scope said:

That sounds really interesting! I'm glad you are doing something you love

I can see Calcotti has already given advice on your DWP letter. Are you feeling it is all more straightforward for you? 

I saw your comments about crafts being similar so I asked a friend (who is also claiming whilst she starts her own business) how she stores everything for when they ask for evidence. She brought a small diary from the pound shop, she uses it to mark how many sales she makes on which day and notes what she makes from those sales. She then will separately mark in the diary the days she was paid from those sales. She also puts any invoices, receipts or bank statements she has showing those sales into a separate folder. Hope that helps you   

Thank you for this. Yes, I will probably do the same, although, thankfully, the site through which I sell books keeps a record, too, and I can print it off after a week to show my income, which is useful. 

I think the confusion came from the lack of info on the letter, which doesn't, for example, tell how things will work out going forward, and isn't very specific or tailored to being self employed.  It reads as though they're expecting me to get paid regularly every week or month, which isn't going to happen.  But from what has been said here, the first month or so will be to prove my income and hours are within rules, and then, hopefully, earnings will be averaged out over 52 weeks - but there's no mention of that at all in the letter, which is why I was confused.  And, of course, it's not like there's someone knowledgeable on the end of the phone who can explain that!