Running it
Two dates and one habit
Everything unpleasant about this is caused by leaving it until the deadline.
Guides on Running it: The admin that turns income into a trade
A tax year, for someone earning from rating work, is two dates and one habit. The dates are when the year ends and when the return is due; the habit is recording each job when it happens.
People who have the habit spend an evening on this annually. People who do not spend a weekend, feel sick throughout, and get a worse answer.
Dates, rates and rules differ by country and this is a shape rather than an instruction, so check yours.
The four phases, and what each one costs
Every system produces roughly the same cycle regardless of what it calls the parts.
| Phase | When | Time if you keep records | Time if you do not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Record | Continuously | Seconds per job | Nothing now |
| Set aside | Monthly | Two minutes | Nothing now |
| Reconcile | Once, after year end | An hour or two | A weekend, badly |
| File | Before the deadline | An evening | An evening plus panic |
The columns are the whole argument. Deferred admin is not saved admin, it is admin at a worse exchange rate, because the reconstruction work is what makes the hard column hard.
Recording as you go
The record you need per job is small and it is the same every time: date, gross amount, fees deducted, net received, format, buyer reference. Six fields, and the reason for six rather than three is that a return generally asks about gross income and costs separately rather than about what landed in your bank.
That distinction catches nearly everyone once. The platform's payout is already net of its cut, and the cut is usually a deductible cost rather than money you never earned, so recording only the payout understates both your income and your costs by the same amount. The four deductions between a buyer's payment and your account is the piece that separates those layers properly.
Do it at delivery, in whatever you already have open. Some systems are moving record-keeping online by law: in the UK, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has applied from 6 April 2026 to sole traders with qualifying income over £50,000, with the threshold falling to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028. The one-minute habit exists because any process longer than the job's own admin gets abandoned in week three, and an abandoned system records nothing at all.
Setting aside, monthly
Set a percentage aside as money arrives, into an account you do not touch.
The percentage is jurisdictional and depends on your other income, which is exactly why picking a defensible number and holding it beats optimising. A common approach is to take a rate somewhat above what you expect to owe and treat the surplus as a refund to yourself at year end. Overshooting costs you interest on a modest balance; undershooting costs you a bill you cannot pay in the month it arrives.
Doing this monthly rather than annually also fixes a behavioural problem that has nothing to do with tax. Money sitting in an account you spend from has already been mentally spent, which is the same argument as deciding a figure to pay yourself and holding it.
Reconciling, once
After the year ends, compare your own record against whatever the platform reports.
They will not match, and the mismatch is almost never an error. Timing at the year boundary and the way fees are presented account for nearly all of it, which is worked through in the reconciliation piece.
Reconcile before you file, not during. An unexplained gap discovered on deadline evening becomes a guess, and a guess in a filed return is the thing you least want to have made.
Filing, early
The return itself is data entry once the reconciliation is done. The reason to file well before the deadline is not virtue, it is that filing early separates the two things that can go wrong.
If the numbers are wrong, you find out with time to fix them. If the bill is larger than you set aside, you have weeks to arrange it rather than days. Filing early also does not usually mean paying early, since payment deadlines are typically separate from filing deadlines in most systems, which is worth confirming for yours.
The parts that are not annual
Two things sit outside the cycle and catch people who only think yearly.
Retention runs longer than the year, because disputes and enquiries arrive late. HMRC says self-employed records must be kept for at least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline, while the IRS's general period is 3 years, longer in some situations. Registration timing runs earlier than the year, and if you have not done it, the shape of registration obligations is the thing to read before the next deadline rather than after.
Where the rest of this trade is documented
Everything above is money administration, which is what this site covers. The craft questions sit elsewhere in the network.
What an assessment should contain to be worth its fee is a measurement question, and the conventions are set out at Measure My Cock. What an automated scorer already does for free, and therefore what your paid hour has to beat, is described by AI Penis. The buyer-side view of the same transaction, including what a commissioner expects a receipt to look like, is at Rate Penis.
If your income comes through Rate Cock, the earnings history and payout records you will reconcile against live in the judge account described on the judges page.
The habit is worth more than the knowledge here. A person with six fields per job and a set-aside account can be told the rules in ten minutes; a person without them cannot use the rules even when they know them perfectly.