Time Registration: Benefits For Yourself As A Self-Employed Person
In my opinion, registering your hours is not only something you do for the tax authorities. It is certainly also useful if you want to gain more insight into your company. If you offer your services by the hour, you have to keep track of your hours for the client anyway . You can quickly see how much your turnover is for the assignment. But with self-employed people it often also happens that they charge a fixed price for a certain service or product. If you keep track of your hours, you can quickly calculate what your work actually costs and yields. And that in turn ensures that you can better estimate new assignments and make better quotations.
An example. Suppose you are a furniture maker and you make and sell a chair for 500 euros. You bought 200 euros worth of materials to make the chair. Then your turnover is 300 euros. If you spend 10 hours buying the materials, manufacturing the chair and selling the chair, then you have a turnover of 30 euros per hour. Maybe you want to earn more per hour? Then you can do a number of things for the next assignment: increase the selling price, work with cheaper materials or work faster (if that is possible at all, of course).
Moreover, you can compare your direct (billable) hours against your indirect hours on an annual basis and check whether you have earned enough in the direct hours throughout the year. You can immediately see whether the percentage of indirect hours is not too high. Overview makes adjustments possible!
The entrepreneur’s allowance is a deduction on the profit and consists of self-employed person’s allowance, starter’s allowance, starter’s allowance in the event of incapacity for work, deduction for research and development work, co-workers’ allowance and discontinuation allowance. The components of the entrepreneur’s allowance that most self-employed persons have to deal with are the self-employed person’s allowance and the starter’s allowance. That is why I will go into these ingredients a little further.
Which hours should you keep in your time registration?
You may add up all the hours you work for your company for the hours criterion. So the billable hours and the non-billable hours. So also the hours you need to update your email, keep the administration up, maintain your website, do marketing and acquisitions (write quotes), travel to your customers, make schedules , take training courses and buy supplies. All these hours fall under your time administration.
My tip: make a division into direct and indirect hours (per assignment) and also make a subdivision into indirect hours (general, administration, acquisition, travel time, training / course, marketing, stock purchasing). It is useful if you divide your hours per assignment, so that you can see afterwards which assignments yield the most and which less.
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