A contract is always a good thing regardless if the company you will be doing work for is a friend or acquaintance. If you don't have a contract with them, I assume you had some discussions regarding your billable rate? At least get that on paper with some signatures. As you grow your consulting business you will need to come up with your policies regarding payment, pricing, on-going support, etc. I currently do my consulting work as a sole proprietor. I have an on-going client that will 1099 me at the end of the year. At this point I would continue to do it the same way with new clients that I would get. As long as you run your consulting business under your own name you don't have to do anything with the Secretary of States office. If you want to operate under an assumed name, then you will have to pay a small fee to register your company name and get your tax IDs. As a sole proprietor, the money I make from my consulting gigs is added to my income. I have to pay self employment taxes each year, but that allows me to deduct business expenses (i.e., hardware, tools, DSL, Mileage, etc). You can just add the money you make to your income and not declare sole proprietorship, I believe. However, if you do this, you can not deduct any business expenses. I am by no means an expert on this. Some good sites for information on this would be: http://www.bizlinks.org/ http://www.sos.state.mn.us/business/ Hope this helps ya out. Feel free to email me off the list if you want more info or talk on the phone. Tony |---------+-----------------------------> | | Erik Anderson | | | <erik at andersonfam.| | | org> | | | Sent by: | | | tclug-list-admin at m| | | n-linux.org | | | | | | | | | 04/17/2003 03:22 | | | PM | | | Please respond to | | | tclug-list | | | | |---------+-----------------------------> >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | | | To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org | | cc: | | Subject: [TCLUG] Semi OT: Freelance consulting question | >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| So I have just gotten asked to do my first freelance consulting gig. I'll be setting up an Apache/Tomcat environment for a company, but that's beside the point. I figure that there are at least a few people on the list that have done private consulting before, and I'd like to ask for advice, as I'm pretty ignorant to the whole process. I know that they'll just cut me a check, and I'll have to declare that income on next year's tax return. Do I need to write up a contract beforehand? Is there any legalities that I need to be careful of? Should I get a partial payment before starting? etc., etc., etc. There's a thousand more questions I could ask, but I guess I'll start with these. Thanks in advance! -Erik Anderson _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list