Of course I would write a post like this at some point, like every vocal business owner does. But to be honest, I was a bit sick of the crappy advice I kept reading everywhere. Vague things like “you’ll never look back” or “it’s a wonderful journey” or “friends are important”. Well yes, thanks, but that’s almost as good as reading a horoscope. It never truly prepared me for what being an independent contributor to the workforce would be like.
There were other advice columns that told you to get certain accounting systems and to enforce a cut-off time for your work, but when you’re working for yourself, it’s difficult to adhere to such a rigid structure. I must admit that systems are pretty important, regardless of whether you’re working solo or in a team, but it takes quite a while before you realise what your workflow will be and hence, design a system for it.
So here’s my take. It’s not feel-good nonsense, but it’s not super specific limiting advice either.
1)Corporate bank accounts charge for almost every little thing
So according to ACRA and IRAS, you should set up a corporate account for cleaner accounting of your business transactions, even if you are a sole proprietor. Fair enough.
But corporate accounts are horridly expensive compared to personal accounts. There’s no way to worm your way out of paying bank fees – they can shut down your account if you don’t, and that’s not something you want when you have a continuous flow of payments coming into that account. The one thing I simply cannot get over is the fact that you have to pay for fund transfers. You can transfer as much as you like (or rather, I have never exceeded any limits) for free for personal accounts, but not for corporate accounts.
If you want to do fund transfers for free… you need to pay for a more expensive corporate account. That irks me to no end, and I honestly wondered why nobody ever told me about the horrors of corporate bank accounts. Even if you see a corporate bank account claiming to offer you free so-and-so, read the fine print. It’s often for the first 6 months, after which the rates will be crappier than the average bank account.
Since they’re all going to be prohibitively expensive anyway, choose a bank that’s near where you’ll be most of the time. If you can’t get it cheap, at least get something convenient.
2)Admin takes up 20% of your time
I used to hate paperwork as a salaried employee. Come on, everyone does. I especially hated HR/accounting software like SAP, because they would categorise things so unintuitively that I swear it was made this difficult on purpose to prevent you from claiming what was rightfully owed to you. I also did not (and still do not) understand the appeal of SAP from the employee end, but it is designed with finance departments in mind, I suppose.
It got worse when working for myself. I’m horrified, sometimes, to realise how much time has passed doing invoicing, checking bank accounts, working on a job numbering system, buying supplies and equipment. Paperwork takes up so much time, and you have to do it because financial and legal systems require this paperwork to process your payment, which is what you’re ultimately doing it for.
I classify emails under admin too, for what it’s worth. But yes, so much of the day is spent not writing, and I wish I could do more of that. At the same time, I don’t quite earn enough to hire someone else to do all my paperwork (also that would require more explaining than I have time for).
3)Government agencies are very helpful over the phone, but their websites are not (warning: most government agencies close at 5pm)
Every time I want to look up something on a government website, I cannot find it. It’s never under what I’d expect. I get better results Googling it and clicking on the appropriate result that links to a government website. I’m not sure why our websites are so terribly organised for a government that comprehensively covers almost everything we could think of, but oh well. Design by committee, I suppose.
But if I pick up the phone and call, the person who picks up is always very helpful. They’ll always be able to answer my questions or give me advice, and they’re also pretty willing to help. I daresay they exceed bank or telco customer service officers in that regard. They’ll email you the information you need, and generally help you to achieve what you set out to do.
The only snag is that they close at 5pm, and all problems occur generally at around 5.55pm for me (just when everyone else seems to be going home).
4)You might get paid late and it doesn’t mean your clients don’t like you
I’m sure everyone has been warned about late payments once they were in this line, but they never quite explained why. I had the impression, before I did my own business, that clients paid you late if they didn’t like you, so all those people who got paid late were those who had clients who disliked them.
Admittedly, there was one such client who did exactly that (and of course, not working for that client anymore) la but go with your gut.
However, I later realised that everyone wants to pay you on time (it’s not a nice feeling to know that money is owed to someone) but that power isn’t always in their hands. If the finance aspect is decentralised from your contact person, it means that someone else is in charge. Or if payment goes down a chain, it requires someone else to trigger the flow.
Also, holidays are not a good time to invoice for anything. From Christmas to CNY, different people are around at different points in time.
But yes, this is something I wish someone had told me before I started. Payments can be late not because people don’t like you, but because of a hundred other factors that they can’t control. I still need to tell myself that sometimes.
5)Call people in the mornings
Remember what I said about government agencies closing after 5pm when problems start at 5.55pm? The same generally goes for everyone else, clients included. If you work for yourself, you tend to have a slower start and a later finish to your day. The problem comes when your work is collaborative in nature and you need advice or feedback. You may be in the zone later in the day, but that might also be when everyone is also no longer at their desk to send you whatever information you need.
So if you need to make calls, pitches or just touch base, morning is best. If you can’t get them, at least they’ll get the message that you were looking for them and they can get back to you in the afternoon. If you call in the afternoon and leave a message, they might forget about it the next day. Even if you can get them, you’ll sometimes discover that they’re on leave the next day – even though they said they’d get back to you the next day.
If you’re thinking of going it out of a corporate environment, I hope this helps! At the very least, I hope that the corporate bank account warning gets to as many people as possible. That irritates me to no end.
No, seriously, why do I have to pay for a bank transfer that takes three days? I mean, would you pay for a taxi ride that took three days?
Marcus Goh is a Singapore television scriptwriter. He’s also a Transformers enthusiast and avid pop culture scholar. He Tweets/Instagrams at Optimarcus and writes at marcusgohmarcusgoh.com.
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