The survey found that 44% of 16 to 24 years olds say they are happy in their current job, with 10 per cent claiming to be very happy. This is in comparison to 25 to 54 year olds, of which only 37% claim to be happy.

Now a lot of this you can put down to the extra responsibilities that come along as your career develops and the additional stress. Most 16 to 24 year olds won’t have a mortgage yet either, or a family to look after so life tends to be simpler.

If you compare this survey to one of our recent reports though you can conclude that money isn’t necessarily a factor when it comes to happiness at work.

In our research, we found that 16 to 24 year old umbrella workers are grossing an average of £546.75 a week. A considerable amount more than the national average for private sector workers of £459 a week and public sector workers at £477, but a considerable amount less than the next age group (25-34) who gross an average of £1,062.75 a week.

In fact, for umbrella contractors, freelancers and temps it’s clear that, in general, rates rise with age and experience, as you’d expect. We found the average weekly gross pay amounts to be:

So when taking an assignment is it all about the rate? Or have the youngsters got it right and there is more to your working life than money? Leave a comment below, join us on LinkedIn, or tweet @parasolgroup.

To read more on the ‘Happiness at Work Index’ published by Office Angels click here

Here are our top 5 tips:

Claim for all of your legitimate business expenses

One of the main benefits of being an employee of a company such as Parasol is that you can claim for all of the legitimate business expenses you incur and have them offset against your tax bill. This could be travel and subsistence expenses, hardware and software, professional subscriptions and membership; there’s a whole raft of things you could potentially claim for. We’ve got lots of information on expenses here, and if you are a Parasol employee you can always get in touch with our Employee Support team for advice.

Make sure you are on the right tax code

This sounds like a relatively simple one but you’d be surprised how many people aren’t currently on the correct tax code and are paying more tax than they should as a result. At this time of year it’s quite easy to check whether or not your tax code is correct as most people in the UK should be on tax code 810L unless you have additional income from things such as a buy-to-let property. If not, you need to query this with HMRC.

If your tax code is wrong you need to inform HMRC as soon as possible so that they can correct it. You will need to provide HMRC with your tax reference and National Insurance numbers, both of which you can find on your payslip. There are also some good online tax code calculators you can use such as this one.

Invest in a pension

As well as ensuring you have a decent income and standard of living when you retire, investing in a pension is an excellent way to reduce your tax bill and boost your take home pay. Basic tax payers can earn tax relief at a rate of 32%, and 42% for higher rate tax payers. We’ve got a lot more information on pensions here.

Negotiate your rate

You could be about to embark on your first assignment, or be a seasoned contractor whose current assignment is up for renewal. Either way there are some hints and tips you can take on board to ensure you are getting the best possible rate. For all you newbies out there, there is some really helpful advice here. And for the veterans out there, it’s never too late to learn new tricks so you might want to have a read of this guide to contract renewals.

Go Limited

One of the reasons so many freelancers, contractors and temps choose to work with Parasol Group is because we have both Parasol and our sister company ClearSky Accounting. We offer the only genuine best advice out there for you and your personal circumstances. For some freelancers, contractors and temps, setting up their own limited company can help boost take home pay. Our best advice team will help you understand which is the best trading option for you – just give them a call on 0800 458 0818.

Do you have any other ideas (legal ones!) for boosting take home pay? Leave a comment below, join us on LinkedIn, or tweet @parasolgroup.

Our preparation for April’s year end starts all the way back in February. We’ve got over 10,000 employees relying on us to get things right so this preparation time is really important and one of the first things we do is make sure we have all the correct, up to date information, such as National Insurance numbers and address details, for everyone who works via Parasol. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important for you to keep us updated with any changes in your circumstances.

We then have to look at everyone’s individual accounts and remove any existing locks. Parasol employees use locks on their account for lots of different reasons but it’s important that these are removed before year end so that we can process their expenses in the correct tax year.

It’s then down to us to crunch the numbers so that we can produce your P60 form which is a summary of your pay and the tax that’s been deducted from it in the previous tax year, as well as collate all the accurate data that HMRC requires from us. Because we have an expenses dispensation from HMRC, we don’t have to complete a P11D form for all our employees but we do file a P14.  This is a three part form detailing pay, tax, NIC, SMP, SSP and pension contributions, everything you get on your P60, which is sent to the tax office as part of the employer’s return for all Parasol employees. This is a good example of one of the many things that an umbrella company takes care of for you. If you were trading via an alternative business model you would have to complete and submit a P35 to HMRC instead. Working via Parasol, all you have to is make sure your details are up to date and wait for your P60 to land on your doormat before the end of May.

As you can see from the above, there is lots of jargon and lots of paperwork which not everyone wants to do themselves and it’s our job to make sure it’s done right, and on time, on your behalf. We’ve also been doing it for over 12 years now so we are pretty good at it even if we say so ourselves. It’s still a lot of hard work though so if you do ever speak to one of our payroll team around this time of year, be gentle with them!

Is there anything else you’ve always wanted to know about how an umbrella company works? If you leave a comment below, tweet us @parasolgroup, join our LinkedIn group (if you are a Parasol employee) and tell us what you’d like to know, we’ll cover them off in future blogs.

There were two breaking news stories last week which really caught my eye and got me thinking about the relationship some staffing businesses have with their service providers. For both stories I think taking more of a partnership approach throughout the supply chain could have saved a lot of money, time and reputational damage.

Let me explain. The first story that caught my eye was the report that recruiters have been hit with £12 million in fines in the past year for failing to carry out adequate checks in order to verify a candidate’s eligibility to work in the UK.

This all stems from a new system that the UK Borders Agency put in place in 2008 which allowed for companies to be fined for candidates the Agency deems to be working illegally. The amount a company can be fined is determined by how stringent they were in their eligibility checks, but it could be anything up to £10,000 per worker.

The second story that stood out for me came from a warning issued by REC about a potential scam that some agencies have fallen foul of. The scam centres on an individual contacting a staffing business pretending to be a client with a requirement for a worker or with a worker ready to start with their employment and remuneration requiring processing. As a result, some agencies have been caught out by taking care of the admin for the worker and ensuring they are being paid. The scam is uncovered once the staffing business chases payment from the client, only to find that the client doesn’t actually exist and neither does the worker.

The thing that really stood out for me in both these stories was the fact that both of these risks could have been mitigated by the recruiters involved through better collaboration with their service providers.

Here at Parasol, as a true employment services provider, we carry out our own ID checks on anyone who works via our umbrella. And the process is not only robust but it’s really easy to use for both the staffing business and the worker. In some instances, our staffing industry partners don’t need to do their own ID checks at all and have effectively outsourced not only the process to us but also the risk that comes with it. As our employee, the worker’s eligibility to work in the UK becomes our responsibility.

This is exactly how it should be in the supply chain for temporary workers and is exactly the type of role the modern day service provider should play. Staffing businesses can take advantage of the well-established systems and processes we have in place, for all forms of compliance (including eligibility to work), which give us the ability to mitigate the risks associated with employing a temporary worker. We aren’t a preferred business partner with so many thousands of staffing businesses without reason!

Get in touch with me or one of my colleagues in the team and we can chat about how partnering with Parasol can help your business. You can join our LinkedIn Group, tweet us, get in touch with us here, or leave a comment below and we’ll get back to you.

Simon.

Well the first thing to decide is how do you judge what is the ‘best’ place? Is it simply the region that attracts the best rates? Is it the type of work available? Is it the quality of life in each region?

According to our latest research, Northern Ireland is financially the worst place in the UK for umbrella contractors and freelancers to apply their skills.

According to our analysis, the current average hourly rate for umbrella contractors and freelancers in Northern Ireland is £13.53 per hour which equates to an annual gross salary of £23,847 . However, this compares favourably with the average gross annual salary for Northern Ireland which, according to ONS data stands at £21,949 .

Despite a year on year fall in rates for umbrella contractors and freelancers (£32.39 in 2012 compared to £33.12 in 2011), the UK’s flexible workforce continues to earn more than the regional average as outlined in the table below:

So if you want to make the big bucks it looks like London is the place to be. Unless massive house prices, expensive transport costs, or even the lack of a countryside view out your window put you off.

[1] Based on an average working week of 37.5 hours over 47 weeks.
[2] Labour Market Statistics, February 2012.

In my view, based on the numbers above, I’d go for Wales. The rates are attractive, house prices are competitive and it’s not hard to get out into the countryside at the weekend.

What do you think? Is it all about rate for you or do other considerations come into it? Are you happy to commute or work away from home during the week?

Leave a comment below and lets us know what you think.

There is word of mouth (and you can’t get better than a friend’s recommendation, hence the reason why we reward people who refer their mates to us), there is the  advertising activity we do, and there are the social media conversations we have via twitter (@parasolgroup), LinkedIn and our blogs which get you lot talking as well. Because of our reputation for excellent service and compliance we also get a lot of referrals from recruiters and staffing businesses. They know they can rely on us to make sure our employees are paid accurately and on time every time.

One of the places you won’t see Parasol very often is in any of the ‘umbrella company’ league tables top tens which pop up from time, which is odd when you think that we are one of the top three providers in this space and have been for the best part of the last decade. You probably won’t find the other leading companies in these lists either and there is a very good reason for this. Well two actually!

The first reason is we won’t pay to be included in them. You might be surprised to learn that if you want to be included in some of these league tables you have to pay to be involved. That’s a bit like a premier league football team paying to be top of the league. It doesn’t actually matter how good you are, if you pay up you’re in the top ten. We don’t believe this is the right way to go about it at all so we won’t support them, it misleads potential umbrella workers and staffing businesses and that’s not right.

Secondly, the majority of these league tables are actually owned by some of the umbrella companies they are promoting. Coming back to the football analogy, that’s a bit like a football team winning the league because they own the league, again, nothing to do with how good they are. So as a genuine leading employment services company, it doesn’t make any sense to pay a competitor to feature in their league table.

The moral of this story is to take the ‘umbrella company’ league tables with a pinch of salt. They are not impartial and they are not transparent, and that is no way to pick a service provider who will be responsible for something as important as your employment status and pay.

What has been your experience of league tables or how did you go about choosing your service provider? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.

It wasn’t exactly party poppers and champagne but I’m pleased to report that our payroll year end has been carried out successfully so there should be no hangovers for any of our employees (well, nothing payroll related anyway!) We’ve been busy in the Payroll and Expenses department making sure we process the final expense claims for 2011/2012 and updating our systems for all the new legislation that comes into force for the new tax year.

Looking back at the last financial year it has seen some major changes for our department with the introduction of AWR (Agency Workers Regulations) back in October. I have only been in my current role since the 1^st January so I tip my hat to the AWR project team for the robust solutions that have been put in place and the considerable amount of work that has gone on behind the scenes which has meant that it’s been business as usual for the vast majority of our employees.

A significant part of my role involves liaising with the IT team here to continue with process refinements to get your pay into your hands as quickly and as accurately as possible – with an average of 4,000 employees payrolled every week we’re always looking to ensure we strike the right balance between compliance, accuracy and speed of processing.

2012/2013 brings a host of new challenges including major projects such as Auto Enrolment for pensions (expect some employee surveys on that as your feedback will play a significant part of how we move forward), RTI (Real Time Information transmission of payroll data to HMRC) and a thorough overhaul of the expenses section of My Parasol based on employee feedback gathered over the last 12 months.

Finally, speaking of expenses we still have a large proportion of employees that have never made a claim for expenses. It only takes a few minutes to submit a claim on the My Parasol portal and for 10 or 15 minutes work each month or week you could save yourself hundreds of pounds in tax and National Insurance relief.  If you’re not sure what you can claim for then email the expenses team on expenses@parasolgroup.co.uk, or for a simple overview on how to claim check out the new My Parasol interactive guide and start holding onto more of your hard earned cash now.

As a market leader, here at Parasol we employ hundreds of freelancers, temps and contractors every week who are brand new to contracting. They have come to contracting or freelancing in a variety of ways, some have made a career choice to go it alone, others have moved on from a job. Many first timers will go on to have very successful careers and never look back, however, that’s not true for everyone.

In fact, about 50% of the newbies who are employed by Parasol eventually leave to go back to full time permanent employment. Why is that?

Well first of all, clearly, contracting or freelancing is not for everyone. You might be removing yourself from some of the stress and pressures of permie life but the reality is you are swapping them for different ones and not everyone can handle that.

But what about the others, have they simply not got what it takes to be a career contractor?

And that then begs the question; what does a career contractor look like?

A successful career contractor has many attributes. These vary from profession to profession. But there are some that are common to all.

In-demand and up-to-date skills and experience

All the most successful contractors have something that the market wants. Any contractor with skills and experience that the market is crying out for is likely to be in demand and will be able to charge the rates that go with this. Of course, this means that the opposite is also true. A contractor or freelancer with outdated skills or with a skill set that is now commonly being outsourced to cheaper overseas alternatives will struggle.

A good CV

A good CV is essential for contractors. What other tips would you give to ‘new’ contractors looking to get their CV ship shape?

A people network

When it comes to securing your next contract, there is no substitute for having a good network of contacts and keeping these relationships fresh. This includes staying in touch with the recruiters and staffing businesses that place you.

A polished interview technique

A successful contractor has been to more job interviews than they can remember and will have perfected the art of being a great interview candidate. What would be your tips?

Of course, these are all attributes to help you get the role – then the real hard work starts. How do you establish yourself in a role and how do you ensure that as soon as one role ends, another begins? (See networking above!)

Are technical skills the critical factor in a successful career? What about people skills? You may be well-qualified and have a great set of skills, but you may fail as a contractor simply because you lack some of the following crucial attributes.

• Able to show genuine interest in others
• Be friendly and helpful
• Do not undermine permies and make them feel insecure
• Share your knowledge with others
• Invest in yourself, keep your skills up to date with regular study and training
• Be knowledgeable. Keep an eye on market trends for the sector you are working in etc
• The ability to network, both onsite and off

So personality, relationship building and the ability to ‘sell’ yourself are just as important as your technical skills and experience when establishing yourself as a career contractor.

What else do you think makes a successful career contractor, freelancer or temp?

“The Chancellor was in a bullish mood and today’s Budget announcement was fairly radical in comparison to recent years but I believe it was also well balanced. There are plenty of positives to take for contractors, freelancers and temps, as well as the staffing businesses that place them.

“As with last year’s announcement, the pledged increases to transport infrastructure investment will create not only jobs and assignments for flexible workers, but will also increase efficiency for the UK as a whole and therefore profitability. In the simplest terms, less time in traffic jams means more billable time working on assignment for contractors, temps and freelancers across the UK.

“A lot of flexible workers work in the leading industrial sectors listed by the Chancellor, i.e. aerospace, pharma, oil and gas and the creative and media sectors. These individuals will get a boost from planned investment, as will the staffing businesses that place them.

“Of more significance for flexible workers working via their own limited company is the cut in tax rates to 20% for small businesses. This was essential for keeping one of the UK’s major sources of innovation competitive and a viable and valuable resource for UK PLC.

“For me, the reduction in the top rate tax to 45p makes sense, as does the reduction in corporation tax. This will encourage the nation’s entrepreneurs and wealth creators and will lead to improved job creation in the UK. The staffing industry is one sector that I believe has an entrenched entrepreneurial spirit so this will also be a plus for business in this sector.

“I do have one concern, and that is the Chancellor mentioned that he will consult on a general anti-tax avoidance rule. He used fairly emotive language in describing tax avoidance as ‘morally repugnant’ but it is important to note that tax avoidance is not illegal. My particular concern is that this rule is a knee jerk reaction to the recent media coverage criticising the use of PSCs, and this would be wrong. Those willing to take the risk and start their own business should be rewarded and encouraged. I am hoping however that by delaying this with a consultation period it’s the Chancellor’s way of taking the sting out of this non-story.

“Finally, although not mentioned in the speech, IR35 remains an issue and the Budget Report does highlight that IR35 is to be simplified and a new regime to police it introduced. This is good news. I have always been of the view that with IR35 it is better the devil you know and any replacement would cause more upheaval and cost and is in no way guaranteed to remove any tax burden.”

Over here at Parasol we’ll be going through this in detail tomorrow so check back on Thursday for our views on the budget and what it means for you as a contractor, temp or freelancer. In the meantime though, one of the regular ‘pre-budget’ leaks that are becoming more and more common really caught our eye this morning. It was the announcement that George Osborne will reveal tomorrow that from 2014, UK tax payers will receive a regular breakdown detailing where their tax money is being spent. Now this should make for interesting reading!

Although this doesn’t include indirect taxes such as VAT or fuel duty, all of your income tax and national insurance contributions will be broken down for you, as HMRC have said that it was “right” that people knew how their taxes were being spent.

According to the HMRC press release, if you are earning near the UK’s average family income at £25,000 a year, you are making the following annual contributions:

Now there are two things that stand out there. One – ‘other’ seems a bit vague considering it’s the second largest chunk of your tax, and two – personally I’d love to see road tax included, especially in light of yesterday’s proposals to toll new roads. British motorists are paying £47billion in tax every year, however a recent report by the RAC would suggest that the return on that comes nowhere close.

I can’t help feeling that there is a political motivation to this as well. At a time when the Government is driving down the cost of the welfare state, it seems convenient to show just how much of our tax is being spent on it, prompting a lot of tax payers to question whether or not they are getting value for money.

I would also like to see welfare broken down further as well. How much is spent on pensions? How much is spent on the NHS? Both of these are politically charged topics and it is your hard earned money we are talking about here.

Tomorrow is going to be interesting to say the least so is the Chancellor and the Treasury hinting at something with this release today?

Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.