Who’da thought it. The music and entertainment world has gone through the ringer since March 2020 especially in the West End and live theatre. Income dropped, sometimes down to zero especailly if the grants could not be claimed.

Since the full opening up, many musicians have been picking up as much work as possible. But with that comes the problem of keeping track of your income, how it should be accounted for and then finding that they are over the VAT threshold until they prepard their annual accounts – which may not be until the January just before the filing deadline.

If doing their own self assessment and just fill in the self employed section, the VAT man is going to be very interested if the turnover figure if over that threshold and will open an investigation into you if no reference is made to it.

What I have found is that if you hold a chair in the main West End shows for the a period of time, it is likely you will be over the threshold as it includes basic pay, overtime, holiday, pension pay etc and always before paying deps as they are your expenses.