You're not actually paying £29.99

Nobody's ever opened a blog about tax voluntarily, so I'll be quick.

You're self-employed. You already knock things off before the tax gets worked out. Your insurance. Your first aid ticket. The mats, the bands, the rent you pay the gym for the floor space.

Your admin goes in the same box. It's a tool you use to run the business, so it comes off the profit before anyone works out what you owe.

What that's worth

£29.99 a month is £360 a year, near enough. That's the bit you see leaving the bank.

But on a basic rate year you're handing over 20% income tax and 6% National Insurance on your profit. Take that £360 off the profit first and you're not paying either on it.

Put it another way. Somewhere around a quarter of your admin bill isn't yours to pay.

Now the bit a website usually skips

Those are examples. They're not a promise, and anyone quoting you a figure to the penny hasn't met you.

Three ways it goes differently. Rough year and no profit, and there's nothing there to reduce. Only doing a handful of sessions and using the £1,000 trading allowance, and you're not claiming expenses at all, so you can't claim this either. And the rates get fiddled with every spring, so today's maths has a shelf life.

Your accountant will tell you your actual number in about four seconds. Ask them, not us. We count sessions.

The part that actually catches people

It's never the claiming. It's January, and you're trying to prove you paid for something eleven months ago, and the receipt was in an email you deleted in March.

Ours lands in your inbox every month, same day, same subject line. Search one word and there's the lot.

Which is a very dull sentence for something that saves you an afternoon in January.

Mind you, that's most of what we do.