Tax Return for Landscape Gardeners

If you love turning boring gardens into beautiful spaces where people can really enjoy themselves, being a freelance landscape gardener could be your perfect job. Our guide will show you what you need to do to make it happen.

Learning to be a freelance landscape gardener

Landscape gardening doesn’t actually require any formal education or training, but having the right knowledge will help you build a more successful business. Even if you have lots of natural talent, studying for a qualification in horticulture will teach you everything you need to know to
be a great landscape gardener. There are many courses available which will teach you the required skills. Read the Telegraph’s article on gardening courses to see a few of the institutions running them.

How to find work as a freelance landscape gardener

In the early days especially, you’ll be spending much of your time and effort finding new clients.
Here are a few ways to effectively market your services as a freelance landscape gardener:

Set up a website: Visuals are very important when it comes to landscape
gardening, so having a professional website is a great place to showcase photos of previous work.
Word of mouth: Once you start doing great jobs for your clients, they’ll start to tell their friends about you.
Social networking: Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn will give you the opportunity to make contacts, as well as a place to talk about your services and post photos of landscaping work.
Place local adverts: Placing adverts in local shops and newspapers is relatively inexpensive, and allows you to target customers by specific geographic locations.

Having the right skills as a freelance landscape gardener

The better you are as a landscape gardener, the easier you’ll find it to gain new clients. Here are some of the skills you’ll need in order to be good at your job:

Turning what the client tells you into sketches that visually represent their ideas.
Taking the client’s budget into consideration when designing their garden. Calculating costs for materials and labour, taking into consideration how much you’ll be earning per hour of work.
Using costs to work out an estimate for the client.
Ordering items such as garden furniture and fountains.
Planting seeds and plants, and installing any furniture or other garden features.
Being able to teach clients how to take care of their gardens once you’ve finished landscape designing.

Accounting as a freelance landscape gardener

There are various benefits to freelancing as a landscape gardener, from the freedom and flexibility to work with a variety of businesses and individuals to more take-home pay. But there is one downside – accounting. As a full-time employee, your tax is usually taken care of on your behalf in the form of PAYE. As a freelancer you’ll have to keep a range of financial records and then prepare and pay a Self-Assessment tax return at the end of each business year. Accountancy can be very confusing and can distract you from your landscaping jobs.

Getting tax and accountancy advice

With most accountants, you’ll pay them to do your year-end accounts, and then they’ll forget about you until the next year. But for your business to be run smoothly and successfully, you’ll need advice on tax and accountancy throughout the year, especially in the early days.

Citi Accounts is different

Citi Accounts provides an affordable and specialist accountancy service designed just for freelancers. Throughout the year we’ll be on hand to give you any tax and accountancy advice you might need, including things like:

Take-home pay
Which VAT scheme to register for
Expenses
Tax allowances
Choosing between sole trader and limited company
Running your business in a tax-efficient way

We charge for our accountancy services in a clear and simple way, which means you’ll never receive an unexpected bill, and you can get in touch for advice whenever you want without the worry of being charged a fortune like you would with many other accountants.