If you are willing to spend some time getting to grips with tax and understanding what it’s all about, then I agree you should be able to manage your affairs without using a tax adviser or accountant. Many people use a professional adviser so they don’t have to deal with all the hassles of tax and finance – outsourcing the worries if you like.
However, as I’m sure you appreciate, tax is a complex subject and has many traps for the unwary – so if your affairs do start to get involved, you might consider going to see a tax adviser on a one-off basis just to make sure you have your records and systems set up properly, with the aim that once you have had your ‘health check’, you’ll carry on yourself.
To get to grips with tax, there is a lot of very useful information available from HMRC through their website. You could try the search facility for a particular topic. They do have some basic guides to self employment, but what they don’t have is a simple guide to income tax.
There are a good number of books published on tax but many are rather complex. The Tolleys series of handbooks (e.g. Tolley’s Income Tax) have a lot of information in them and will probably answer all the questions you are likely to have – but you may struggle to use them if you don’t have a general knowledge of income tax. You could try books by Which?, St James’s Place or Zurich.
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