Question for those who do portraits etc.

Does anyone know the laws regarding this? Can I charge money for my work without a license? What about selling prints? Do I need a business? How do you all deal with this stuff?

Anytime money is exchange for services you should or required to have a business license. The law varies from state to state.

Thanks, Vegas Poboy. Okay, looking around this forum, I realise I need to learn a lot about the business side of things before even considering this.

isis24 wrote in post #2227803
Does anyone know the laws regarding this? Can I charge money for my work without a license? What about selling prints? Do I need a business? How do you all deal with this stuff?

It should be fairly easy to set up a business as long as it's not a corporation or a limited company of some kind. As much as anything the state/province/country want's you registered so you are set up to collect and pay taxes, so they aren't going to go out of their way to make it difficult.

The next step is record keeping. You need to record all of your sales and most jurisdictions require invoices to have some type of numeric pattern. ("Uh X1234 is here and so is X1236. Where is X1235?"). I just use a spreadsheet program to record sales, taxes and so forth.

Finally you will need to find out what information the government wants you to put on invocies. Where I am (in Canada) I must put my HST tax number on any invoice. I don't know what it gets used for, but it must be there.

I suspect that there's any number of government programs (free) that are in place to help small business get off the ground so you should look into something like that.

you have to have one, and why wouldn't you? you can then write off all your expenses. Its worth the little hassle in taxes and paperwork

don't forget about insuarance