Am I charging enough?
I am a self employed small business admin assistant and I was hired by a cleaning company to basically run the entire business but when people have found out how much I charge they think I’m short changing myself so I thought I’d ask for some opinions…
For this cleaning company I do the following:
- Accounts receivable & payables
- All bookkeeping tasks
- Filing and paying of all company quarterly taxes & I work with a tax professional gathering what’s needed for yearly taxes
- I do all contracts, price negotiations, vendor account set up and property viewings
- Scheduling of services
- Maintaining all company insurances
- Employee records and new hiring onboarding
- I’m the main point of contact via email and phone
- I create spreadsheets for monthly budgets and monitor all bank accounts to make sure the company is on track
- Any errands needed for the business and owner
- All mail correspondence
- Keep the office stocked and inventory tracking
I work about 4-5 hours per day 5-6 days per week but I’m always on call for whatever the business or owner needs. I currently charge $850.00 per week and I’m in in the state of Arizona and file my own taxes as I’m a 1099 contractor and not an actual employee.
I look forward to your opinions on the matter and thank you in advance!
This one’s a little tricky because you’ve got a couple of issues going on. First is you’re probably misclassified as an independent contractor and second is whether you’re underpaid.
If you simply did just the bookkeeping for them, then that might pass as an independent contractor. You’d provide this service to this company and other companies, having discretion of when and how you work. All the other stuff is basically a W2 employee, like an office manager or admin assistant. This ties into the second issue of compensation. As a 1099 independent contractor, you’re keeping less of your $850/week than as an W2 employee because you’re responsible for self-employment tax.
Compensation wise on the surface, it doesn’t seem that bad if you’re making $44k/year in AZ working only 4-5 hours a day. It’d be a great salary if you had a full 40 hour work week. If they made you a W2 employee, they might want to pay you less because now they’re responsible for payroll taxes, insurance, and benefits. If you were truly a 1099 independent contractor, you could take 15 unpaid days off any time you want to travel, but they probably won’t let you do that, hence you’re truly an employee. As a W2 employee, you’d be getting PTO, sick days, and more protection from being let go.