It's not always the case that people dodge VAT, sometimes it happens through an innocent mistake. Some years ago I used to use a builder for the major works on my projects. Really nice guy, honest as the day is long. Always on time, he had a couple of lads that helped him paid through PAYE that his wife did. Always did his own accounts Big problem was that he was ignorant of the VAT laws, he thought that registration was voluntary!! Needless to say they caught him and went through him like a dose of salts, he very nearly went under, had to stop employing his lads. Still working, interestingly still not VAT registered, but does a lot of jobs for cash!
I was forced to go VAT registered during my first year of trading, I had no idea that they worked out your threshold on a rolling basis, so I was caught out, I even had a few jobs booked in without VAT, had to pay the VAT out of my own profit.
I know someone who use to regularly steal his boss's clients. I don't condone it as a rule but the boss charge extortionate rates to people who were either desperate or gullible. He finished the job, got a rapport with the client and took weekend work from them for future projects.
revenge would be to be the good citizen report him as self employed to inland revenue you have all his details and the details of where he worked and how much work he did. theyll haul him over for you.
my first priority wud av been to ring customer and ask what's wrong. sorry don't do text to cancel jobs,
There would have to be a death in the family for me to pull off a job, as far as I'm concerned the customer and trademan has a contract so there had better be a damn good reason to stop work. At the very least I would make the customer pay until the end of the week.
in answer to the first post, have it out with him by all means but as someone else said, put it down the experience, forget it and move on to focus on your business. We have all taken on tossers and worked for tossers, but as i get older i make better judgements on both. Best turn it into a laughable story you can tell in the pub or it will pick away at you and cost you more in distraction time
The other thing you have to watch out for is when a customer contacts you about 2 jobs. Job 1 - you take that on board and discuss prices etc. Job 2 - you politely decline as it's not your area or you don't have the resources to throw at it. You recommend someone else. That someone else walks away having got that job and yours! That hasn't happened to me but recently I was in the fortunate position of being asked to look at two jobs. One was for two bathrooms, whilst the other was for a garage conversion. Now the garage conversion was not something that I wanted to do but I really wanted to do the two upstairs bathrooms. Hence they asked me to suggest someone for the garage conversion. Having passed on work to one chap I knew a number of times (and never got thanked once for it), I decided that I couldn't trust him not to undercut me for the work I was after. He's undercutting everyone else in the area at the moment, whilst there are a bunch of handymen, painters and decorators, small builders, etc all helping each other out by passing on recommendations, and as a result all getting work at a reasonable rates, he is going all out to undercut the rest of us, and his work is beginning to show this. Hence I decided to recommend another guy who's work I've seen. "Don't take my bathrooms away from me" I said with a grin when I passed on the client's details. "I wouldn't do that to you especially as you've given me a way into some work, I'll just look at the other job" Although I was half joking I would not have been happy had he done that, and he would not consider it fair. Anyway, a week later he approached me and mentioned that he'd had a look at the job and quoted for it but advised that he had specifically excluded the downstairs bathrooms that were part of the job on the basis that I may be interested in doing them. I didn't know that there were any downstairs bathrooms! I was talking about the ones upstairs! The client got back in touch with me and said "I understand you'd like to consider our downstairs bathrooms as well - We'd be happy for you to do them as well as the ones upstairs."
makes me laugh how people that are not VAT reg think they are 17.5% cheaper. Can you do maths??? work it out and i think you will find it is just under 15%
I can't see how someone taking on a £40K extension could not be VAT registered. Maybe he is just starting out. Maybe he gets the customer to pay everyone (sub-contractors)direct and only gets his cut from the customer. There are plenty of ways around it.....
yes it is possible to price and manage a 40k extension and only take 10k in labour/profit, getting the customer to pay the builders yard other other major subbys direct -- on the other topic id never price for a job someone i knew as involved in or had come from their chain of work, unless i had spoken with them and they were cool with it for whatever reason
It is possible but never works out, i have done this in the past,you take on the job the customer says he will take care of all the materials, so you say fine and start the job, two weeks in and you find half way through the day that you are missing some item or other and the customer is out at work so you just nip off to the builders merchants (taking time you hadn't planned for) the customer says he will reimburse you, a few days later you tell the customer that we will neede such and such ordering, he turns round and says "don't suppose you could sort that out and pick it up could you?" and so on and so forth. IMHO it never works out on a big job, the builder always ends up being the one losing out