Anyone else self employed?

[DixieChick42]

I am in the process of starting my own business, I'll be working from home doing bookkeeping, budgeting, etc. Things that need to be done on a weekly and/or monthly basis for businesses and individuals.

My concern is how I'm going to get maternity leave. Because my clients have steady work that has to be done, I will need to figure out how to not lose them to competition during maternity leave but still have their accounts taken care of.

I'm just wondering if anyone else has had a similar situation while self employed (without employees) and can give me some ideas.

Thanks in advance

 

[My_First]

You can still do 10 keep in touch days, however remember part of a day will also count as a day. The plus side is you can earn whatever you like in those days and not loose maternity pay (I take it its actually MA?) so if your day rates is say £500 a day, you can earn that and still keep your ma. Also, technically you can't work for free either, but I guess no one will check and you could invoice at the end if your maternity period, instead of during it. I am guessing that's not too legal though.

 

[DixieChick42]

You can still do 10 keep in touch days, however remember part of a day will also count as a day. The plus side is you can earn whatever you like in those days and not loose maternity pay (I take it its actually MA?) so if your day rates is say £500 a day, you can earn that and still keep your ma. Also, technically you can't work for free either, but I guess no one will check and you could invoice at the end if your maternity period, instead of during it. I am guessing that's not too legal though.

I'm in the US so we don't get maternity pay. I'm just concerned about how to handle the work load while I'm taking maternity leave. I don't want to lose customers. I'm not concerned with getting paid during the leave, I'm concerned about retaining customers. Does that make sense? I know my original post was kind of confusing sorry

 

[My_First]

My fault, I didn't look at you location. Could you work in evenings? How long do you intend to stay off for? Can you out source the work?

 

[DixieChick42]

Not a problem My_First, I forget to check locations sometimes too

Well for the first few months I don't want to work at all, I want to be able to focus on bonding with baby and healing so it's not the hours that would be an issue, Hubby also works for himself so his schedule is pretty flexible.

I've been thinking about outsourcing, I just haven't looked into it yet nor talked to anyone about it. I'm thinking about talking to temp agencies here in town (they provide temporary staff for things like vacation and maternity leave) I just don't know if they will provide staff to someone like me who will be working from home because that means the temp person would have to work from their home (I know I can't get a business license to have employees coming to my home, our county is pretty tough and they already give DH a hard time for his business license since he works outside). I also don't want to have to become a registered employer just to hire a temp person for a few months so they would have to be considered a private contractor and I'm just not sure how that all works.

I just wanted to see if there was anyone that had already faced this issue that could possibly offer me some advice as to what they did.

Thank you for your suggestions I appreciate any feedback I can get.