Business Management

What is the structure of your coaching business?

As a coach it is important for both you and the tennis venue in which you work to establish whether you are employed or are self-employed. This is essential for both legal and tax purposes. It determines whether the venue has to pay National insurance in the case of an employee or whether you have to register as self-employed with HMRC and be responsible for paying tax and National insurance yourself. Similar considerations need to be made for any coaches who work directly for you.

Benefits of being employed by the venue:

• Guaranteed monthly wage
• Additional legal benefits and protections such as of holiday, & sick and redundancy pay and protection from unfair dismissal.

Benefits of being self-employed:

• Flexibility of when and where you work
• Some expenses can be deducted from your taxable pay
• Profits generated by the programme are kept by you (after any tax is paid)

Whichever option applies the information in this section should provide you with some basic guidance.

• Employed
• Self-Employed

As with the structure of the coaching business, the venue at which you work has also made a decision regarding its structure.

Determining whether you are an employee or self-employed?

There is often no simple answer as to whether a coach is an employee of the venue or self-employed. Whilst the contract may give an indication of the intention of the parties, the relevant authority such as HMRC will look beyond any contract and will examine the reality of the relationship between the parties and what happens in practice. This is of particular importance for coaches at the moment as the HMRC has recently taken an interest in this area.

When considering which applies to you there are a number of major factors which determine your employment status. These factors include:

• Can the coach provide a substitute to perform the services provided?
• Does the coach incur personal financial risk for the services provided?
• Is the coach required to work a set number of hours each week or month?

Find a detailed list of questions.

It is possible to have two different relationships with the same venue. Some coaching services can be provided as a retained employee, whilst other coaching services are provided to the members as a self-employed coach.

This is also an important consideration if you use assistant coaches who could be deemed to be employees of your business. When asking yourself these questions you should do so along with someone at your venue, as the outcome will impact on them.

The answers to the questions should be documented and in order to do this HMRC have provided an anonymous Employment Status Indicator (ESI) tool which can help to establish employment status. Use the Employment Status Indicator (ESI) tool.

By providing honest and accurate answers to these questions HMRC will provide details of your employment status and will honour the result, i.e. whether the coach is either employed or self-employed. It is important that the venue or business  record  evidence of this outcome by keeping copies of the ‘Enquiry Details’ screen and the ‘ESI Result’ screen which contains the ESI reference number.

Disclaimer

The information provided is for guidance only. You should seek professional advice before taking any steps relating to this guidance. The LTA accepts no responsibility for any errors contained in this guidance and will not be liable for any losses incurred through following this guidance.

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