How to get organised for self-assessment from day one
The habits worth building in your first weeks as a locum, so self-assessment is a quick review each year instead of a January reconstruction project.
- self-assessment
- getting-started
- organisation
Ask any locum with a few years behind them what they’d tell their first-week self, and a version of “start the admin habits earlier” comes up almost every time. Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
Register early, not under pressure
If you’re newly self-employed, register for Self Assessment with HMRC promptly rather than waiting until the deadline looms. There’s a registration deadline separate from the filing deadline, and missing it can mean an avoidable penalty for something that takes ten minutes online.
Open a separate account for locum income
You don’t need a fancy business bank account on day one, but keeping locum income separate from your personal spending — even a simple second current account — makes reviewing your year vastly easier than untangling it from everything else you’ve spent money on.
Set aside tax as you go
A rough percentage of every payment, moved into a savings pot the moment it lands, means the tax bill is never a shock. Ask your accountant what percentage makes sense for your situation — it depends on your total income, not just your locum earnings.
Log sessions the day they happen
This is the one habit that makes every other part of self-assessment easier. Date, hours, fee, site, payment status — a two-minute entry on the day beats a two-hour reconstruction in January, every time.
Keep receipts as you go, not in a pile
Photograph or file receipts (indemnity, subscriptions, equipment, parking) the day you get them. A shoebox of paper receipts from eight months ago is genuinely hard to make sense of, even for you.
Know your deadlines before they’re urgent
Self-assessment has a filing deadline and, separately, payment deadlines — and if you’re within Making Tax Digital’s scope, quarterly update deadlines on top of that. Write them somewhere you’ll actually see them, not just in the back of your mind.
Tip: Do a genuine ten-minute review of your year-to-date position every few months, even if nothing’s formally due. Catching a gap in June is a quick fix. Catching the same gap in January, three days before a deadline, is a much worse afternoon.
Get an accountant involved early, not at the finish line
You don’t need to have complex finances to benefit from a conversation before your first year ends. An accountant can flag things worth doing differently — how you’re recording mileage, whether a limited company might suit you later, what you’re missing — while there’s still time to adjust, rather than after the year’s already locked in.
The point of all this
None of these habits are complicated on their own. The value is compounding — a locum who’s logged sessions and kept receipts consistently for a year opens self-assessment season to a five-minute review. A locum who hasn’t opens it to a genuine reconstruction project. Same underlying admin, very different January.
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