Founded in 2008. The Landscape Juice Network (LJN) is the largest and fastest growing professional landscaping and horticultural association in the United Kingdom.
LJN's professional business forum is unrivalled and open to anyone within within the UK landscape industry
LJN's Business Objectives Group (BOG) is for any Pro serious about building their business.
For the researching visitor there's a wealth of landscaping ideas, garden design ideas, lawn advice tips and advice about garden maintenance.
Replies
David Gauke needs to try and live on a gardeners' wage for a year.
Some clients will want to pay cash because they know it will be cheaper for them (i.e. no VAT) and others will want to pay cash because they genuinely want to help, in the knowledge that the money is used by the tradesman to pay vital bills and pay for food.
And what about bank charges? If Im paid by bacs I loose 33p of the payment, then have to loose another 40p when I use my debit carb to pay for petrol... all for having a business account...
Pay me cash and It gets spent without me incurring what would amount to £200-£300 a year in extra bank charges... And it still gets declared to the tax man....
Is he insinuating that I didnt declare £xxxxx last year? All of us?
Phil Voice said:
As usual the MP's pick on the soft target. The normal working man who just wants to go about his business. Lets see them closing some of the tax loop holes which big businesses use to avoid BULLIONS in tax. or why not take some actions against these banks that have driven us to the edge of the abyys. Maybe David Gauke should look at his own financial dealings before he criticises others
http://order-order.com/2012/07/23/naming-and-shaming-the-morally-re...
http://graduatefog.co.uk/2012/1971/david-gauke-mp-treasury-minister/
Never mind, £10 for running your Hayter over Mrs. Farley's front lawn as a favour, because your working next door. It's the so called 'gardeners' who only do cash and nothing else.
You know the type they're not insured, no overheads, work out of the back of an old car and have no come back if they do a dodgy job and generally give the legitimate gardeners a bad name.
I ran into a guy the other day who boasted that he only did cash to top up his pension, he saw nothing wrong in undercutting everyone else as he said 'it gave him something to do', he had so much work he didn't know what to do with it all. After the spring/summer we've all had I wanted to hit him!
We've even got a chap in our area who is charging £9 per hour and you supply the tools, how professional is that?
I personally run everything through my books (don't want any issue with the tax man) but I don't think they're on about the odd £10 here or there, it's the large transactions and people like this sh** that I came across last week.
Sue
You can pay me however you like my price is my price and it all goes through the books.
I'm sure many of us are seething at this: what an irresponsible and ignorant man? To whom does this [insert powerful expletive and adjective combo here] societal liability actually address in his statements and on whose behalf does he speak? To what societal benefit is his goal and from where does he draw his hideous inspiration?
Black Market? It is not illegal to pay in cash - it is NOT ILLEGAL. What alternatives there are bind us all mostly to expensive systems of receipt and maintenance as part of the wider banking infrastructure (as David rightly says above) - these are SERVICES to which there is no obligation to subscribe and therefore should we choose to receive, or indeed should a customer choose to pay by cash, then there is no legal no legal prejudice against doing so. CASH FLOW is a big issue in small business, and since the banks haven't been overly forthcoming in dispersing the quantitative easing measures in any form of business loans, then ready cash is the currency we need to thrive, grow, develop and yes, dare I say it being but a bob-a-job gardener, prosper.
The prevailing class-based attitudes disseminated by the likes of David Gauke and indeed the Daily Mail (among others of course) are at the heart of many of the current social, political and economic problems we in the UK face today.
With respect to any Conservative supporters or Daily Mail readers, this is nothing but vacuous repugnant Tory tosh.
Nicky Patterson, Landscape Designer @ GardenImprovements.com (@gardndesign)
Talk about 'stating the bl**din' obvious'! The country is awash with black market money, everyone knows it - it's up to those WE pay, to do their job and get to grips with it...........which means they get on the road and get their hands dirty. Every town could have a dedicated HMRC team, ferreting around, getting to know the tradesmen, the hairdressers, cabbies, windowcleaners etc etc.
As an incentive to small businesses, the VAT threshold could be raised to a realistic level - say £150K
It was a cheap shot by the Minister. I take it no other paper is reporting this item then Nicky ;-)
Typical daily mail...
Since they took the cheque-guarantee cards away, and small sole traders can't afford card machines to carry around, how are people supposed to pay us if not cash? Most of mine pay be electronic transfer, with the odd regular cheque, but if I was doing smaller jobs as one-off dealings I'd not want to risk bouncing cheques for tiny amounts, so it would need to be cash.
Again, it's just badly-worded. They seem to mean people trying to avoid paying VAT by doing a cash "deal", which is illegal. Always makes me laught when people try this on with me, and I explain to them that not being VAT registered means it's hard for me to give them a "discount" for cash! The tradesman getting small amounts of cash, not declaring it, and then spending it locally, aren't really bringing the nation to it's knees, are they? They're the only ones keeping the pubs in business!
I expect that in the fullness of time we will learn that David Gauke MP has paid cash for a substandard job.....
Anyway why do we have cash? It's always getting stolen or forged. Get rid of it now and end the black market! (can I be a minister please?)