Umbrellas and subsistence

[LisaContractorUmbrella]

With regard to the issue of online calculators - it is impossible for an umbrella company to give a 100% accurate estimate of your earnings in this way. The reason is that an umbrella company pays via PAYE. Income tax is calculated cummulatively and tax free pay is determined by your tax code. Not everyone has the same tax code and not everyone will have necessarily worked every week/month of the current tax year therefore an accurate determination of tax is impossible. However, any online calculator should use the standard code for that financial year which is currently 522L - if this is not your assigned tax code your net pay will automatically be different from the figure quoted by the calculator.

With regard to expenses - if the online calculator does not ask you to enter your expenses then you will know that the umbrella company has made an assumption. Obviously any assumption made is unlikely to be a true reflection of the expenses that you will be claiming and therefore the calculation returned will be wrong.

HTH

[Ardesco]

Umbrella's need to realise not everyone joining is single and can absorb discrepancies in promised income compared to that received. People do have budgets and failure by an umbrella to be responsible in being clear affects this.

Churs

The sad reality is that the majority of Umbrella's don't care. They get your money in, take a slice and hand the rest out to you. The less they talk to you the better and once you are on thier books they have got what they want so they aren't going to bother trying to make you feel better.

Chalk it up to experiance, either go LTD or use one of the very few umbrellas reccomended here.