Executive summary
ContractorCalculator, the expert online guide to contracting, is the brainchild of former City of London IT contractor Dave Chaplin.
Packed full of news, contractor guides, specialist advice plus salary and tax calculators, ContractorCalculator is the only contractor website to hold an ABC certificate independently confirming unique visitor numbers. The site has been online since 1999, and has always offered full access to all users, without the need for payment or registration.
Masters maths graduate Dave Chaplin, author of The Contractors’ Handbook: the expert guide for UK contractors and freelancers , worked as a leading IT consultant and contractor for some of the world’s best-known City names in a career spanning a decade, before becoming full time CEO of ContractorCalculator.
About ContractorCalculator
ContractorCalculator is a leading internet site for contractors and freelancers. Packed full of expert guides, information and salary and tax calculators, it has been designed to make contractors winners at every stage of their career.
First launched in 1999 as ir35calc.co.uk, the site has always offered full access to all users, without the need for payment or registration. It features:
- Over 30 online salary and tax calculators enabling contractors to make the right financial decisions for their circumstances
- A detailed, comprehensive and extensively cross-referenced knowledge base of contractor guides and features covering the key aspects of contracting
- News and in-depth features on current affairs of specific interest to contractors and freelancers
- Areas providing access to dedicated and specialist services available to contractors, from mortgages, pensions and insurance to legal accounting and payroll.
Contractors can also benefit from the Contractor Doctor, which draws on industry experts to answer contractors’ questions, which over the years have ranged from the mundane to the bizarre.
The news channel focuses only on those issues relevant to contractors and freelancers, covering such diverse but essential topics as IR35 tax legislation and HMRC/High Court rulings, market news and statistics, the latest contract-seeking techniques and industry news.
About Dave Chaplin and the creation of ContractorCalculator
Dave Chaplin’s move into the IT sector was in part inevitable after his BSc in Mathematics from Bristol University and a subsequent MSc in Mathematics from Southampton University. He started work for an IT consultancy, working with some of the best-known names in the City; he also had a six-month stint in Hong Kong.
Chaplin soon realised that he could cut out the middleman and earn a much larger slice of what end-user clients were paying for his services. And, three days after handing in his notice from his consultancy job, he landed his first contract on double the pay.
Work on a specialist website for contractors started as a hobby, prompted by the introduction in 1999 of the IR35 tax legislation. Chaplin spent a weekend building a salary and tax calculator, loaded it onto the site, and had plenty of visitors within a week.
For several years, Chaplin would work a full day for his IT clients and spend his evenings and weekends working on developing the ContractorCalculator website. Finally, a combination of financial success with advertising and a desire to build his own web business led Chaplin to work full time on ContractorCalculator from 2004.
Since then, Chaplin has steadily improved the site and created a healthy and sustainable income from advertising revenue. His dedicated focus on combining usability with high quality content – produced by an editorial team of three – has generated high levels of website traffic. This traffic is independently audited by ABC, enabling advertisers full transparency when investing their marketing spend in ContractorCalculator.
In 2008, Chaplin published his first book, The Contractors’ Handbook: the expert guide for UK contractors and freelancers , by which he hopes to give first-time contractors and experienced freelancers alike the benefit of his knowledge and experience and that of the expert content on the website.
Photos and Site Logos:
ContractorCalculator Logo (Colour): JPG - (708 x 182 pixels) - 36kb
Dave Chaplin : Photo - Small
