If you’ve landed here, you’re thinking about offering services via homecarelink. Great decision! We’re the only platform in New Zealand that keeps costs to a predictable monthly rate to make sure you get the most out of working directly with customers.
Here are some key things you need to know that we hope will help you feel confident as you start out using our service:
Setting up your profile
Customers will want to know a bit about you before they book your service. That’s natural; you’d want to know more about someone new before you trust them to provide care for you in your home, too!
You can use your vendor profile to tell customers about yourself and your experience. Your vendor profile is independent of your service listings – customers will be able to click through to it from any listing you make. So, use it to provide information that is not specific to an individual listing. Some examples of information to include in your vendor profile are:
- Your area – how far afield you’re willing to travel to provide your service.
- Your experience – some information about relevant work history that can help customers to be sure you’re a good fit for their needs.
- Your interests – in your downtime, what do you do? What would you like to learn? This will help customers to gauge whether you’ll ‘click’ on a human level.
You can edit your vendor profile during your initial account setup, or in the Settings page of your homecarelink account dashboard.
Your first service listing
Service listings are what makes our platform go round. There are several parts to them:
Your listing title should be short and sweet – and obvious. Offering seats in a car pool to a specific school? Try ‘(School name) car pool’. Do you help with meal prep? ‘Vegetarian meal prep’ might find the right customers. Are you offering in-home assistance and qualified for wound care? ‘Living support and wound care’ will tell your customers what you can do.
Listings have several pricing fields. These are:
- Price – the baseline price of your service, with a standard time slot and no add-ons.
- Hourly rate – the baseline price of your service on a per-hour basis. If your standard service is a 20-minute dog walk for $20, then your hourly rate would be $60.
- Tiers – tiers allow you to charge more for higher levels of service. For example, you might charge $45 per hour to provide basic in home care, but include a trip to the grocery store in a $50 per hour tier.
- Extras – extras allow you to charge for specific additional tasks. You might offer showering assistance as part of a ‘care for me’ booking for an additional $15, or an extra litter-box check as part of a ‘care for my pets’ booking for an additional $5.
The listing details tell customers what is included in your service, and you can also use it to tell them about any specific exclusions. For example, if you cannot lift things that are heavier than 10kg, you might note this in your listing details.
Once you have made your first listing, your profile will appear on our ‘Browse providers’ page.
Being a sole trader
Offering your services directly to customers makes you a sole trader in tax terms.
We know that sounds scary – but it doesn’t have to be. We recommend that providers on homecarelink sign up to hnry, so that they never have to think about tax again.
Hnry’s service is simple: You direct your Stripe Connect payments into your hnry bank account, and your hnry setup tells them what you want done with your money. They charge 1% of the payments that come through (but they cap it at $1,500 a year) for their service.
Every time a payment comes in, they calculate the tax, ACC, Kiwisaver, and student loan (if you have one) parts, and put the right amounts into each. The rest goes to your bank account – usually getting there within hours of the customer paying you. You can even divert some off to your mortgage account or savings! This means that when you use hnry, the money that lands in your bank account is yours. No unpleasant surprises.
You log expenses (like your homecarelink subscription, stripe fees, tools, and safety gear) in the Henry app, and hnry accountants ensure that those are correctly offset against your tax, so that you don’t pay more tax than you should. They even offer a mileage app that can track your journeys, taking the pain out of keeping a logbook.
Hnry handle your GST claims and your end of year tax filing, so you’ll never miss out on a rebate you qualify for. We hope you’ll like working with them as much as our founders have.
Getting paid
During sign-up, you’ll be asked to set up a Stripe Connect account. This is required for paying your Homecarelink subscription, but you can also choose to use Stripe as a payment option for your customers if you like.
All other payments for your services are arranged directly between you and your customers. Homecarelink does not handle any service payments.
As a sole trader in New Zealand, you are fully responsible for managing your own invoices, taxes, and payments. Stripe simply provides a secure option for subscription payments (and optionally for customer payments), with a low processing fee (currently 0.7%), while you remain in control of your business finances.