You don’t need to have a business license to do freelance work under your own name. You can still get paid by a client for your work with no legalities attached. The only time you run into legalities is when a client pays you and then records that expenditure for tax purposes. Then you need to fill out a tax form for each company with the income you got from them so everything is properly recorded. Clients will let you know if they are reporting your costs for taxes. They’ll often ask for your tax payer id number if they are. In many cases though clients will not report paying you to the government meaning you don’t really have any obligation to report your income from that client either. I’m not exactly a legal expert and of course can’t qualify this as professional legal advice but those are the guidelines I go by.

I asked Kristen Fischer who wrote this article on Freelance Switch about contracts (http://freelanceswitch.com/clients/legalese-for-freelancers-creating-a-contract/) and she said you should contact a lawyer on that one. It’s an excellent question. I wonder if you might be able to find the answer somewhere online.

In all honesty the presence of a contract in these deals is a lot more important that it’s iron clad legality. If a client will sign a contract you probably won’t have trouble getting payment from them or have issues where they try to squirm out of it.

In case you haven’t found it yet I’ve put the contract I used in the post called Five Essential Tools Every Freelancer Should Have ( http://bryanconnor.com/2009/03/five-essential-tools-every-freelancer-should-have/ ) which you can download and adapt.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any more questions.

Thank you,
Trent