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Taking on your first employee: what changes on the admin side

One to two is a bigger jump than two to six. On your own, the business runs on things you know: where the job is, what was agreed, which customer is awkward about access. None of that is written down, because it never needed to be. The moment there is a second person, all of it has to exist somewhere outside your head — and it has to be there before their first Monday, not after.

What stops working immediately

• The schedule in your head. Two people cannot both know where the other is going.
• Quoting from memory. Two people quoting the same work at different prices is a customer conversation you do not want.
• Hours on a pad. Yours were a formality; theirs are wages, and they need to be accurate.
• Knowing which jobs are finished. You used to know because you did them.

The employment side

Payroll, contracts, pensions, insurance and the checks required before someone starts are all real obligations with real deadlines, and they are not something to work out from a web page. Talk to your accountant before you make the offer, not after. One thing is worth settling first, though, because it decides everything else: whether this person is employed or self-employed. That is not your choice to make — it follows from control, the right of substitution and mutuality of obligation. Run HMRC's CEST check before the offer and keep the outcome. CIS sits on top of whatever the answer is; it does not replace it. What follows here is only the operational half.

Write down the two or three standards

Not a handbook. The things that will otherwise be discovered by a customer: what a job sheet has to have on it before it counts as done, what happens when something extra comes up on site, and when it is acceptable to leave without a signature. Three sentences each. The point is not formality — it is that a new person has no way of guessing.

The variation rule especially

On your own, extra work is a conversation and you carry the decision. With an employee, it is somebody else deciding on your behalf on a doorstep. That is where unbilled work comes from in firms of two to five: not dishonesty, just an engineer being helpful without a way to record it. See variations on site.

Give them the history before the door

The thing that makes a new engineer look like part of an established firm is knowing what happened at the property last time. That is not experience, it is a record — and if it exists, somebody in their second week can walk in already knowing about the boiler that was condemned two years ago.

Do it a month early

Everything above is easier to set up while you are still on your own, because you are the only person who has to change. Putting the schedule, the job sheets and the price list in place a month before the start date means the first week is about the work rather than about the system.