The Social Media Manager career: Accounting, tax, and Social Security Framework for a Self-employed Person in Portugal

Abstract

Purpose – The main goal of this paper is to understand the legal framework of the self-employed worker in the social media management area. Design/methodology/approach – The research uses the legal research method to analyse Portuguese legal resources such as the personal income tax law, the accounting law, and the social security law. Findings – The results show that a self-employed worker needs to pay attention to several legal commitments to fulfil all the obligations concerning the activity's development. This fact implies knowledge in all dimensions, mainly accounting, taxation, and social security. In the accounting domain, the Portuguese social media manager needs to know concepts related to the applied accounting system to recognise economic operations. The accounting legal framework can represent consequences in the tax sphere. The manager has two tax options in the personal income tax domain, according to the simplified regime and the organised accounting system. The second option implies that workers have an accountant to certify the activity accounts. In the social security domain, the law foresees a lot of legal obligations that are of frequent accomplishment, including the social security payment. Each scope has specific requirements that need to be observed and needs substantial knowledge that marketing people sometimes do not have, thus, it is frequent to recur to an accountant service to get help. This decision represents the increase of the context costs to the employee. The research of this case study evidences how the Portuguese tax system is complex and the difficulties the self-workers can feel when making-decision to develop the activity on their one.