Tax Man Cometh

I'm being dragged away from my work-in-progress by necessity, and I'm not happy about it. Today, I'm doing what I should have been doing right along - Keeping our financial stuff in order. No, my checkbooks are not balanced - they're barely legible. I'm in the midst of transferring the second register into Excel, where it will make a lot more sense to look at. It's almost 6:00 pm and I'm up to September, 2009. My goal is to get through December on the Excel register. It may take a while since half the time I didn't bother entering payroll deposits or ATM withdrawals in the register. That's the trouble with automatic debit. It's too easy to ignore balancing the checkbook and figure if the ATM receipt shows there's money, everythings's okay. Once in a while I do go to the bank's site also to see if any major checks are lurking out there uncashed. Sad to say, I don't go there often enough.

During the week, I'll color code highlights in these registers to reflect whether or not it's a business expense, or household deduction. Then, I'll go through the charge card statements and do the same thing.  I know, lots of people use a separate business charge card to make things easier on themselves, and I did transfer some of my expenses over to a business charge, but I'm still hooked on Amazon and like to gather points there for purchases.

Next Sunday I'll tackle my business checking and savings accounts. They're less intricate, since I like to keep the money I make from my books in them and that's all. The system that works for me is to put into savings whatever I didn't have to collect sales taxes on, such as bookstore signing payouts. The business checking account is for the opposite - books sold that needed to be accounted for to the State of Illinois for sales tax purposes. Fortunately, I got their sales tax payment out of the way at the end of December, since that's when it was due. One less item to worry about.

Anyway, I have a deadline of March 13 to put it into the hands of the accountant, and you can probably surmise from this post that I'm under the gun. I hope all the effort will be worth it in the end after all the writing expenses have been added up and deducted.

Whatever happens is always a surprise to me. That's because, in case you can't tell, I'm no financial wizard. I'll get it done somehow. I know that because I always do. (g)

What about you? Have you finished your taxes? Okay, now you can brag about how great your system is if you feel like it.