Tax day!

It's tax day today!

We were expecting a refund so we filed a few weeks ago, although it wasn't nearly as early as we would have like to have filed. We were waiting on me to tally up all my self-employment income and expenditures, which in the wake of a move topped with bad record-keeping practices, was not an easy venture.

I did learn something from it though ... I MUST keep better records. I have Excel now and could make up worksheets for all my expenditures but haven't bothered to learn how to properly use it.

In the meantime I'm keeping tabs with everything in a Word document. I have several headings broken up by month and every time I spend money for my business ventures I enter the figure in my document. I have individual columns for each of our utilties (electricity, water, gas, and phone/Internet) since a portion of those can be counted as business expenses. I have a column for mileage and another for expenses like computer programs, supplies, or whatever it is that I bought.

I do pretty good with keeping up with all my income. I get 1099s for most of my work but I keep all the payment stubs since invariably there will be a job (or two or three) for which I won't get a 1099. For that reason I don't have the payments on my new tax document.

Hopefully next year it won't be as difficult or time-consuming to tabulate everything in preparation for a visit to the tax office!