Taxes, Yuck!

April 15th, taxes due! It's unbelieveable how much data entry, tracking, analysis, thought, worry, concern, angst and time goes into keeping books for a business. If I were a larger business and had a finance dept, maybe I'd feel different about it, but being the chief cook and bottle washer as well as CEO, CFO, Admin Asst., and boss lady, I burn a lot of midnight oil trying to not get too far behind on it. Needless to say, 4/15 is marked as a red letter day on my calendar but not in a good way.
For those of you starting out, here's a piece of advice I paid $150/hour for....get QuickBooks Pro in whatever the latest version is. Then, find an accountant or bookkeeper who doesn't trigger your gut reaction alarm and who is affordable/knowledgeable and a whiz with QB. Not all accountants are, so you really do have to ask them if they are truly competent with the program. If they are QB Certified, even better. It's worth the price to have them set up your Chart of Accounts so you can get off to a good start from the get-go and not have to go back and correct a year's worth of data. If you are opening a business like mine, it's considered a non-traditional business and there are special considerations that affect how the chart is set up. Feel free to ask me any questions....I've already paid to get the answers.
Whatever accounting program you use, even pencil and paper, will require a learning curve to get it set up and use effectively. I've been using QB since 2005 and finally was forced to upgrade to the 2008 version and I'm still learning how to do things. But, as frustrated as I get with having to do it at all, I do get good information from it and it does print out beautiful, informative reports. Which does make filling out the tax forms easier.
But it's still not on my list of favorite things to do!
As compensation for doing all this accounting stuff, I've promised myself I will do something FUN!!