Taxing My Patience

Taxing My Patience
Originally uploaded by 365 Things

What: My revenue and expense documentation for Q1 2010; stacks of receipts and invoices.
Origin: Desire to avoid extreme stress around tax prep in 2011.
How long kept: Oldest items, since 1/1/10. Most recent are only days old.
Why kept: Frugality, legality. This Might Be Useful for both. (And It Also Might Be Worth Something in the form of tax deductions.)
Destination: Moon. No, really to my new bookkeeping service, via priority mail.

Confession: If I were to make a practice of doing this for myself, it would probably take about 5 minutes a day. Many years of small business ownership have taught me that this is not bloody likely. Instead, I gather icky looking piles of wrinkled receipts into folders, and then ruminate endlessly about what I need to do with it...leading up to between 2 and 4 hellish days of procrastination and self-loathing as I sift and sort through the nightmarish, but semi-orderly, mess, and data-enter everything into a spreadsheet.

Enough. Sometimes the services of a professional are called for.

I don't fill my own teeth, either.