| > and maybe stop paying an accountant to do my taxes My mother was an accountant for years, I learned a lot of accounting, but there is a MASSIVE difference between knowing how to basically bookkeep and the tax code. I'm in the US - so might be easier in less tax-lobbied countries. When I started my second consulting firm (after closing down my first when I took a "real job"), I initially tried to go at it myself, but payroll is a complex process, so I decided to outsource that. Cost me $20/mo, but saved me hours of work. Then when the end of my first tax year hit, I started trying to figure out how to do my corporate taxes myself. Downloaded all of the tax forms I could find that I needed, and printed the couple hundred pages of information. 4 weeks into filling out the forms and 2 weeks before a filing deadline, I gave up. To the best of my knowledge I had underpaid my quarterly estimates by $30k. I reached out to a small business accountant (brother of a good friend), and for only $1200, he handled the 112 page tax return, found out I had only underpaid by less than $2000, also found a whole bunch of write offs I didn't even know to look for, and did a full reconciliation of my accounts for that. It was at this point that I decided I will always pay for professionals to do the part of this job that I am not proficient at. All of my various accounts-related services add up to less than 1% of my revenue, and if it were even 5 or 10% of my revenue, I'd probably still pay it, just to know it was done correctly. |