A few years ago, I met my accountant in September right before my company account taxes were due. It was quite stressful getting everything in order and I left the meeting saying I would never leave it that late again. I booked an appointment with my accountant in the middle of January of the following year.
I’ve arranged it like this since then. As the year closes, I have two weeks to get everything in order for when I meet her. It’s an intense period since I find there’s always a lot to do at the beginning of the year anyway. What it does is it frees me from thinking about it for the bigger part of the year.
A few things helped me this year to get my company taxes done within a few days:
- I use a folder that has 12 dividers so as the invoices come in, I can file them away in the right month for easy access.
- I started using a budgeting tool called You Need a Budget (1) in 2020 so I was able to export the data and convert it into the format my accounting tool Banana needed. Since I only started in February, I needed to manually enter January’s entries which took less time than if I had to do the whole year. This really helped me with my Paypal account as this was where I used to spend time figuring out the currency conversions and which entries to use.
- The main thing that got my taxes done was timeboxing with the accountant appointment. When I know I have a week to do something, it takes me a week. If I had left it for months, it would probably take months as other things would take more priority. I knew it had to be done so I spent a good part of the week and evenings working on it to make the appointment.
- There were some entries that were more complicated, for example, transfers from Paypal and Credit Cards, so I got them as far I could and then sought help from my accountant. I could easily have spent way more time figuring it out but since she is experienced, she was able to get things to balance quickly.
How do you feel about getting your taxes done? I would love to hear what you do to get them done quickly. Please share.
Footnotes
- You need a budget blog post
