Group Discussions

Self-Employed Taxes

I just attended a workshop yesterday about Taxes and Record Keeping for the Self-Employed. It was great and helped me out quite a bit, but I still feel overwhelmed by the whole idea! I would love to just hire someone to think about all of that for me, but I hate the idea of paying out any more money on my very tight business budget. Any thoughts?

Flag as inappropriate Posted by Jennifer Tankersley on Friday
I know exactly what you mean. I use quick books to keep records of everything that way at tax season, I just print out reports and have my tax rep do the rest.

Flag as inappropriate Posted by The Shu Lady on Friday
A lot of my freelance work is also for my main FT employer, so they deal with taxes for me -- very convenient. But now I'm doing a lot of work for other publications (and Work It, Mom!) and so I need to start to be careful about setting aside the money for the tax man, so I don't get smacked at tax time...

Jen, would you share some of what you learned at the workshop, please? I'm sure a lot of WIM members would be interested!

Flag as inappropriate Posted by Lylah M. Alphonse on Friday
One thing I'd consider is hiring an accountant to set up your Quickbooks the right way, for your business. Then you can easily track things during the year and the records for the accountant, if you were to use one for taxes, would be all ready at the end of the tax year. And if you want to do taxes yourself, you would also have very good records.

Most accountants don't charge that much for this type of set up, I don't think.

Flag as inappropriate Posted by Nataly on Friday
This topic makes me so nervous. I've done our own and the business taxes for years (thank you Turbotax) and I'm always afraid I'm missing something. This year I'm def. getting help b/c it's too important and I'm making more money for a variety of clients, not just one main one anymore. To me it's worth the investment plus, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm bartering yoga for accounting!

Flag as inappropriate Posted by Mandy Nelson - Dandysound on Friday
Turbo Tax no longer offers a subscription to their estimated taxes service. Are there any similar subsciptions like this? If not, how do you guys handle estimated taxes?

Flag as inappropriate Posted by On the Go Mom on Saturday
For estimated taxes, I had my accountant calculate them based on last year's income and then give me 4 coupons to pay quarterly. He only charged me $150 to do this and I think it was worth it because it made life simpler and I am not losing sleep over how much I should be paying.

Did you see Mir's post on this a while back?

http://workitmom.com/bloggers/corneredoffice/2007/ 10/02/getting-ready-to-pony-up/

Flag as inappropriate Posted by Nataly on Saturday
I find a local accountant. He is very knowledge and he deals with small businesses and self employed all the time. I really only use him for tax time, but I can ask him questions year round.

The accountants are not as expensive as one may think and they do save lot of headaches! There are also many bookkeepers, etc. out there that may be able to help.

Flag as inappropriate Posted by SK on 18th January 2008
I have been self-employed for years and also have a degree in Accounting so am able to understand all the ins and outs. My best advice is to use QuickBooks (it is truly the easiest program out there) and if that is too time consuming or difficult, put out an ad for a part time bookkeeper on Craigslist and at your local mom's sources online. You can often find stay at home moms who have the skills to do what you need done and at a reasonable cost - say monthly. Then, always, always, have an Accountant who is IRS approved review all at the end of the year. They know the up to date deductions better than anyone. Also, save any and all receipts for everything and at the very least, keep them in a monthly file. You never know when you can deduct something until you ask!

Flag as inappropriate Posted by travelmom07 on 20th January 2008