The scariest season of all: Tax Season

Hello Folks!
It's late winter in the Cape. Rain is softly falling. The neighbor's Yorkie is working hard on achieving his merit badges for 'Persistence' and 'Longest Time Continuously Barking at Birds'.

It will soon be spring and that can mean only one thing... Tax season. When you wake up in a panic because doing taxes is probably as close as you'll come to having to retake your final exams every year of your life. It is judgement day. The reckoning.

Filing a tax return yourself is not so very bad if you have a single income stream, a job that provides perks like medical, retirement, a car. Then it's all pretty straight forward. One form for you and off you go.

Not if you're a freelancer, contractor, or have any kind of income besides your work income. Then you get to level up to the extra hell that is Provisional Tax. Where you get to do a tax return 3 times a year, and maybe one extra one if you think you might need it.

Tax is one of those vague financial monsters that is out of reach of a mere mortal's grasp.
Medical tax rebate- Has nothing to do with what you've paid for medical aid and medical expenses. It is not a number you can calculate all by yourself without it involving a very very big calculator and all your fingers and toes. Divided by 5, multiplied by the people living in the house times 12.

I have now come to the point where I am shamelessly paying other people who actually enjoy doing this kind of thing a whole lot of money to go stand in the queue at the South African Revenue Service for me and find out what my transgressions are and which punishment is deemed suitable.

More than that, I am the chosen one in charge of both mine and my husband's taxes. So if I mess up he also gets to go to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $100.

In my searching to find a tax person I have approached 3 companies. All who make it very clear that if they have to do any kind of book keeping for you you'll have to pay with your firstborn.

I was home schooled on ACE and book keeping never featured on my radar. I still don't quite understand the difference between net and gross profit. I tried to have it make sense by saying net profit is everything together in a fishing net and gross is leftovers after taking away the costs ( Because leftovers are gross) But apparently that's not correct. :D I can't remember. Let's see what google says

"Gross refers to the total amount before anything is deducted. Many important accounting statistics use this method, such as gross earnings and gross profit. Net refers to the amount remaining after certain adjustments have been made for debts, deductions or expenses." http://www.investorwords.com/article/gross-vs-net.html

Ok so I had it backwards. You see?
Maybe the Gross waters that you're fishing is the mess that of all your accounts and receipts, and Net is whatever gets left behind in the net after the Whale of Expenses has had his fill?

Expenses Whale taking your profit like om nom nom

Thus, I threw myself on the mercy of the interwebs and after much frustration and pilgrimages to mountain tops discovered this nifty little accounting app called Wave Accounting.

Link here . Clickety click https://www.waveapps.com/

Wave connects to your bank account with read-only access and draws transactions into spreadsheets and ledgers. You then go through every now and again and verify the transactions and make sure they are saved in the right categories. Then with the click of a button you get Summaries, detailed reports etc, that you can send to your designated tax person.

If you have more training in finances and such you can also add your invoices and all kinds of wonderful things into the mix.

I found the shortest video available that explains what Wave is.

It's pretty awesome. Book keeping for the mathematically challenged :)

So, I'm really thankful for good old Wave who can just sit there doing it's job without me needing to remember things.

Huzzah!

Procrastination! Thy name is Steemit.

I hope that was helpful to someone!
Stay classy Steemit

Lizelle

Whale Shark Gif from http://www.gifbin.com/987399