I spent a chunk of today sorting through Microsoft Money to get our business expenses in order for tax time. Until 2007, I kept track of business expenses with a record book, a pen, and a calculator. I was very resistant to the idea of switching to a computer program, but I finally did it a year ago. I faithfully kept track of our business income and expenses all year long, and it did make it easier overall. But today I tried to generate reports showing total expenses for various categories, and the report total was $16,000 less than the total that was showing in the input section of the program. Dang it. So my husband suggested that maybe I didn’t have all my expenses in categories that the program recognized as business expenses. Sure enough, that was the problem. When I started using the program, it had lots of built in categories, and lots fit what I needed (for example, there’s a built in category for ‘rent’ and I used that to categorize the rent that our business pays us each month for business use of our home. But when I tried to total the business expenses, the program thought that was personal rent). Once I went through and re-categorized everything as business expenses, my numbers matched exactly. So I’m feeling very pleased. And I don’t have to get out my calculator and add up 10 pages of numbers like I’ve done the past four years. I can just print my report screen and use that to do our business taxes. I’m sure I’ll run into all sorts of other hurdles since 2007 was the first year we were incorporated for the whole year and considered W2 employees of our business rather than self employed contractors. But at least I got the expenses report to work, so for today, all is well on the accounting end of our little business.
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