Last night after work I raced around the office collecting tax information so I could go and see my accountant. I only thought I missed one chunk of paperwork (no doubt in the pile of papers from last tax year, which I can’t find either), but when I got there she asked about my car insurance, and was this all I paid? “No, I just haven’t finished entering data into Quickbooks.” How about house insurance? “Oh, I have the info, but it’s not here yet.” Milage? “I have my logbook in the car, but I haven’t added all the numbers up yet.” How about something something capital assets something something? “Oh yea, I have those all set up (no, the computer parts are really small tools under $200), in Quickbooks, but I didn’t know what report to print out. ” You were going to bring your backup file so I’d have it here if I needed it? “Forgot.”
Other than that, it went well. I still gasped when she sent me the information on what I’ll need to put into an RRSP and what I’ll still be paying (though some of it is in un-avoidable stuff like CPP and the other joys that come with having your own business). Of course, I can’t complain too much. I had some good contracts at the start of the year that made me money, I drive on the roads and use public utilities, and I still have enough money left over to upgrade computers and live a good life, so it’s not that bad. Still have to get some more exact numbers for what I should be putting into RRSPs before the end of the week though.
After I got home, and after dinner I spent a couple of hours putting numbers together. Brooks & Dunn sang to me in the background and I put in missing information and spent a lot of the bulk of that two hours pouring over my chicken scratches in my milage logbook and adding differences in milage up (must do that before the end of the year), and then adding all those differences up. Sometimes I was savant like, able to add numbers in a single bound, other times I’d sit there for 15 or 30 seconds muttering “16 and 6, 16 and 6, what is 16 and 6…. twenty…. uhmm…. shit…. 16 and 6, 16 and six, 24? no, no, 16 and 6….. 23!” Keeping my pen on the row I was working on and repeating the numbers helped me not to lose my place. Other times I was just blazing away, with the numbers falling together without hardly thinking about them.
In the end the result seemed plausable, though I have no illusions that if I had a proper tape calculator the numbers be the same.