Do the words “tax season” send you into a blind panic? Don’t worry; you’re not alone!
Almost every small business owner, no matter what their industry, hates tax season with a passion. You need to be so organized! Every single document, invoice, receipt, and expense needs to be properly filed, and heaven help you if you make a single mistake. It’s stressful, it’s time-consuming, and, frankly, it’s a pain in the caboose.
But it doesn’t have to be! The reason why tax season can be so stressful is that all of that work is packed into such a short time frame. As a therapist, you know that kind of pressure just isn’t healthy. So, what can you do? You can start getting organized right now! Here are a few tips to skip the stress and panic by getting started organizing your taxes today!
Hire Someone
Ok, this first tip might seem like kind of a cheat. After all, you’re perfectly capable of doing your own taxes, right? Why not save a little money and hit the books yourself?
Let me ask you this: how busy are you on a daily basis? Your clients and patients probably take up most of your time, not to mention the demands put on you as the owner of your own practice. Ask yourself what your time is actually worth. And then consider if you can really afford to use hours upon hours of your precious time to do your taxes.
The reality is that hiring a professional to do your practice’s taxes can be an incredible way to save time, energy, and stress. Not only that, but a good accountant might be able to offset the cost of hiring them, as they’ll know exactly where to look for tax credits and rebates that you probably would have missed.
Another reason why you should start looking for an accountant or tax person right away is the same reason why you don’t want to leave your taxes until the last minute. Around tax season, accountants are understandably incredibly busy. Trying to find one with the time to do yours might be challenging. You can skip this headache by finding an accountant right now before the tax rush comes into effect in the new year.
Organize the Shoeboxes
Do you keep all of your receipts in a shoebox? If so, I’m terribly sorry, but tax season is probably going to be a bit of a nightmare for you.
Keeping all of your receipts in a shoebox is a surefire way to be disorganized come tax time. It can take hours to sort and organize a year’s worth of receipts and other financial records, and that’s just for your personal taxes. If your business’ financial records are kept in a similar format, you’re going to be in big trouble. The best way to avoid this situation is to put a much better system in place to keep your tax records organized. Rather than a single shoebox, use a series of envelopes, one for each month. Or if you’re really stuck on using shoeboxes, at least have 12 of them!
Go Digital
If you want to double down on the organization, you can go digital. There are so many excellent smartphone apps that allow you to take high-quality photos of your receipts that will be automatically tracked and sorted. The CRA accepts digital receipts, so this can be a fantastic way to keep everything organized up in the cloud!
One word of warning. While digital scans of receipts are acceptable to the CRA, it can be an excellent practice to keep the physical copies, just in case of data loss or hacks. If you’re audited in a few years, you might be incredibly thankful that you kept all of those envelopes stuffed full of receipts!
Use Owl Practice
Owl Practice offers you many different tools that can help simplify your life come tax season.
Our invoicing system, for example, makes getting paid easy. You can fire off customized invoices to your clients, and keep track of payment histories and records. Come tax time, all of these documents will be stored safely, ready for you to download. Plus, everything is backed up, so you never have to worry about losing this essential data.
If you require ALL of the financial information stored in Owl Practice, you can use the accounting export feature. You will download a .csv file that will contain all of your financial information over the last year, including appointments, invoices, fees, and payment data. FYI, no personal information is included in this file, so the data of your clients will be safeguarded.
No one likes tax season. Chances are if your clients and patients are more stressed than usual around that time of year, taxes are probably the cause. But you can avoid all that yourself by setting up practices and procedures that will keep your financial information properly organized throughout the year. So, when your accountant asks for it, everything will be right at hand. And you can do this by allowing Owl Practice to help you manage your financial records!
If you’d like a more in-depth look at all of our practice management features, please sign up for a free demo! If you have any questions or comments about our services, we invite you to contact us at support@owlpractice.ca.
As always,
Practice Wisely
