I need a crash course on taxes and stuff.
“IRS and Other Taxes for (extreme) Dummies” sort of thing…
@maique just get an accountant to do your end of year stuff. Crash course in how to empty your bank balance quickly 😋
@vincent End of year is a mess, but I also should have been doing some things every quarter, something to do with VAT, and I haven’t.
@maique yeah. Welcome to Europe and being self employed 😂 best thing is an accountant. Trust me on this. And maybe you’ll learn from them.
@maique My son & his wife have a sort of complicated tax picture, though not a high income. Self-employed, housing allowance, lots of itemizable travel, etc. They use H&R Block and have been very happy with the service. Less than a CPA, more than do-it-yourself.
@maique good 👍 The problem with not filing any quarterly returns is that the tax office could open an investigation… so better let the accountant help to get everything tip top and the tax man happy. It’s worth the money to get this sorted, even if there is a penalty to pay. Tax is complicated in Poland, and I’m sure where you are too… and I don’t trust myself to do it in the first place… plus it’s all the wrong language 😂
@vincent It’s a mess already, waiting for her email reply 🙂 I’m helpless when it comes to taxes. It was brilliant when I worked at the paper, everything was done for me, but freelancing requires a lot of work on that front and I’ve been stupidly childish about it. Now’s the time to pay for that 😔
@maique I’d look at having a business account with Revolut or similar and integrating it directly to either Quickbooks, Xero or Sage. That way you can pretty much automate your VAT returns.
@wfm Also looking into that, thanks. In fact my “business” isn’t actually a business per se, as it’s one person only, and there’s a difference here, for tax purposes. I’ll talk about this with the accountant who’s trying to fix this mess.
@vincent Your advice is wise. Do-it- yourself is a good idea with painting a room or adding shelving, but most people know to hire a professional for some things. Intuit got in trouble with its own Pro Advisors when it ran national ads suggesting any small business could do their own books using their software, very bad advice.
Unfortunately we have an analogous situation here on this site. If you're an expert software engineer, micro.blog offers a very affordable site where such people can customize a very handsome & useful blogging platform.
But for an expert tax accountant like myself, not so much. I learned Fortran in college, even got a job doing such programming one summer. But I never progressed from that with programming as I began a career in tax accounting. It was more important for me to learn details of tax law, which I did.
I watch the software engineers here talking among themselves about how to configure their blogs. I failed to convince anyone here to copy the Intuit model of providing a network of Pro Advisors to help small businesses to properly use the Intuit software to make sure it is configured properly. The same could be done with blogging software, but I could not convince anyone who could do anything about it to try it out.
Manton is obviously good at what he does and like most people he likes to work with people of comparable magnitude and skills. Dave Winer is the same way, but to even more of an extreme!! Dave even wrote a long detailed article about all the many steps one must go through before daring to ask Dave a question. That was an obvious big advantage of Manton's cheerful approach from day one of the Kickstarter.
Keep up your good work, Vincent.