By: Stephen Bishop
I’m not much of a puzzle person, but about once a year an overwhelming urge to do a puzzle overtakes me—granted, it’s a government-induced urge that nearly always corresponds with the hours leading up to April 15th, hours spent trying to piece together my beekeeping finances for the previous tax year. Each year I tell myself this is the year, the year I’m going to get organized, and each year I find myself on April 15th trying to quickly decipher faded and crumpled up receipts, all while praying the IRS has bigger fish to fry than a lowly, disorganized sideline beekeeper with a bad procrastination problem.
Historically, my financial record keeping system has not been the best, my truck’s glove box, but it has progressed from the days when I just stuffed beekeeping and farm receipts into my wallet for safe keeping. I do not recommend a wallet for long-term receipt storage. For one thing, sitting on a billfold that’s as big as a softball is bad for the sciatic nerve and as a beekeeper you likely already have a bad back. Also—and this is just my best scientific theory—the downward pressure from sitting repeatedly on receipts causes the ink on the receipts to volatilize and escape into the atmosphere, leaving you to guess what that twenty-five-pound bag of sugar cost ten months ago (though I’m not a CPA, I suspect the IRS frowns on treating faded receipts like a Price is Right game).
Furthermore, if you’re like me, a good-hearted, IRS-fearing, tax-paying citizen whose God-given gift is the ability to misplace and lose important objects, like, say, a wallet containing three dollars and a year’s worth of beekeeping receipts, I highly recommend QuickBooks Online. With it, you don’t have to remember to put your receipts in your wallet, nor do you have to remember where your wallet is. You just have to remember where your cell phone is to take a picture of the receipt, which is then beamed up and stored safely in the Cloud. Also, you’ll have to remember your Quickbooks’ password. Be forewarned, failure to remember your password may require you to answer security questions, the answers to which you will have likely forgotten. If that happens, your receipts are lost forever in the Cloud, so you would have been better off just stuffing them in your wallet and losing it to begin with.
If receipts are like puzzle pieces, you’ll have to figure out where the receipts go in the puzzle. Are the receipts for current year expenses or long-term assets that need depreciating or candy bars that have nothing to do with beekeeping but got misplaced in your wallet? These are questions that CPAs are trained to answer. Other questions they are trained to answer is whether you should file a Schedule F or Schedule C or just go ahead and schedule a meeting with a good tax attorney trained in IRS audits. Apparently, however, CPAs are not trained to answer questions the same way, which is evident by the fact that if you ask ten different accountants the same question, they’ll give 11 different answers and tax you differently for each answer.
That’s why I like Turbotax; if you ask it questions, it just implodes and takes your half-completed tax return with it. Just kidding. Turbotax is a fine product for those beekeepers who feel confident in their ability to wield numbers correctly or those beekeepers who have no other choice because they’ve waited until April 15th to file. For those of us in the latter category, Tax Day is something of a yearly tradition involving lots of caffeine, a table covered in receipts, bank statements and W-2s, and a raging headache from staring cross-eyed at numbers all day.
So Happy Tax Season! And for my fellow procrastinators out there, here’s hoping your bees don’t swarm on April 15th—your attention will be elsewhere.
