The 3 Essential Elements to a Stress-Free Tax Season
/Tax season is right around the corner! For our clients it’s business as usual. But for many other holistic practitioners out there, tax season is a crazy stressful period filled with late nights, emotional outbursts and a whole lot of headaches. That’s why we’ve come up with our 3 tried and tested elements that will guarantee you a stress-free tax season.
1. An easy bookkeeping system
Not all systems are created equal. No one understands this better than holistic practitioners implementing lifestyle changes for their patients. If the system you suggest isn’t easy to maintain, if it doesn’t fit seamlessly into their current life – then you know better than anyone that the patient WON’T be following it.
It’s the same for bookkeeping systems, which is why we created our free professional tool, the Healthy Wealth Tracker, to implement seamlessly into your day as a holistic practitioner.
At the end of each day, spend a couple minutes recording patient revenue into the Healthy Wealth Tracker. If you’re an associate and the clinic you’re at keeps track of your revenue, we suggest you keep your own record. Errors can easily occur and this step ensures you’re never losing out because of one.
Once a week, spend a few minutes recording your expenses into the Healthy Wealth Tracker. We have an entire post devoted to teaching you step-by-step how to record your expenses in 10 minutes flat. Check it out here.
Once a month, record things like commission revenue into the Healthy Wealth Tracker (you can also do this more frequently if you’re paid commission on a more frequent basis). This is also a good time to cross reference your bank and/or credit card statements with your expenses log to ensure you haven’t missed any deductions for the month.
Follow this process and you’ll have to put in little to no extra work at tax time. For our own clients, we simply have them fill out a questionnaire, upload their Healthy Wealth Tracker to our secure online portal, and voila! They’re done in a few [stress-free] minutes.
2. Digitized receipts
If you’ve ever been audited or asked for more information about a past tax return, then you know the absolute headache that can come from digging up proof of deductions. There is no easier system for keeping receipts organized and accessible than digitizing them. This not only makes your life infinitely easier when searching for a receipt, but also saves a ton of space. Marie Kondo would approve!
How do you do it? Sit down once a week and pull the receipts you’ve accumulated out of your wallet or purse. Order these chronologically and input the expenses into your Healthy Wealth Tracker. Snap a photo of each receipt, save it with a unique name on your computer (we put everything in a folder called 2019 Expenses) and toss the original.
We’ve got a whole post devoted to what qualifies as an expense, plus how to keep, organize and take photos of your receipts. You can check it out here.
3. An accountant who understands you on speed dial
There are so many times throughout the year that things come up. Technical questions you need specific answers to like “I want to set up a dispensary. What are the steps I should take? Does it make sense to register for HST now? What Impact will this have?”
But more often there will be less technical questions where you’ll want some comfort that you’re on the right track. This is where an accountant who truly understands your business and your goals (like us) comes into play. We provide tax services, yes; but on a deeper level what we provide is confidence. The confidence that you’re getting the best return possible, that you’re making the best [holistic] financial decisions, and the confidence that you’re moving in the right direction.