You did it! The April 30th deadline is over and you’ve officially overcome tax season 2018! With the entire experience still fresh on our minds, now’s a better time than ever to think about the lessons you’ve learned this year. If you’re like most taxpayers, your experience with tax season was probably a little chaotic, coupled with a whole lot of stressful moments. To prepare for a stress-free tax season next year, learning from your mistakes (and considering what you did right) can help make it easy-breezy and stress-free. Look Back to Plan Ahead To be prepped and ready for future tax filing, it’s important to stay current—and we don’t mean by watching the news. Review your financials often, and make sure you’ve started putting a portion of your income aside for tax payments next year. Learning from your hands-on experience can help optimize your approach to tax season the following years. Review your returns in 6 months, and then also a year from now. There are a lot of details about tax filing that could easily slip from your memory. Keep Up-to-Date With your Bookkeeping If you want your tax filing to be flawless next year, it’s important to start assessing your cash flow and get into the habit of regularly managing your bookkeeping. It’s an easy task to put off, but it will become a much harder obstacle to tackle if you’re leaving it to the last minute. Doing your books weekly or monthly takes a lot less effort than catching it all up next tax season. There are plenty of reasons to keep your bookkeeping current and accurate: Never miss out on a deduction again. Remembering all the expenses you’ve incurred over the past 16 months is a beast of a task to tackle. Instead, record all your expenses as-you-go! How do I start? Use the Kashoo mobile app to snap a photo of your receipt while you’re on-the-go. Once you add your receipts into the app and recorded all your income and expenses, you can export your income statements and other reports to see all your financial status at-a-glance. It’s that easy! Lose the stress of doing things last minute. Filing your taxes when you’re unprepared is similar to being given a report to write that’s due a day from now. Think of it as starting a report with zero research conducted and no notes saved. Your submission is frantic, rushed, and definitely not your best work. It’s one thing to be deducted points off a school assignment, but it’s another to be messing around with the CRA! You’ll save yourself a lot of time, worry, and trouble if you file your taxes correctly—with the right data to back it up—the first time around. How do I start? Get into the habit of tracking your income and expenses by entering it all into the Kashoo app as it’s happening. We store all of your data in the cloud so that you can access it from any of your devices, whenever you want! Saving yourself the extra hassle. Adding a monthly bank reconciliation to your routine will help you catch any anomalies with your finances before it’s too late. “A bank reconciliation is used to compare your records to those of your bank, to see if there are any differences between these two sets of records for your cash transactions. The ending balance of your version of the cash record is known as the book balance, while the bank’s version is called the bank balance.” How do I start? To avoid getting into a sticky financial situation, start by regularly assessing your cash flow. Make sure you check out our help article to see just how easily you can reconcile from directly within Kashoo. Comparing your accounting records with the bank’s records helps ensure that you’ve correctly accounted for all your money! Once this becomes a habit, you’ll be wondering why you didn’t start earlier. Get Out of the Closet It’s not uncommon for people to save their receipts and other documents in the back of their closets, in old file folders, or sometimes even in their wallets and purses. Don’t be someone who falls prey to this routine! Keeping your documents is a good habit to have, but there’s a much easier (and more organized) way to do this. How do I start? Take photos of your receipts and enter it into the Kashoo app—we can’t stress this enough! The CRA and IRS both accept digital copies of receipts. Simply use your phone to take a snapshot, attach it to your expense entry, and you’re good to go. You no longer have to worry about losing old invoices, receipts, and other documents to do with your business finances. We make it easy for you to build up a good habit maintaining organized records. Separating Your Finances: Business vs. Personal An important tax planning habit that all serious tax professionals exercise is separating business and personal finances. Having a shared account for both personal and business use could cause you to be overlooking a legitimate business expense or accidentally claiming a personal expense. How do I start? Apply for a new business credit card or open a separate bank account for your business to keep the cash flow strictly apart. Don’t start slacking just because you’re relieved tax season is over. There is no better time than right now to take the next step in improving your business finances! Make 2018 the year to do bookkeeping right. Try Kashoo free today and start making tax season 2019 worry-free.
