Tax Season: 4 ways to make tax season less painful.
Tax Day is just right around the corner
Tax Day is just right around the corner. It is not strange if you develop a headache when the thought of how close it is, pops into your head.
Apart from the fact that paying taxes means you are giving away money. Another reason why folks develop tax-related headaches is that the process of deciding what can or can’t be written off as a business expense is very time-consuming.
Well, this should not be the case anymore. The internet is here to help. There are a lot of innovations online that would help reduce these headaches to a significant level. Using financial automated programs like Mint would make tax season less strenuous.
This article would suggest some things that you could do to reduce the intensity of these headaches.
Track Your Expenses Online Automatically
You can use programs like Mint to keep track of your expenses and that of your family. You can also categorise the purchases.
This is better than using paper receipts to track each transaction, which could be very inefficient.
Stop Using Cash
Since most cash transactions have no records, it is virtually impossible for you to trace cash transactions through automated methods.
So, if you want to reduce the headaches that come with tax season, reduce the number of transactions you make using cash. I know it is a difficult thing to do. I hate using my debit cards for transactions where I’d instead use cash like paying for an Uber.
But it is for the greater good. You would be able to track all your purchases. Thereby, making it less stressful for you to compile receipts when you have to sort out tax palaver.
Train Your System Well
Finance tracking systems, like any other automated system, need you for them to serve you better.
I hope you are not confused. What I’m trying to say is that you would initially need to spend some time training the system to work effectively for you.
But I can assure you that the time you put in setting up the system would pay off. It would save you all the time, stress and energy that it would take you to do categorise your expenses manually.
Pay Attention When You’re Doing Strange Things
You know when you are travelling out of town, particularly if you do not take trips a lot, you call your bank to tell them that they are to expect charges in a faraway place. Else, they might freeze your card.
In this same vein, recognising unexpected pattern changes in your purchasing behaviour that won’t fit into the parameters that you set up for your automated system is not a bad idea.
The follow-through on this is to go back frequently and manually categorise things that fell outside the filters you made.
When you do this, you would be able to track all your expenses and tax season would cause less mental pain.