drscott | Accounting Hell and TSA boot-on-your-face

I have been employed at a typical corporate job exactly 9 months of the last 15 years. Running my own business has some great advantages -- I set my own schedule, work from home, yadda yadda yadda. But one big downside is having to do my own accounting, payroll, and taxes.

It's easier for me to do my accounting all in one lump after the end of the year. This means firing up Quickbooks and adding every check and receipt for a whole year, then a grinding process of adding book entries and resolving discrepancies with bank balances and other accounts which takes another day at least. And then I generate an S corporate return for both state and federal, with a K-1 for each for myself as owner. Then I do my own personal taxes in Turbotax, which takes another two days (complicated investment accounting.) Then I tackle my partner's. Then I do my mother's (and sometimes my brother's.) This means I lose my spare time for weeks every year.

I tend to be in a bad mood around this time.

If you want to really get into a bad mood, read this: http://www.reason.com/0402/fe.jb.dominate.shtml. So much for the "professional, trained" staff we were promised. The cost of the new system is many times the cost of the contractors it replaced, and it looks like it's almost as dangerous as the terrorists it's supposed to catch.