Raise Your Hand: Who Hates Doing Taxes?

It comes every year around this time. I'm talking about taxes. This time of year reminds me how much I hate doing taxes. But, as the saying goes, you cannot avoid death and taxes. Well, I didn't die last year; why must I do last year's taxes?

There's no answer to that question. 'Just do it' is my ever ready motto. So, I plow ahead, doing the best I can, which never seems to be good enough when it comes to taxes.

Just in case you're wondering why I'm griping more than a month before April 15th, people with incorporated businesses need to file by March 15th. I've got a month less to prepare than other people! I didn't know about this arbitrary rule until my good friend from MBA school delivered the bad news.

I was at her house while shopping the Gem Show in the middle of February. She wanted to know if I'd started my taxes for my itty bitty jewelry business. No, I would do that next month, I told her, adding that my head was full of jewelry creations begging to be made from all the luscious gems I got at the Show. She strongly suggested I make jewelry after March 15 because my business taxes are due by then.

We went to the same MBA school. Why did she know this and I didn't? There's no answer to that question either.

She went on to say that as a corporation I would need to call an annual meeting complete with officers of the corporation and shareholders, report the time, date, location and minutes from the meeting along with my taxes. Or was it a Board-of-Directors meeting? I don't know. I said that I hadn't done either. She was horrified to learn that I didn't know I had to. Besides, who are the officers and shareholders of my corporation, I wanted to know. Don't you know, she wanted to know. No, I don't. Again, horrified she was. So was I. All these obligations were coming down upon me fast, as well as a deadline for taxes, none of which I knew anything about.

Okay, so I promptly held a meeting with me, me, and me--the President of My Corporation, the Board of Directors, and its sole shareholder. There was an official agenda for the meeting, which was conducted in a minute as I spoke to myselves, and minutes were prepared from the first ever, minute-long annual meeting or BOD meeting. Whatever you want to call it.

More questions arose as I struggled to fill accurate information into the tax forms. Things like revenue and expenses were easy. For the latter, I keep receipts for everything, and the former simply isn't much. Things like starting inventory, ending inventory, cost of goods sold, and depreciation left me depressed, throwing my hands in the air in exasperation. See that wall of shelves with jewelry supplies? You need to determine the value of them, I was told. And so, I've been counting pearls, gemstones, jump rings, lengths of gold and silver wire, minutia, ad infinitum for a month now, since I started on February 15th. Like the Ever Ready rabbit, I'm still going.

Which is why I've stopped making jewelry, at least for awhile. Which is why there's no jewelry to photograph. Which is why no jewelry articles from me post on AC. Which is why creativity has been stifled and production of beautiful things halted in favor of digital, mindless form-filling.

Because I'm doing my taxes, folks, while being unproductive in my business and driving my earning ability down to zero, at least for the time being. I'd like to do what I do best, but obligations to Uncle Sam require me to do what I don't do well or like at all right now. I think Uncle Sam likes it that way.

So, if your hand is still raised because you too hate doing taxes, take it down now and start doing the dreaded job. You have a whole month before April 15th and few options for alternatives.