Here is a New Year's Resolution for you, before you start frantically going through your 2011 receipts and invoices, trying to run some numbers that you can hand off to your tax preparer so they can finish your tax return on time for the April 17th deadline this year. Why not start a New Years Resolution, and become a bit more organized before 2013 comes around the corner?

I recommend going to Mint.Com and create a free account. Put in all your accounts that you own, banking, savings, 401k, credit cards, investments, and create a tag for transactions "TAXES". Once you have tagged all your business, advertising, medical, and anything related to your taxes you can then search for those transactions with your tag and export them to excel. Lost a receipt? Forgot about a transaction? The program will help keep you organized, for transactions that can't be captured with the program, make sure you start 2 folders or a shoeboxes and label it "Personal Taxes" and "Business Taxes". You will need some sort of storage device to keep your tax documents and business expenses in order.

Hire me as your tax preparer and I will create a list of suggested categories of basic tax write offs and get you organized for 2012 based on your business and tax situation. I would recommend creating a document in Google Docs to keep track of the itemizations. Start planning this year as if the end of the year is already here.


As a tax preparer, you can write off my service in your taxes, I make note of exactly how much I get paid, I report everything to the IRS, as I wouldn't want to be out of compliance to never be able to do taxes again. I file my taxes early to get out of the way but thats because I am also very organized. I hope I passed off any information that may be helpful to you when preparing for your taxes and if you have any tax or organization tax questions please feel free to write your comments below.