Fri. February 2, 2007

---

Happy Groundhog Day. I'm sure the movie is playing today on a cable station near you.

My first year of self-employment was completed a month ago. Now comes the part where I pay taxes. I just have to figure out the correct way of doing that.

The correct way, it seems, is to pay someone knowledgeable in these matters to do it for me. Which is my plan. But the someone in question has to have all the necessary information in order to achieve my goal.

So today I spent the whole day reviewing my record keeping, and it's the anticipated mess. I decided to try organizing everything using Excel (the spreadsheet program). When I was a management type (18 years ago), I used spreadsheet programs (anybody remember Lotus 1-2-3?) to organize everything. Excel is very similar to Lotus, but I haven't used either in quite a while, so I was a bit rusty.

But I had the whole day (and I needed it) to succeed. I ended up with a pretty elaborate 9-page spreadsheet, but I was very proud of my achievement. It kept all the info neat and orderly and easy to find, and it'll even print out invoices for my customers. The tax guy will be very impressed.

Unless I've overlooked something. I gotta go review all this.