CPA3PO would be horrified at the Drawer of Money Things.
That's not "draw-er," as in Hilary Price, who is the "drawer" of Rhymes with Orange.
That's "drawer" as in "the drawer of the end table tucked under my work table" or "the amalgamated filing system." Or, to put it another way, "where I shove stuff that I might need next April at which point I'll deal with it." Not really an amalgamate so much as a conglomerate, like a puddingstone.
The entire issue of what you can write off and what you should write off and what you are supposed to write off and what you can't write off is complex and not dealing with it is one of the few things -- along with health coverage -- that I miss about Working For The Man.
Whatever accounting I do is forced upon me by stark necessity, and being self-employed includes a lot of both starkness and necessity.
My accounting system is conducted on the WGASA system, which would make a CPA weep but I can't afford an accountant anyway. And my system is perfectly sincere. I think sincerity should count for something, and I promise you, I sincerely don't GAS.
Back when I had a straight job, I skipped over some stuff I could have written off because, first of all, I made about twice what I make now and so a lot of it seemed like small potatoes and, second, because the hassle of tracking it was not worth the benefit of claiming it.
Which is, come to think of it, the same reason stated twice. Which only further proves my sincerity in these matters.
Example: A photographer I worked with was absolutely anal about tracking his mileage, because he could claim the mileage from the company, then calculate the difference between what they paid and what the IRS allowed and then deduct that difference to the extent that it exceeded two percent of his adjusted gross income.
Granted, much of his work day was spent on the road. Still, I suspect he spent more on ink than he gained in write-offs, given that he could have guesstimated for the company and the IRS wants you to write down the date, the task, the destination and the specific before-and-after odometer readings.
I don't think this is to ensure accuracy. I think it's to ensure that, while you might do it for the yearly trip to the regional convention, you probably won't do it for the piddley little daily trips around town. And, for those getting compensated by the company, the only way the IRS-allowance minus the company-allowance on the trip to the convention will exceed two percent of a.g.i. is if you do track all those piddley little daily trips as well.
Here's a more detailed analysis of freelancing and taxes that I did this past April, including several tax-time cartoons and Professor Cosmo Fishhawk's classic explanation of How It All Works:
I live on that theory, and on the principle that, while I wish the IRS hadn't been cut back to the point where they can no longer audit fat-cat high-end tax cheats, I'm willing to bank on them not wasting their limited resources on small fry like me either. There's got to be some kind of slip-streaming benefit from living in a plutocracy.
In any case, getting back to the cartoon (hey, I do that once in awhile), I think CPA3PO has also been advising the Rebel Alliance, because Luke wouldn't be concerned about deducting anything related to his X-wing fighter unless he had been forced to furnish it himself.
When I worked at the paper, I used to love being able to snag one of the delivery vans to run errands, the only hard part being to remember that, when your employer's name and phone number are plastered all over your vehicle, it's a good idea to be polite to other drivers.
But, of course, the delivery vans were only delivering bundles to stores and to carriers. The carriers themselves were required to have their own vehicles, and to figure out their own deductions on operating them. I would assume the Rebel Alliance works along the same lines, not because they are Evil but because it's kind of a shoestring operation.
In fact, my understanding is that they financed the destruction of the Death Star through a Kickstarter campaign, with the stretch goal of producing a series of prequels.
Which explains both why it was so long before you actually saw any of them, and why, when they finally appeared, they turned out to be such crap.
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