The taxes are, finally, DONE: all that's left is a final look, sealing
the envelopes, and a trip to the Post Office tomorrow morning.
Many other things have, needless to say, not been done, but I'm not going to worry about that tonight.
DONE. TaxCut. Needs to be checked: tomorrow, when I have a brain.
TaxCut wasn't too annoying this year, except that there doesn't seem to be any to scale the damned fonts up so that I can actually read them from a comfortable working distance. And itemized lists no longer work right -- that was really only a problem with the charities (there are too many to fit on the form, so I have to group them). Fixed that problem by adding sub.codes to the appropriate items in data-entry file, which is just plain text. Piece of cake.
Total time from downloading the program to done: three and a half hours. Data entry was done in two or three evenings this last week.
Done with the preliminary data entry.
( For those not familiar with my work process... ) The next steps are stacking up and sorting all the various forms 1099 so I
can enter those, and making sure I have the sales and inventory
numbers handy from the sales tax worksheets (09:08). That'll get done tonight.
Then I have to actually set up the Mac laptop that I'm borrowing from
work, install the software, and turn the crank. Which will
change my mood to "cranky".
Added: Production cost: $3.05 each for About Bleeding Time, $3.16 each for Coffee, Computers, and Song. This is physical production and doesn't include royalties. I was originally thinking I didn't have to worry about those because they're all paid to myself, but then realized that I do need to compute them so that I can value my unsold inventory. Gaak!
On the other hand, that's good, because the royalties are all 2007 income for the songwriter (me), but the part that applies to unsold inventory gets subtracted from 2007's cost of goods sold. Um... right? Looks right.
(Anybody know offhand what [T]he statutory mechanical license fee is
$.091 for songs 5 minutes or less, or $.0175 per minute or fraction thereof per
copy for songs over 5 minutes.)... so that's $1.652 for CC&S, and $0.91 for
ABT. So that's nearly $1900 total.
![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/roshi/palefaces/busy.gif){kind=small}
productiveThis is the first year I've actually had, you know, stuff to sell. I understand the general concepts, but there are a couple of things I could use advice on from somebody who's done it before:
The data-entry is done as of this morning, except for convention travel, in-kind payments (i.e. free CDs for the contributors), and inventory. Then it's a simple matter of tracking down all the various forms (W2, 1099) and transferring subtotals to the actual software. Straightforward, but,... ugh.
Bottom line is that it looks as though my CD sales made a small profit, at least in the sense of gross sales exceeding cost of goods sold. Whether that translates into a positive bottom line on the Schedule C will depend on just how many of my various expenditures I decide to call business expenses, as well as exactly how inventory gets handled: that's a section of the form I'm totally unfamiliar with at this point.
... for dealing with physical objects, anyway. This afternoon I somehow managed to get my keychain tangled up with my steering wheel and windshield-wiper lever, causing a minor explosion of keys all over the inside of the car. I think I have managed to straighten the bent one back to the point of useability. (8:52 verified, by the simple if slightly risky experiment of using it to move the van so the garbage bins could be rolled out to the curb.)
And only half an hour ago, when attempting to flatten a board that was considerably more warped than I needed it to be, I managed to break my right thumbnail. Right before a filk con. Fortunately, the break provided a good gluing surface for once, and didn't affect the outside edge (which is what I use for picking), so it could conceivably hold together. Maybe. If not, well, it wouldn't be the first time I've played a guitar without my fingernails. It'll just hurt a little.
Meanwhile, the ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
flower_cat is annoyed at me for not finding the
black pepper, which she insisted was in a tin on the kitchen counter. The
fact that she was eventually able to find it in a plastic bag in a drawer
does not seem to lessen her annoyance. That's ok; I'm annoyed at
me, too.
I did have a reasonably productive morning, though; did all the data entry for the Amex year-end report, which covers essentially all of my online payments. That leaves only the paper store receipts; the various forms (1040 and the 1099's) get entered directly into the software.
And I had a good walk, if slightly less than yesterday: three miles by the creek, from Leigh Avenue to the little park at Campbell Avenue and back.
![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/roshi/palefaces/exhausted.gif){kind=small}
tiredThis post seems to be written in blog order: most recent events first. Seems appropriate.
Just finished off the data-entry for the checkbooks. That leaves the paper receipts, which are a bit more work but also more interesting, and the Amex and Paypal reports.
Tasty dinner: scalloped potatoes, pork ribs with spicy peanut sauce, and carrot-and-raisin salad.
Went for a nice drive with the Cat this afternoon. Good to get out of the house and hang out together. We don't usually talk much; it's all about good company and comfortable silences. Spent some time working on a song -- still marinating.
Did a little shopping. Mostly Office Max for white business card stock for mini-fliers, little colored dots to mark ripped albums, 9V batteries for the travel guitar, and a package-opener. Fry's for a 2GB micro-SD card and a little USB reader that's no more than a 250%-longer plug. Came with a little plastic cover threaded onto a little lanyard of the sort usually used for cell phone charms, but it seemed unnecessary and I took it off.
Did the 4-mile walk by Los Gatos Creek this morning. Felt good. It always does. The weather was cool but a little too humid after last night's rain.
Death comes into it because I heard from my insurance broker yesterday; he had noticed the activity on my account. He mentioned that, rather than cashing out the policy, I could have borrowed against the death benefit instead. Right. As if the whole point wasn't to reduce my level of debt, and eliminate yet another monthly payment. There's a reason why I don't like to do business over the phone: I don't like having to make decisions like that on the spur of the moment.
Yesterday I downloaded the year-end reports from Paypal and Amex. That's all I need, since Amex is the only card I use for online transactions, and I have paper receipts for everything else. Started data-entry this morning; I'll probably have the checkbooks done today. I do my tax-related data entry into a flat file using Emacs, then compute the subtotals with a Perl script.
The next step will be going through the paper receipts for credit card (and debit card, now that I have one for my business account) transactions. I also still need to sort through this year's charity mail looking for more receipts, and do triage on last year's investment and banking statements. On the whole the shoebox method of organizing still works for me, although these days it requires a file cart and two banker's boxes.
It was raining gently when I got up this morning. Very calming.
The other major accomplishment this weekend was clearing the boxes of debris off Colleen's old cedar chest in the garage attic, and clearing enough of a path that Kat and I will be able to get it down. As older daughter, Kat will be inheriting it. I believe Colleen got it from her grandmother... It's been in the attic for well over a decade. Of course, it will still have to be passed down over the edge into the stairwell; the "footpath" between the boxes is too narrow, winding, and cluttered to be usable.
A number of things didn't get done, including data-entry for taxes and scratch tracks for the next album. Hopefully I'll get started on those this evening rather than letting them go until the weekend: that's likely to be busy. Not as insanely busy as the weekend after that, though.
With sales taxes due at the end of the month, and a week of travel impending, it's a Good Thing that I was finally able to get started. I was able to get the data-entry for pre-orders done by starting with my shipping-label address list and editing in the somewhat smaller number of entries from my paper list. Sales to dealers, and non-preorder sales, were easy enough to add up by hand.
I have yet to break down sales by location for sales tax purposes, but that's all I have left to do this weekend. The bottom line is 390 albums out the door, and a gross take for the year of 4665. 80 out of the total were contributor, promotional, and gift copies -- anyone out there know how I treat those for tax purposes? There were a total of 195 pre-orders, meaning that there are 61 signed, numbered pre-order packages still available. All-in-all I've definitely made a profit on the project, so I'm a happy filkish bear at the moment. I may have to leave off some related expenses in order to convince the IRS that I've made a profit, but that's a problem for another day.
All my random, scribbled-on-tiny-slips-of-paper sales "records" have been properly scribbled on large, well-ordered pieces of paper. I still need to go through and make an integrated customer list, but at this point I have enough information -- what was sold where, when and to whom -- to compute my sales taxes fairly quickly. I have a little under 2 weeks (including two whole weekends), so that's OK.
The fileserver still isn't dead, but I don't trust it yet. I'll probably upgrade to a Maxtor 500 just on general principles.
22:15 It died. There's a new disk in my immediate future. In fact, I may just start transfering to the PATA drive I bought Wednesday.
22:37 Hmm. I'm seeing write errors on the mirror drive (sdb). The easy thing to try would be disconnecting it first.
productiveAs near as I can tell, all the information I need for computing sales taxes has been separated from all the information I don't need, but will eventually need for computing income taxes. All of the receipts and other 2007 correspondence that I know about have been sorted.
I still need to go through the actual sales information, figure out what was paid for where, and fill in the blanks. Probably over the weekend. Yes, I should have kept better records. Dumb bear.
Spent a few minutes this morning sorting receipts. For the first time in decades, I actually have all of last year's receipts sorted before the end of January. Cool! Of course, that doesn't include bank statements and most of the album-related stuff, but it gets a major bit of clutter off the desk. Perhaps more importantly, it keeps this year's receipts from piling up and creating more clutter.
The next major push is sales tax, which I only have about two more weeks to do. Fortunately, all I really have to do for that is to identify each sale by amount and location, so I know which county to assign it to. Should be straightforward; hopefully I can have that done by, say, Friday.
Sometime yesterday evening my left leg started hurting -- it still hurts, on and off. Feels like maybe a muscle cramp, though I'm not ruling out joint or tendon problems at this point. Aspirin helps. Grumble. I've also had very low energy, and crashed around 10pm last night. A couple of times today I've felt like I'm fighting off something. The Martian Death Flu, probably -- something flu-like would fit the symptoms. Took only a short walk at lunchtime, and a nap after dinner.
I did manage to put down a clean vocal part for "Someplace in the Net" this morning. I'll try to do "Daddy's World" tomorrow. Those were the only really bad ones on the latest dump, though some mixing is clearly going to be needed.
Got the taxes into the mail before heading off to work. I'm not going to pay $20 extra to e-file and save them money. Idiots!
The taxes are done -- all but addressing and mailing the envelopes. I'm
getting quite a bit back this year; next year I'll probably take a big
hit, between the chaoswolf not being a dependent and possibly,
with a little luck, album sales.
I walked the Wolfling through hers on TaxCut -- totally straightforward, though she got unaccountably upset when the time came for writing a $3 check to the Gubernator. I addressed her envelopes for her.
The printer is whining at me. It will stop if I keep ignoring it long enough.
Took the Younger Daughter to Barnes & Snowball to use her birthday
gift cards. She looked at gaming books but ended up getting mainly stuff
on babysitting and money management. Could she possibly be growing up?
Found a couple of mysteries with food in their titles for the flower_cat, and the newest Ursula LeGuin Earthsea book for
myself. Put it on the shelf with the other unread books, to be hauled out
after the album is finished.
Listened to today's dump CD on the way to B&N (plus a drive afterward, since it was less than half over by the time I got back with the YD). It's getting better -- there was really only one track that was horribly broken (sounded like I was gargling while I was singing -- really needed to have cleared my throat properly and started over), though I think there are several others that could benefit from new vocals. For some reason those are a lot easier for me than guitar. I need more practice at multi-tracking guitar parts.
Good -- the printer has stopped whining. I really like my little mini-ITX systems.
The flower_cat and chaoswolf are off at a Baycon
-- or is it Westercon? -- meeting; a newly-arrived selkit is
in the living room hacking something in SL, and the super_star_girl's plans for the afternoon have fallen through.
I'll have to see if there's something I can do to amuse her. Meanwhile,
the taxes are done except for the printing; I want to walk the Wolfling
through hers and make sure she doesn't need her tuition as a deduction. I
can use it if she doesn't.
Meanwhile, I still need to work on bringing up the new gateway system, and make sure there's no more recording I need to do. Some of the parts I put down over the last week seemed a bit shaky. And there's still a bit of percussion work needed.
Finished the tax data-entry about 8:30pm and went out for a drive with the
flower_cat. I'll probably want to go over a few things in the
morning, but between my usual prep and TaxCut's interview mode it all went
very smoothly. Had to put up with tiny fonts and the Mac's horrible UI
(and TaxCut's slightly botched implementation of it), but it's done now.
Looked at the disk usage on the fileserver and saw that I had somehow crept up to 99% on the main partition. Went into the directory where I keep downloaded CD images and deleted a few, mainly from 2005 plus the Debian beta installers, and got it down to 94%. It'll keep until I upgrade the drives, anyway. Could maybe do that tomorrow, even, or at least get started. Shouldn't actually do it until after I've printed the tax forms, at least, though I can start copying data earlier.
No walkies -- it rained most of the day, right up until dinner time. Grump. We need the rain, but grump anyway.
Not only did Fry's have a dual-platform CD of TaxCut for the same price as the Mac download ($30), but there was a $10 mail-in rebate for purchases between 3/17 and 4/15. So I win this round.
Now I'm waiting for my macbook to suck down the 25MB update through the soda straw of my old DSL connection, because I put off switching over to the new connection so I could, um..., get started on the taxes. Right. Sometimes procrastination doesn't pay off.
Went to start working on my taxes, only to find that the "free" CD of TaxCut that they sent me in the mail was actually not a CD of TaxCut but only a network installer: it goes out and tries to download the real copy, after trying to get you to pay $5 for "extended download protection" on top of the $29 that you'd normally pay for federal+state -- which means that if your machine croaks sometime after 60 days you don't have to pay to download it again.
Not to mention the fact that it doesn't actually work on the Windows 98 machine I used last year. I'm guessing that it's flummoxed by the fact that I'm using Firefox instead of Internet Exploiter. Since it's really just a downloader and all. If they think I'm going to type my credit card information into IE...
The only currently-working XP machines in the house are in the various bedrooms; I found this out on the Mac laptop that I had the presence of mind to borrow from work. There's a Win98 laptop, but it's currently booted into Linux and serving as the router on my new DSL line. So now I'm off to Office Max and Fry's -- where I was going to go anyway -- to see whether I can find an actual CD.
Then I get to find out whether the Mac version of TC can import last year's data that was prepared on a PC.
I'm suddenly very glad I thought to stop off at BevMo on my way home yesterday and get a fresh bottle of gin. And put it in the fridge.
Which is to say that a great many chores and to-do list tasks got done this afternoon and evening, but very little actual work. No more recording, for example.
But I did, finally, go through the Pile of Stuff to the Left of the Keyboard. tPoSttLotK is where I tend to toss paperwork and such that doesn't have to be handled immediately, but looks as though it's going to need attention in the next month or so. What this often means is that stuff gets ignored until it's no longer relevant, but in this case I found a couple of health-related receipts that I'd been looking for for a couple of weeks. And a great deal of clutter has been eliminated, though there's still a small pile of things that will need attention soon.
Going back in time to the start of the afternoon, I found out that my car is waiting for some parts -- it'll be ready tomorrow. The front struts and bushings will get fixed under warranty; flushing and replacing the transmission fluid, power-steering fluid, and coolant will cost me.
Tried to set rat traps in the garage attic, and failed miserably, nearly getting a finger broken for my trouble. I'll go get glue traps on the way home tomorrow.
Went out for dinner with the flower_cat. We wanted to try
someplace new, so of course the kids wanted to stay home and have
something familiar. OK with us -- we went to Los Gatos to try Transilvania, a Romanian place
we'd been eyeing for months. It is to yum!
We split an appetizer of grilled portabello mushrooms with marinara sauce and melted blue cheese, and a glass of a heavy, dark red wine whose name I unfortunately failed to catch. Then I had the sarmale (ground beef, pork, and rice rolled in pickled cabbage leaves, served with polenta, pickled cabbage, and sour cream on the side), and Colleen had the bulsz (polenta layered and baked with romano and mozarella cheese and served with a dollop of sour cream on top). Finished off splitting a serving of savarina -- sponge cake soaked with syrup and rum, with whipped cream and cherry preserve.
After dinner I got DNS going on the interim gateway (took all of 10 minutes), followed by the aforementioned clutter reduction.
And now it's time for bed. Past time.
The tax data-entry is done. There are still a few receipts to be sorted out, mainly from charities, but those are just supporting documentation: the actual numbers come from the check register and the AMEX year-end summaries. I still have the various forms 1099 and the W2 that I need to get out of their envelopes, but those get entered directly because they don't have to be subtotalled.
So I'm going to declare the data-entry finished, and spend most of tomorrow on music (and being social with our various guests -- we've invited three or four, and we often get drop-ins). Call ahead if you want to drop in, and bear in mind that our idea of an Easter celebration involves barbecued rabbit and a ritual showing of The Wicker Man.
The new DSL line is working well; I did a little tweaking with the ruleset to cut down on log clutter. The most common attack turned out to be Windows messenger popups. Go figure.
( So here's the transition plan... )And did I mention that I still have taxes to do? Did the last of the receipt data-entry today; next up is the year-end credit-card summaries from AMEX. They categorize charges so it's easy to spot the charity contributions.
Finished the data-entry for the check registers, which includes almost all of the charitable contributions and about half the assorted business expenses. Now I get to go through credit-card receipts for the rest of it. Thursday, maybe.
In case you're wondering, I tend to use the shoebox method of bookkeeping. Every once in a while I transfer invoices and receipts from the shoebox to a bunch of file folders. Around tax time every year I decant all the non-tax folders into 9x12 envelopes and box them up, then go through the receipts relating to deductions and my side business (Schedule C), and type them into a tab-separated text file.
Then I run the file through a Perl script to compute subtotals by category, at which point data entry into TaxCut is basically trivial.
Comparatively painless, once I realized that the Y.D.'s investment income was on one of the 1099's that I'd already processed and put in the wrong place. And I'm getting money back, too.
Call me a Luddite, but I'm filing on paper and getting my refund by mail. I've never gotten electronic filing to work, and I trust direct deposit not at all. And for some reason the big summaries are refusing to print; can't tell if the problem is Linux, Windows 98, or TaxCut. At least the forms are printing OK, so I can file. And I have all the other worksheet-like information in my files. I'll try again, maybe tomorrow, with a direct USB connection to the printer.
Taxes are mostly done; there are a couple of things I still have to track down, like the Y.D.'s investment income. But the data is entered. I'll get money back, so, yes, I should have done this weeks ago. I procrastinate.
Mild flame: TaxCut has gotten harder to navigate. It keeps trying to display stupid videos. And I can no longer create an itemized worksheet on a form, just in the interview. And I can't get directly to the interview page I need, just to a section. IDIOTS!
But I'll be rid of the wretched stuff tomorrow.
Actually, I've done a fair amount of tax work today, too: the initial data-gathering is done, except for a pass through the pile to find all the forms 1099. (This step involves going through my check registers, credit-card and cash receipts, and the AMEX annual report and typing in all my tax-relevant expenses in a standard format I can run through my little report generation script.)
Now the only question is which machine I should install TaxCut on. Probably the laptop.
But along the way I've done plenty of procrastinating: my walk, a load of dishes, a load of laundry, moving lumber around in the garage to make the back door useable again, archiving a 120GB disk full of backups, and installing a Gigabit ethernet card on my workstation, picking up a refill on my Flonase prescription...
Sorted the banking and investment stuff for taxes -- most of it goes straight to the archive box, since I separate out the tax forms when they arrive, but sometimes I miss something. Spent most of the day when I wasn't procrastinating or doing other things (see below) doing the initial data-entry. I always start with the check registers; the one I've been looking for for the last couple of months -- basically April through November -- turned up lurking in the bottom of the folder it was supposed to be in. Apparently it's been avoiding me.
We're spending the day sitting Amanda while Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff go
house-hunting. Mostly flower_cat; she's much better at
amusing four-year-olds than I am.
For about an hour in the morning, went with the Younger Daughter to her school, which was holding their annual "Arts on the Green" showcase for many of the performance groups. Not her intermediate drama class, but she did have to rendezvous with the rest of the team she's working with for her science class. (Only one other kid out of the four showed up, so not much got done.)
After a small lunch I went out for my walk. And after that, I took the
Older Daughter, chaoswolf, out for her first driving lesson.
This consisted of half an hour or so of driving in circles in an empty
parking lot, but felt a lot longer. I wasn't nearly as nervous as I
expected to be, perhaps because you can't do much damage at 10 mph. I
don't think it was much like the Wolfling expected it to be, either. But
nothing was damaged, and the Wolfling got a little bit of time behind the
wheel. We're giving her 6 hours of professional lessons as soon as we can
make the arrangements.
This evening is a house filk at Kanef's, and between now and then I get to start on the credit-card receipts (mostly from Fry's). What fun! :-P