Friday, February 19, 2010

Crunch Time (Part One)

Tomorrow morning we have our rendezvous with Ned. 

He's our accountant, and we've been with him for many years.    He's the one who genuinely thrills over all our dependents, who has watched our vehicular size grow with our family, and who has helped us make sense of each year's crumpled Wal-mart receipts and Aldi lists.

Correction:  piles and piles of receipts.  And checkbook registers.  And calendar notations of daycare income and attendance.  And proofs of purchase, valid vouchers, sales slips and stubs.  Yep.  It's all there.  Our 2009 lives, in one big box.

Ned likes seeing us because he gets the "Annual Big Picture" of our lives.  He also gets the paper thin computer report that summarizes it.
I'm left preparing that report from the quagmire of "proof" of how we lived it.

I really struggle with all this.  In fact, I mostly dread it.

It's not that I fear looking at the reality of the Sieve of my Checkbook, or how much we don't put into savings, or how our emergency fund is drained every month, usually via the plumbers, or mechanics, or doctors.  (Kel can do a lot of things like build and lead and cook and clean... if only he could prescribe!  Sigh.)

The struggle is that I'm the one who sorts, organizes, and enters all this data into the computer.  That's a Big Ugh.

Because of my daycare, I use a Quickbooks program that allows me to take each receipt and catagorize it by various line items... like "Paper Goods", "Cleaning Products", or "Lawn and Garden", all of which are relevant to the "bottom line" of our taxable income status.  This takes a lot of time!

Forgive my sour mood, but what I really need are categories like "Stuff", "Crap", and "Things We Impulsively Bought But Never Should Have Left the Store With".  Surely the IRS would understand these universal designations!

So now you know; the only reason I even blog is so I don't have to deal with the data entry of receipts. 

Wanna  see a cute picture of my kid????

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your 11th dependent is adorable in that picture.