While the April 15 deadline is still a few months away, it is time to start preparing your taxes (if you haven’t already). Tax time for me was usually a time for cramming, doing everything at the very last minute. I just dread the work that tax preparation entails, even with the help of a tax preparer. Plus, I love to do it at the very last minute – driving my husband bonkers. But this year, I resolved to make tax time easy and painless (hopefully!) for me.

I read an article that said that business owners need to be proud that they are actually paying their taxes, not just waiting for refunds because that only means one thing — they made money for the year. True enough, but I still prefer to keep most of what I earned! So I had to re-review again the qualified business deductions that I could possibly claim to make sure that I am not leaving anything on the table.

Late last year, I trekked to Border’s Bookstore and bought several books to help me figure out deductions that I may be missing (end of the year is the best way to do this in order to still have time to do catch-up spending). I found two books that are simply a gem of listings of possible tax deductions – J.K. Lasser’s Small Business Taxes and Eva Rosenberg’s Small Business Taxes Made Easy. The J.K. Lasser’s book has more detailed discussions, plus examples on how to possible use the deduction. Rosenberg’s book is more of enumeration of what you can deduct, but has scant discussions on how to actually take the deduction and what it actually is. I found that I still have to research each item to ascertain how a particular deduction would apply in my situation. A great read, nonetheless.

As a reminder, if you have employees or you paid an independent contractor more than $600 last year, the deadline for filing 1099s is looming. So better hurry up. You can read more about it from Richard Chapo’s article “Deadlines For Issuing And Filing 1099s Are Approaching”