If you inadvertently use it for something you shouldn't have, your accountant or bookkeeper can correct that for you. This discipline will prevent you from having to walk through literally every transaction you made last year trying to find the ones that were business related.
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A surprisingly useful thing that I've done is wrote a one-pager "What happened this year" for each line of business, for consumption by the accountants. (In my case, heavily sourced from my public end of year review blog posts.) These get more valuable each passing year.
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"What should I do if I get audited?" You email your accountant and say "Hey a low-probability routine event has happened. What should I do about this?"
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I was audited by the State of Hawaii one year, because one of my companies had registered to file a bid with one of their agencies, and then they didn't get a business privilege tax return from us the next year. Responding to the audit took 45 minutes.
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General flavor of the interaction: "How much revenue did you have in Hawaii last year?" *SQL query* $180. "Wait, what. OK, you're done."
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In general, exuding professionalism will make many, many interactions with government (and other bureaucracies) go better for you. You want to be polite, compliant, and armed-to-the-teeth with well-organized records. And, again, this is why you pay your professional advisors.
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Accountants generate immediate ROI at any scale of business larger than a bake sale. My Japanese accountants, for example, caught that I had filed an exemption from consumption tax because all of my sales were exports of software. That was not an optimal filing.
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The optimal filing was to file a consumption tax return, saying that we had $0 of sales subject to consumption tax. And then claim back all the consumption tax our business had paid (on business expenses). Resulting in a tax refund of several times what I paid accountants.
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"Wait you can get radically different results from the same facts with just tiny changes in what you type on your return?" You sound very surprised, hypothetical person who probably has programmed before.
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If you read this far, you might want to check out our guide to business taxes: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-taxes … If you're an Atlas company, we've got a quick survival guide for tax season here:https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/tax-season …
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