A Money and Numbers Game

I love being my own boss.

I hate doing my own accounts.

All the time that I'm reading long-forgotten receipts and entering numbers in books and spreadsheets I'm imagining the ghost of a tax in-spectre looming over my shoulder, whispering little threats as to why I'm wrong and how he's going to punish me for claiming that fourth Americano while working in Starbucks. As if it isn't bad enough having the coffee shakes too.

But, like driving and studying the literary style of D*n Br*wn to see why he's so popular, it's a necessary evil. So I gathered everything up, spread it all out on my dining room table and started scribbling. In pencil, obviously. I know better than to get too confident.

It's strange, I spent several years working as a bookkeeper for a small business, a job that involved doing the personal accounts and tax returns of the directors of the company. But somehow that was different. Even though the numbers involved were bigger (much bigger), the implications didn't seem as real. That was for someone else. This time it's personal. It's my business, my tax return. Every number that I enter has a personal story behind it. That receipt for Australian sales? They were as a direct result of an afternoon spent spamming direct target advertising to a select number of Australian readers and reviewers. The invoice regarding that huge hardback book? Research for a quiz book that has yet to see the light of day. There was never this level of personal involvement when I was doing exactly the same job for someone else. And I was getting paid to do theirs. The time I spend doing my own is time that I could be writing more saleable product.

I'd love to pay someone to do my accounts for me but the truth is that I don't earn enough to make it worthwhile. Unless they were so wonderfully creative that they could get me a refund large enough to cover their own expense of course. Which, however much me and the accountant might want it, is unlikely. My account books simply don't have enough entries to be that creative.

So after weeks (months) of procrastination I finally sat down and made the effort. I wrote up all my invoices and receipts, numbered them and filed them away tidily. I ticked all the transactions off against statements and other documents. Current account? Check, all ticked off and balanced. Credit card? Yep, everything agrees with the statements and receipts. Petty cash?

Petty cash? Not quite so successful. After balancing all the big accounts the one with the little tiddly amounts was the one that caused me the most trouble. Things like a couple of quid for stamps and envelopes or a new printer cartridge. I don't think that there was a single entry for more than a tenner yet there was a piffling small amount difference between what I had in my cash box and what the figures said that I should have. There must have been a receipt missing.

I looked in my files in case I'd clipped it to something else. No joy. Maybe it was in that-drawer-where-you-stuff-things-to-look-at-later? (Tell me it's not just me?)  No, it wasn't in there. Maybe I'd confused it with my own personal receipts? But I hadn't, it wasn't with them either.

I eventually found it. It had slipped in between some blank pages of the book I do my accounts in. Turns out that the missing invoice was for that very same accounts book.

Irony. You've got to love it.