My birthday got off to a terrible start. I received three
e-mails in rapid fire succession from my accountant, never a good thing. I don’t
believe that I have ever received any
correspondence from him that was good news like, “Hey Doug, just wanted to drop
you a line to remind you to be looking for that fat IRS refund check! It should
be hitting your checking account any day now.” No, it’s always something
dreadful and dire-sounding like, “These expenses you have listed on the
document entitled RFA expenses for 2013? What do you expect me to do with them,”
or even worse, “Can you explain the discrepancy between what you say that you
have paid in estimated taxes and what my
records indicate?”
Anyway, I could understand virtually nothing in any
of these e-mails, and it is this sad fact that troubles me. The problem is this…I
haven’t filled out a tax return in over 30 years. I have always had an
accountant, and while I’m sure that he has saved me a lot of money, it has
resulted in a total ignorance on my part of the entire process, which makes me
feel like a moron. I’ll never forget when my kids asked me to help them fill
out their first returns. I looked at them and said, “wait,..what?” So here I am
in the financial business and I couldn’t fill out a tax return if my life
depended on it. When Carl sends me my return every year it looks like it was
written by Tibetan monks. I glance at the pages and pages of numbers and
columns with a pit in my stomach. Then I find the cover page and look for the
words, “WHAT YOU OWE.”
But, enough about our fascist tax code, the rest of
my birthday was quite fun. My business partners took me to Hondos for lunch.
Then last night I went to Chuy’s with family and friends. I got some truly
awesome gifts. My daughter gave me and invite and tickets for prime seats along
the first base line for next Friday night’s Flying Squirrels game. For those of
you not from around here…yes, our double A baseball franchise goes by the name
Flying Squirrels as in, “GO NUTS for the Squirrels!” Then Pam got me some
really cool workout shirts and the most amazing gift ever, three, hour long
massages at Hand & Stone!! Then my son, who is very broke and in graduate
school sent me this amazing video that for some inexplicable reason, I can't manage to upload into this blog post, so you'll have to go to my Facebook page to see it. Take my word for it, it's awesome!
So, all in all a very good day which ended much
better than it started.
While letting the professionals do their work is truly a good idea, sometimes we have to hold them accountable to ensure that they are doing it right. It's like when the taxman does an audit, only that you are the taxman doing the auditing. It always helps to learn something about accounting when you're in a business - let's you keep on top of things, in a way.
ReplyDeleteAngel Richards @ PerfectAccountingService.com