Arthur Francis Tyde III

Every year at tax time I freak out at the amount of work I have to do to prepare my filing. While I should file quarterly, I find the whole ordeal so draining that I prefer to pay the penalty and do it once a year. This means I am faced with a box of receipts about 18 inches deep which have to be sorted, organized and entered into spreadsheets. Given that my business expenses are in 8 different currencies and all amounts have to be converted to US dollars this can take time. I spent a month on this last year and my tax-accountant was still unhappy with the results. It is the fear of this single mind-numbing task that pushes out my tax filing to the absolute last minute every year.

Please vote for a flat-tax!!!

This year, I decided to take advantage of my present location and outsource the work.

Talent here in the Philippines is actually pretty easy to come by and at a low cost. I hired two business school graduates who took on the task of organizing all this paper. They went through the stack, separated all the non-deductible receipts, then completely organized the remaining paper into categories entering everything into a spreadsheet. What would have taken me a month, took them about four days and this included double checking all the calculations. Overall, a positive experience for everyone involved.