Sometimes I just have to shake my head and move on.  Recently I've been trying to add to my small business's staff by hiring an accountant and an editor. (If you missed my blog about why every self-publisher needs a staff, you can find it here) In both cases, I started by taking the recommendations of friends.  I should have known better!

Case #1: The Accountant.  She "welcomed my business", but never had time to meet with me.  Meanwhile, I was sweating the fact that my book sales had added thousands of dollars to our income, without any deductions coming out of them.  I knew I was going to owe self-employment taxes at least, and we might also be hit with a fine for not submitting quarterly estimated payments to cover the difference.

As January 17 got closer, I again asked for an appointment, which she made, and then cancelled twice. On the third appointed day, I arrived at her office with all my paperwork in hand, only to be told she was "out of town." Her receptionist offered to call her, and I had the dubious pleasure of listening to her sputter an apology. "Leave the paperwork there," she said.  "I'll be back in the office tomorrow, I'll look it over, and call you." Right! She finally called on the Saturday afternoon before the deadline to say she didn't have time to go through the paperwork.  Her recommendation: Send the IRS $2000 or more, and they'll be happy.  Then, she said she would file to get me an extension on paying my taxes in April.  Bottom line: "Call me back at the end of April, and we'll try to find a time to go over all this before the October deadline.

Instead, I found myself a new accountant -- one recommended by the Chamber of Commerce.  He was polite and accommodating, offering a whole afternoon to get us straightened out.  Thank you, Kind Accountant, for treating me as if my business is important.

Case #2: The Editor. She was excited to read the first three chapters of my book -- until she read them.  Then back came the critique. "You seem to want your historical novel to be historically accurate, but all these details are going to bore your reader, as they do me.  I prefer to work on a story line that has lots of action and excitement.  I can do an edit on these pages and put in some more exciting events, but you'll have to start all over again to write the kind of book I produce." 

I was just about to brag about my decision to make no more resolutions when my world became very complicated.  I'll spare you the details of the six deaths of good friends we've had in the 2 weeks since Christmas. I've managed to clear out the last vestiges of Christmas, finished the final edit of "the Second Mouse Gets the Cheese," and designed a new bookmark feataturing the Mouse. But the topper came with a call from my accountant, reminding me that because of the high volume of sales of "Beyond All Price" in the last quarter of 2011, I owed the IRS a quarterly payment on my 2011 taxes. All she needed, she told me, was a list of all my income and all (read: ALL) my book-related expenditures over the past year.

Have I been keeping those records? Well . . . sort of. I have a couple of file folders at the corner of my desk into which I've been stuffing receipts and credit-card bills. And I had started out last year by downloading a highly recommended program for organizing those receipts.  I just hadn't actually kept the records up to date.  Arrrghh!

Gamely I dug out all those little slips of paper and opened my expense record, only to be horrified by how complicated it was.  It had a separate sheet for each month, with a row for every day in the month. And each sheet had some 35 categories of expenses, each with its own column on a spread sheet that measured some 18 inches across. That meant I was looking at over 8000 little cells to be filled in before the actual calculations even began. I started sorting my little pieces of paper into monthly piles.  I didn't take long before I realized that this program was major over-kill, and much too complicated.

When I couldn't find a simpler version that seemed designed for the kinds of expenses writers and indie publishers incur, I decided to design my own.  The result is a simple template that works on any computer that can handle Excel.  It put all my expenses onto just 2 pages. Just set your page to landscape and under the print function, scale to about 85% or 1 page wide and two pages tall.It would even be possible to squish the data a bit more and get it all onto a single page.

The layout is simple.  It has three sections: one for travel expenses, one for day-to-day expenses, and one for including the figures for a dedicated home office. You get just one cell for each expense during a given month, so you may have to do a bit of addition on your own--adding all your postage, for example. And travel mileage needs to be converted to cost by multiplying it by the IRS allowance for mileage.  (That's not as complicated as it sounds. The current allowance is $0.50 a mile, so you just divide the number of miles by 2 and add a dollar sign.)

When you're finished entering your numbers, the spreadsheet calculates each type of expense (in the rows) over the course of the year and the total for each month (in 12 columns.)  At the bottom right corner, you get the grand total.  Simple.  

There are also some blank rows, so if you need to add some new categories, you can just type them in. The "total" formula is already entered in the blank cell at the end of each row.  I finished my calculations in a single morning.

I was so easy that I decided to share the template. If you'd like a free copy, just go to my website and fill in your name and e-mail address in the opt-in box.  I'll e-mail you the template in an attachment.