Most Small Businesses Hate Accounting, Dislike Sales Tax, and Hate the Tax Man

Small business seems to always be facing the brunt of the decisions made outside of their control, they hold all the liability should their business fail yet are expected to account for more and more in a world when technology should be making it easier and easier.

Worldwide there is an every increasing burden on small business to account for more taxes, to pay more money out in fees, licensing and insurances with little or no return. Gone are the days when mum and dad could decide to go into work for themselves with very little fuss.

If It Wasn’t For The Tax Man Small Business Would Never Use Accounting Software

Let’s face up to the real facts, I don’t know any small business owner is ever going to pop up and say that they love accounting and that their business thrives because of it. In reality the majority small businesses find accounting to be a burden on their time and ONLY do it because they need to account for income, expenses and sales tax.

Sales Tax is one of the biggest winners for most governments yet they burden business with the job of collecting it. Obviously it’s not just the burden of Small Business, but unlike large companies who employ specific people to do this task the Smaller Businesses are usually always mums and dads who are juggling to make an income only to find that their day doesn’t finish when they get home. They are then subjected to the indignity of spending their time calculating, reporting and remitting the cash cows of taxes to government departments.

In the end it’s not about to go away so some might say that I am having whinge and to go back under the rock I came out from. I fully understand this but the point I am trying to make is that accounting has become a burden on many small businesses.

How Do We Solve This Burden

I don’t think there is a way to solve it completely as at this time this century there is no way around it, maybe in another couple of centuries we will have figured out an easier way. So we may as well do the next best thing, do the bare minimum and nothing more.

Why are we trying to over complicate everything, we purchase great big accounting programs that are tedious and require hours of effort just to make a few transactions. Yes it seems great to see all those reports and all those Balance Sheets and Summaries, because after all that’s what the salesman or the accountant told us we needed.

But in the end its time to stop and ask yourself one question “when has any of that stuff ever helped you to make more money?”

For the most part accounting goes after old money and it does not help you to make new money. Yes it can sometimes be useful to Small Business to see where some of the money is going as it can help them to see if they are wasting money in areas where with better management they can put more money back into their own pocket. But this is what all accounting programs do anyway, they are in fact just big calculators and with a bit of basic math you could achieve that without the program.

Because we have to account for more and more it has become almost necessary for all Small Businesses to use an accounting program, the point to remember is do you need all that stuff that wastes so much time. In the end you would not be using the program if you did not have to report to the Tax Man so why make your life any harder than it already is.