A small business owner’s diary entry on the annual dread of tax season and the increasingly elaborate systems built to survive it

The email arrived, as it does every January, with the subject line “Self Assessment – Action Needed,” and I felt the familiar drop in my stomach that I imagine soldiers feel upon hearing a specific whistle. Attached was a spreadsheet. Forty-seven tabs. I counted them twice, hoping I had miscounted. I had not. My accountant, a genuinely lovely woman I trust with my entire financial existence, has apparently decided that this is the year we finally get organised, and organisation, it turns out, means forty-seven tabs.

The Early Tabs Are Reasonable

Tabs one through six are perfectly sensible: income, expenses, mileage, home office costs, that sort of thing. I understand these tabs. I have populated these tabs before, in previous years, with considerably less ceremony. I felt, briefly, a sense of competence and control that I now recognise, in hindsight, as the calm before an administrative storm.

Then We Arrive at Tab Thirty-One

Tab thirty-one is titled, and I am quoting directly, “Miscellaneous Ambiguous Receipts (Sort By Vibe).” I do not know what my accountant means by this. I have stared at this tab for eleven straight minutes without blinking. Is she asking me to categorise my own spending based on emotional resonance? Is there a formal accounting definition of vibe that I have simply never encountered in four years of running this business? I have decided, for now, to leave tab thirty-one entirely blank and revisit it once I have consumed considerably more tea.

The Receipts Themselves Have Become a Genuine Archaeological Project

Somewhere around tab eighteen, “Receipts Found In Coat Pockets, Q3,” I began to understand the true scale of what I was being asked to do. I have receipts from a printer cartridge purchased in April that I genuinely cannot recall the purpose of. I have a receipt for what appears to be four coffees purchased in a single sitting, which either represents an extremely productive client meeting or a personal crisis I have since blocked from memory. Both feel equally plausible.

My Attempt at Tab Thirty-One, Eventually

I did, eventually, return to tab thirty-one, fuelled by desperation and a second pot of tea. I have sorted the miscellaneous ambiguous receipts into three subcategories of my own invention: “probably business,” “definitely not business but I am claiming it anyway out of spite,” and “genuinely no idea, ask past self.” My accountant has not yet responded to this system. I remain hopeful she finds it as reasonable as I currently, delusionally, believe it to be.

The Existential Tab

Tab forty-four is simply titled “Notes,” and contains, at present, a single line I wrote to myself at eleven o’clock last night that reads “why did I become self employed.” I have decided to leave this note in place for my accountant to find, partly as an accurate emotional record of the process, and partly because I suspect she already knows the answer better than I do at this point in the year.

Where I Currently Stand, Tab-Wise

I am, as of this writing, on tab thirty-nine, with eight tabs remaining and a growing suspicion that tabs forty-five through forty-seven exist purely to test my resolve. I will finish them. I finish them every year, usually somewhere around eleven at night on the day before the deadline, fuelled by panic and the specific dread of a late filing penalty. This year, I am simply choosing to document the journey, tab by increasingly unhinged tab, for anyone else out there currently staring down their own spreadsheet of reckoning. Further small business diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with additional London business coverage available at prat.uk.

SOURCE: https://prat.UK/