Taxing times

Money isn't funny.

Wahhhhhh!! I type, then sigh and delete my howl of pain from the page, one letter at a time. Clack, clack, clack.

RA is all events, I write instead. Stripe is Substack!!

I’m drafting what I estimate to be the millionth email to my accountant, a man I’ve never met and can’t actually remember how I contracted his services, or even when exactly. Maybe his email address came to me in a dream.

Now it’s a nightmare. This year I’ve decided to be Sensible. The sun has only just risen on the 6 April and here I am, smugly firing over a year’s worth of bank statements (exported jankily and individually into .csv format by a series of increasingly cumbersome online converters, until I realise AI can do job lot) invoices and an impenetrable Excel sheet I use to track income and outgoings from my events. I’ve even got my P60 on hand!

More than anything, I don’t want a repeat of 2025, when I was inexplicably asked to pay more than several thousand pounds worth of tax than my calculations had reckoned for. In order to avoid such a situation rearing its head again, I have decided not to do any audit, but instead just bung a large ‘bonus payment’ into my tax pot every now and then. I will do anything to rectify the problem, except actually interrogate its causes.

So, obviously, it’s happened again. My eyes bug out of my head, cartoon style when my accountant sends his first pass at my return back. All the tax I’ve diligently put aside over the past 12 months is around £10,000 short of what I supposedly owe His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.

Thanks for this,I reply, but it seems awfully high! Can we go over the figures?