Taxes

We have just spent the best part of a weekend preparing our tax information to send to the accountant.

Even though we are just starting out we chose to get an accountant because neither of us are tax experts. We are both too busy to have more then a cursory understanding of the tax rules that we have to comply with.

This may be a little wrong in some peoples eyes but, as we are both busy with our own careers we don't have time to really know all we need to know. That and our weekends are precious to us. We have a basic understanding of what we need to know, just not the detail.

I would recommend that you learn as much about this stuff as you have time for. The more you understand the better for your piece of mind.

The other recommendation I would make is select an accountant the either already handles clients that are engaged in property investing or better still also has investment properties of their own.

An accountant that is engaged and interested is far more likely to know the rules and regulations, what you can claim and when. They will also know when not to claim and why, they will give better advice then an accountant that handles general accountancy.

If you are going to do your own books, I would still recommend getting an accountant to look over them, spend the money once to make sure that you have it right. Or as a friend of mine is doing, do a correspondence course on accountancy, the rules are not obvious and as a general rule you want to avoid attention by the tax department, an audit takes a lot of your time weather you have done anything wrong or not.

Get and learn to use some accountancy software, GnuCash is free and works across Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It is fairly good, for our purposes it seems complete. MYOB is Windows only and you have to pay for. Quicken I hear is also good and quite cheap, supports Windows and Mac OS. Though I was mildly confused when I looked at their support site, it said Windows, Mac and Mint.com. I am writing this using Linux Mint 12...I thought for a moment that they has a Linux Mint client (this makes little sense, Ubuntu support = would still work with a much bigger audience).