Double Blind

If anybody is running a corporation in Canada and their fiscal year ended on December 31, then they have until the end of this month to hand in their tax returns to the Canada Revenue Agency.

I just finished mine and I have no idea how large corporations could possibly have survived without Microsoft Excel. Even then, Excel doesn’t quite cut it if you didn’t program it correctly – accounting for such things as capital cost allowance (the deprecation that you are allowed on capital purchases) is not easy to set up if you’ve got to keep track of various purchases you made over the year (since you can only depreciate those at half the rate) and keeping track of used equipment that you’ve sold and removing that from your CCA pool… argh. That’s one reason why they invented software, to streamline the messy aspects of tax preparation.

That said, I’ve got the process semi-automated to the point where I don’t even need to use Quicktax to do the menial calculations – I’ve got it all in Excel. The time I have to spend keeping the corporation afloat in terms of the bureaucratic overhead is relatively low, and I’ve saved a hundred bucks because I don’t have to buy Quicktax anymore.

Then check out Justin’s Blog – he left a couple months ago and has been writing about his experiences, including details that you’d normally not get in most travel experiences, such as budgeting!

From what I can tell, Justin has been drinking more in Japan than I ever recall seeing him doing here in Richmond!