
Ask HN: Tax/admin tips for US-based consultant? - simonebrunozzi
I have been performing some consultancy services lately and I am curious to hear from more experienced freelancers&#x2F;consultants what are the best ways to handle tax and admin tasks, which tools you use, etc.<p>Any help is appreciated, thanks!
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davismwfl
Best tool you can get initially is an accountant. :)

Seriously, not being a complete smart ass, just find a local accountant that
can help you properly book your revenue and help you on taxes. It seriously
doesn't cost much money and unless you are just doing tons of deals use either
excel or something super simple like QuickBooks for your accounting.
Quickbooks is nice because so many accountants are familiar with it and can
set you up to where all they do is come in once a quarter and help you
organize your taxes etc.

When you are starting off (wish I would've done this way back when) pay your
estimated tax to a separate bank account every month, this will help make sure
you don't get caught come tax time. Most likely what will happen is you will
only pay a portion of what you saved for taxes since you'll have write offs
etc that you can utilize.

So seriously the best tool I can recommend is an accountant to set you up and
help you as you need it.

Outside of that: Quickbooks is a decent accounting package that will let you
send invoices, book payments, services, and even can track time if you really
need it to at some point. Many 8 figure businesses still run off quickbooks
because it works for most common scenarios. I personally used an app (many
exist) for tracking time because it was simple and would let me create jobs
and track time against multiple clients which made invoice time easier. I even
used it when I had consultants working for me to have them submit their time
to me since the one I was using would send a CSV file of their time to job
number and I could put those into an excel file and pivot out all the time to
put together invoices easily.

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brudgers
Worth mentioning, if you can't afford an accountant (or if it is painful) then
you're not charging enough and the business is not really sustainable.

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fyp
I use Quickbooks self-employed: [https://quickbooks.intuit.com/self-
employed/](https://quickbooks.intuit.com/self-employed/) which imports from
your bank account and exports to Turbotax (with free filing). It will remind
you to pay quarterly taxes too.

If you use a separate business bank account (which you definitely should),
it's very easy to set up rules to classify each transaction in their
respective category for deductions so it's mostly set and forget. My only
complaint is their invoice feature sucks so you still need to look for
something else for that.

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quaquaqua1
Turbotax should make this pretty run of the mill as long as you get all the
proper forms from the people who paid you :)

The software will walk you through what boxes contain what values and then you
type them in. Then maybe you can get some expense write offs too for home
office, gas, computer etc if you saved the receipts.

Other than that be prepared to watch 30-50% or more of your income walk out
the door depending on your state and level of income. That's why consulting is
a hard gig that forces you to raise your rates!

