Hey, creative you done your taxes yet is tax season, which means you’re scared out of your mind. It means you’re <laugh>. You’re trying to go back and find old gas receipts from last February, and you’re having bad dreams that the IRS is gonna show up at your house and take you to jail and seize all your assets, right? Because you’re doing your taxes yourself. TurboTax, let me guess, right? And you’re doing the little, and you might even have an llc. You better have an llc. Go back and listen to that episode. But even if you do, you’re like, oh, TurboTax has an LLC section. You need an accountant. You need an accountant today. I understand the pain and the fear around taxes for small businesses, especially small freelancers. If you’re a freelancer out there, and it took me a very long time. I was just like you, I was like, oh, they have all these programs and I can save all that money and I’ll pay the $72 to have TurboTax do it for me.
This is a mistake for lots of reasons. Let me, I, I want to, in this episode, try and take away some of the fear of hiring an accountant, but I also want to equip you with the right words, the vocabulary you need to go out and find an accountant, um, that is going to help you, help you sleep better, help you save more money, right? You’re probably losing money by doing your own taxes. Um, and also just make sure that your business is structured properly so you are maximizing your profits. This is what businesses do, and this is unfortunately where most freelance creatives especially fall short, is you work your butt off all year long and then you go pay taxes and you’re probably leaving money on the table. All of this, all of this can be solved if you hire an accountant. Okay? So let me, let me give you, let me, let me try and equip you with some information that you need to make sure that you do this.
So there’s, there’s a few good reasons why having an accountant, um, is the thing for you to do like today. Like as soon as you finish listening to this, go hire one. First thing is, um, is accountants obviously know taxes and no, all that stuff, you don’t, you know, your art form, you will make mistakes. You will screw this up a hundred percent guaranteed you don’t know what you’re doing. And that’s okay, because if somebody asks you to come do your art form for them, they don’t know what they’re doing and they need you to do it for them. Accountants are specialists and they can help save you sometimes thousands of dollars. Okay? So just having an expert on the scene, make sure that you’re doing it right. You’re not gonna get in trouble with the irs. But also too, a really big one is that they will, they know loopholes in the tax.
They know business structures. You don’t know. They know all kinds of things that can help you save more of your money, keep more of your money that you work so hard for. Don’t you want to keep more of your money? Accountants can help you do this, and you could stop right now and try and learn everything they know, but you’d have to stop doing your business. Which brings me to the last benefit of having an accountant is it frees you up. Think about all the time you’re spending probably right now as I speak, this is like March 6th or something like that. Maybe you haven’t even started your taxes, right? <laugh>, whatever. It’s, um, you all the time and all the stress you spend trying to save a few hundred dollars is money that you could be ma putting into your next social media post into your next marketing, into a project, into a proposal, into a client, call into anything besides doing taxes, anything that helps build your business.
That’s why you need one. Now, there are lots of terms out there you’ve probably heard, and it gets overwhelming really, really quick. You’ve probably heard the terms. Bookkeeper, accountant and cpa, certified public accountant, okay? Bookkeeper, accountant, cpa. Let me help you walk through these just a little bit. A bookkeeper is someone who just keeps track of your financial transactions throughout the year. That’s all it is. Anytime you make money, anytime you spend money, you need some way to record those transactions. That’s what a bookkeeper does. Now, you might be your, your company’s bookkeeper, which I’m sure you’re a terrible one because you’re not a bookkeeper. But if you had a bookkeeper, uh, the, the difference between a bookkeeper say and an accountant is that a bookkeeper can keep track of all of the, keeps the books, keeps track of all of the receipts, keeps track of all of the expenditures, keeps it just, it, this person just organizes and tracks all of that stuff that at the end of the year when you’re doing taxes, you’re, you’re scrambling to go find all this stuff.
That person keeps up with that throughout the year. However, a bookkeeper cannot file your taxes. They cannot give you tax advice. They are not, they’re not qualified for that kind of work. They just keep order. When it comes to your, your finances in your business, that’s bookkeeper. An accountant can give tax advice, can file your taxes for, you can fill out your, your tax paperwork. These people are magical and they’re awesome. They’re a little, they’re more qualified than a bookkeeper. They’re required to have a bachelor’s degree at least, and some training on top of that. Um, and they’re great. Okay? So that’s the person. An accountant is different than a bookkeeper. They have more skills and they have more authority to help you with specific tax information. Now, a cpa, uh, a certified public accountant is an accountant. It’s right there in the name, but they have way more qualifications than your average accountant.
The bar is really, really high. To become a cpa, you probably have to have an advanced degree. Um, you’re gonna have lots and lots of extra training On top of that, they are very highly accountants CPAs, okay? Those, uh, CPAs work with big corporations. They certainly work with publicly traded corporations because they can do some things that accountants are not allowed to do with the irs. So we all films. What do we have? We have a bookkeeper and we have an accountant. We do not have a cpa, at least not yet. Okay? So just because you hear people are telling you, oh, you gotta get a cpa. If you’re a freelancer or you’re a very small business, you probably don’t need one. Now this, I’m not a tax professional. Please don’t. I’m just saying you can get by and you can do your taxes and be legal and be safe and make sure that you are getting all of the advantages that you are eligible for and legal for.
With a, a regular run of the mill accountant. Now, you can certainly hire a cpa. Nothing wrong with ’em. They’re super smart, very qualified people. I’m just saying that for most really small businesses, a cpa, they’re cuz they’re expensive cuz they’re, they’re more skilled, they’re more qualified. Um, they typically are a little bit of overkill for a brand new starting business. So we have a bookkeeper, his name is Rob. I’ve never met him in person and I tell you that because it has never been easier or better with the gig economy and finding people online to find these, these people who are very good this stuff. And they will work for you hourly. You don’t have to hire him on full-time. So we have Rob, he’s our bookkeeper. He’s amazing. Anytime that we make a purchase, anybody in Wewa films makes a purchase or makes a sale or does any kind of transaction, we take a screenshot of it, we email it to Rob, we tell him what it is and he, he organizes it.
He puts it in Dropbox and organizes everything. I literally on the way home today bought gas and I have to send this receipt right here. I have to send that to Rob as soon as I get off this podcast, <laugh>, okay? But Rob does not file our taxes. He’s a bookkeeper. So he just keeps the everyday stuff. Now we have uh, uh, a guy named Mike Robinson who is our accountant. He’s the one that does all the tax preparation. He, Rob is our everyday bookkeeper. He compiles this information little by little, by little receipt by receipt all year long. Then he packages it up and he gives it over to Mike once a quarter. And then Mike does everything. So for us to pay our taxes quarterly and then at the end of the year, Mike files our taxes this entire thing. Cuz you’re probably thinking, oh my gosh, Kevin, you probably spend $10,000 a year doing just, no, I don’t.
No, I don’t. Our bookkeeper and our accountant together are about $1,200 a year, a year, $100 a month to make sure I don’t have to do taxes. Courtney, my business partner doesn’t have to do this. And professionals are on the job. 1200 bucks a year. If you won’t spend $100 a month, put that aside. I’m gonna be blunt with you. You don’t deserve to be in business if you aren’t serious enough to do that, okay? You don’t have to go broke. You do have to think like a professional though. Now, as our company grows, we might move into a CPA firm and we’ll pay more, but we’ll be making more and we can afford that, those circumstances will change and we will grow into that. But you at least need an accountant. If you can get a bookkeeper on the side to help you with the everyday things, just to d work hourly for you.
And again, you can, you can find these people online. Um, you don’t have to spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. If you don’t have $100 or so a month to put aside for an accountant out of your, the, the revenues from your creative business, you’re probably still working a day job. But which is nothing wrong with that. You’re probably still working a day job and you can take a hundred dollars out of a month out of that revenue to pay. This is money well spent. You should do it right now. It’ll help you feel better. You’re gonna save more money than you think you’re spending doing taxes. And you’re going to avoid possible problems with the irs, which is the most important thing. So you can focus on being you on growing your business, on being creative, on finding new clients, on doing your marketing, and let the other professionals do what they do. You can do it. I know it’s scary, but once you do this, you will just not know how you ever did without these people. So it’s time for you to think like a professional. I want your business to succeed. You gotta think like a business person. You can do it. I love you.