it all adds up

I look at the calendar this morning. May 17. Our five year anniversary, of sorts. Five years ago today, we got divorced. I don’t miss you, Mike. Well, I might miss the sex. I definitely miss the sex. Fuck was that good. We even had one last romp the night before we filed.

Damn it. Now that I’ve noticed the date, I can’t not think about it. I still remember that first time I saw him. I was two years out of college, at a singles bar with some girlfriends. Mike caught my eye from across the room. He came over, offering to buy me a drink. I said I already had one. He said I had two hands, unless I had something else I wanted to do with the other. I laughed.He could always make me laugh. Even with dumb jokes like that. It was just the way he said them.

I watched those hands as we talked. They were clearly workman’s hands, but he moved them so gracefully, so nimbly. He was good with his hands. And several other parts of him. I went home with him that night and had the best sex of my life.

It didn’t hurt that he was drop dead gorgeous. Other than sex, my favorite thing to do those days was walking across a bar room with him. Every woman in the place would be staring at us, envying me. I hate how catty that makes me sound, but that always made me feel good, special.

Yeah, Mike could always make me laugh. But that was his answer to every problem in life. Tell a joke and ignore the real problem. When he proposed six months after that first night, I thought he was joking. I figured that since he could make me laugh and the sex was great, everything else would fall in place. But it just fell instead. There was one big problem; I didn’t like him.

By our wedding day, we both knew that we were making a mistake. But there was too much momentum to back out by then. Two things really got to me in the end. He had no intellectual curiosity or introspection or anything. Or maybe he was afraid of what he saw if he tried. And life was just a joke to him. I’m a pretty driven person. Nothing was ever serious to him, not a career, not himself, certainly not us.

After almost two years of increasing irritation at each other, we decided to split up. I brought it up first, but he was relieved when I did. We split our financial assets fifty-fifty, as meager as they were, and went our own ways.

After the divorce, I got serious about my masters in accounting and two years ago, earned my CPA, almost as a backlash against Mike’s unwillingness to push forward in life. During those years, I also tried the on-line dating scene. I group my dates into three categories: too creepy, too weepy, or too clingy. And the few I did go to bed with were very disappointing after the high bar Mike had set for me.

My new year’s resolution was to do something else. I researched for small towns that were short of accounting services. A small college town sounded appealing, so I moved across the bridge and set up my own accounting firm. Just a store front in the strip mall that is half empty now. They were happy to find a tenant that would pay them a pittance but make the place not seem quite as deserted. I look through the plate glass at my corporate alter-ego, it all adds up accounting. Yes, all lower case. I know. But I like the way it looks, including the abacus in the logo.

Okay, enough mooning for the day. Or the year for that matter. I don’t have a huge number of clients yet, but I do have some work to do.

I finish all my immediate work and I’m just starting in on today’s crossword, when a man walks in the door. His appearance surprises me. Almost all my customers fit one of two profiles. I have some elderly clients who do not feel up to doing their own taxes. They are mostly widows and widowers, whose late spouse had always handled the money for them. I generally give them a discount, often pretty steep.

The other group, the ones that are getting me close to break even in my own life, are small business owners. Two beauticians, an electrician, the guy who owns the local hardware store. You’ve met them everywhere you go. They have a certain look about them. A harried look. I guess they turn to me when they are at wits end, having tried to do it themselves.

This man is certainly not elderly. I would guess he’s a few years older than me, maybe thirty-five or thirty-six. He’s casually dressed, in a tee and jeans. His hair is mussed, like it rarely sees a comb, although he looks (and smells) clean. Some of Mike’s friends reeked when they came over. A bit of grooming and he would be handsome, maybe even rivaling Mike.

What was really striking were those eyes. Like he didn’t belong in civilization, but out surviving in the wild somewhere, living on his wits. There was depth there. I had gotten used to the void behind Mike’s eyes. These were the eyes of a thinker, a philosopher. In another age, I imagine he would be a hermit, living off in the wilderness, convening with his god. I had no idea what he might be doing in my office. Hermits don’t usually need accountants.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

“I’m hoping so. I’ve made a mess of my books for a few years. I’m worried I’m starting to dig myself deeper. I’ve paid something for taxes every year, but I have no idea if it was the right amount.”

“I can certainly try to straighten out that mess. What do you do, Mr. -?”

“Stevens, Xavier Stevens. I’m a photographer. And you are?”

“Olivia Barnes. Oh, Stevens Photography? Just off High Street, right?”

“Yeah, that’s my studio. That’s where I started actually making any money with this. And what created the problem.”

“Do you have other forms of income?”

“Well, I teach a photography class once a year at the college. But that’s only a few thousand dollars a year. I make a few thousand dollars a year selling prints of my wildlife photos. I turned the living room into a photo studio to earn some more money. That was almost three years ago, after my mom died.”

“Was that her house?”

“It’s the house I grew up in, but I inherited it when she died, yes.”

“So where are the big issues for you? Do you keep good records?”

“I try to, at least. I know what I get paid for everything, but I have some questions there. Even more so questions about the expense side. What can I count as a business expense and what can’t I? I pay for almost everything on my AppleCard, so I have a pretty complete list of what I spend money on. I have a box full of receipts for everything I need to pay cash for.”

“We will need to figure out how to divide the costs of your house into personal and business, but that should be a pretty straightforward one-time decision. What else do you see as dubious expenses?”

“I sometimes offer my customers a glass of wine to calm their nerves before a session. Can I expense the wine? How about if I drink a glass with them? Do I have to figure out how much I drink and how much they drink? And I’ve had a few women take me out for a drink afterwards. Do I need to count the cost of those drinks as revenue?”

“What kind of pictures are you taking, Mr. Stevens?”

“Please call me Xavier. Mr. Stevens was my dad. I started out expecting to take kids and family portraits and things like that. And I do get some of those. But I did a set of boudoir photos for a friend. And she showed her friends. That is now something like eighty per cent of my business. I even have women coming across the bridge to get their pictures taken.”

“Boudoir photos?”

“Sexy photos that they can give their husband for an anniversary or a birthday. Some of them do it just to make themselves feel desirable again. Nothing explicit. A glass of wine can calm their nerves. I sit and talk with them, so they’re comfortable with me. Most of the photos are quite tasteful, but I do see more of them than I let the camera capture, so they need to trust me. Which is why I often drink a glass with them.”

“All that wine should be a valid professional expense, yes.”

“What if I finish the bottle that evening after they have left?”

“That one is a little trickier, but I don’t think you’d get much pushback for charging the whole bottle to the business. And I think you can consider the drink afterwards as a personal gift, which is not taxable income.”

“And if I feed them a light snack with the wine? But eat the rest of the snack for my dinner?”

“I can see where this can get tricky. Do you at least separate what you buy for feeding the customers from what you buy purely for yourself?”

“No. I just grab stuff at the grocery store that looks appropriate when I am shopping for myself.”

“You should start paying for the two sets separately. We can try to guesstimate the percentage of the grocery bill as business versus personal, but it’s much easier to defend if you clearly delineate the two purchases. Even if you end up eating most of the snacks yourself. Try to only eat the leftovers, though. That makes it much more defensible if you get audited. Anything you open for your personal consumption should count as personal. Are there other categories of concern?”

“I’m assuming anything I spend on my camera equipment counts as a business expense. How about my phone? I do take some of my wildlife pictures on my phone.”

“I would allow that expense, but not your monthly bill. Unless that is also the number you use for your business, in which case you can deduct that as well.”

“How about my car? And the mileage on it. The vast majority of my mileage is going to locations for wildlife shots.”

“Do you track your mileage based on what the trip is?”

I see him grimace.

“Well start doing it now. We can try to make an estimate for past trips. The easiest thing to do is to reimburse yourself for mileage, but pay for the car and its maintenance out of your own pocket. You could also declare it to be a company car and charge all of the expenses to the business. Do you have a logo on the car?”

He shakes his head.

“Too bad, that would make it a bit easier. If you decide to go that approach, you cannot take any significant personal trips with it. Like vacations or anything like that.”

“What if I go somewhere on a vacation and take some pictures that I then sell?”

“You can get away with trips if all you do is take photographs, yeah. Or almost all you do.”

“Well, I don’t have any family. And photography is my one and only hobby, so that is pretty much what I’d do if I took one.”

“So I need all three years of your credit card charges, the three tax returns you have filed that you are concerned about. And that box of paper receipts. I think we can file amended tax returns for those years and get you set up with a system that needs minimal intervention on my part long term. But this isn’t going to be cheap. I’ll need to go through every one of your expenses and suss out how to characterize it. You’ll need to help me understand what goes where and why in many cases. So it’ll be significant hours of mine and yours both.”

“The business is actually doing pretty well and I still have most of the money my mother left me, so I can certainly pay for this as a one-time. And I’m not that busy. I assume we can work around my intermittent schedule for photo shoots.”

“Certainly. I do have other commitments as well, so we should each have time away from this. I have an iPhone as well. Can you airdrop me the transactions from your phone right now? I can start looking at a first pass of categorizing. Would tomorrow afternoon work to make a first review of the categories and see what questions I have?”

“Can you help me download the transactions? I’m not really sure how.”

“Open up your phone and hand it to me.”

It only takes a few clicks per month to export them. It is thirty six months, so it takes me a few minutes, but soon I have his whole financial history on my phone, ready to be uploaded to my computer.

“Here’s your phone back. Does 2PM tomorrow work for you?”

“I’ll see you then. Back here, I assume.”

I nod, He heads back out the door.