I am very late in commencing putting finger to keyboard this evening.
Somehow the night has ticked away and it is almost ten o’clock, and I have not written a single word.
Well, I hadn’t. I have written some now although not nearly as many as would be a complete diary entry.
The thing is that I have occupied much of the day frowning at a computer screen. Despite the glorious and unexpected sunshine in the garden, I have been faithfully doing sum after sum, my nose to the calculator and my heart heavy with sighs.
Of course it was heavy with sighs, I am doing the paperwork for the Inland Revenue. No matter how I think about it there is never much to celebrate. Either we have earned lots of money and so we are going to be stung for tax, or we do not have to pay very much tax because we have been living in straits of desperate poverty. Neither picture is the sort to fill one’s soul with glad cheer.
Actually, it all worked out fairly well in the end really. We had earned more or less what I thought we had, and also what I had told the Inland Revenue that we would, so we are not going to be surprised with a sudden excess tax bill and shocking penalty, so everything is more or less all right. That is to say, it is all going to have to be sent to the accountant for him to peruse, and he will send me emails that say things like: Were you aware that you have written down that you spent three hundred and fifty thousand pounds on stamps? Are you sure this figure is the correct one? and other such sensible observations.
I was very fed up with it by the time I had finished, and threw my pen on the desk with a wearied clatter. I went downstairs to start on the jam, although it was five o’clock by then, and a bit late. I poured the jelly-juice into a pan and decided it was just all too difficult, and put the pan into the fridge for tomorrow.
I went back upstairs and contemplated the beginning to this year’s tax return. This does not have to be handed in for absolutely ages, but like a dissertation, it is just as well to get started with it quickly, otherwise you just forget everything that you ought to say.
This year’s tax is complicated because of being called Ibbetson Limited, and I was in no merry frame of mind about it, I can tell you, when a splendid thing happened.
The Nat West, with whom we have opened our brand new Ibbetson Limited account, and who have been pretty useless in every other way, had sent me an email which I had ignored. I found it whilst I was scouring through my Junk mail, looking for a lost receipt, and wondered if it might be worth looking at.
It was a present of some accounting software.
I looked at it without much interest, but was at the stage of the day where research was better than sums, so I opened it and pressed Play on the software.
Readers, it knew everything.
Not everything really, obviously, I mean it didn’t know that I had been too idle to wash the breakfast pots. It didn’t even know anything about our old bank account.
What it knew about was our shiny new Limited one.
It knew how much we had spent and what we had spent it on. It knew how much money we had made, although actually that is none, so far, apart from the hundred quid that Nat West gave us because they made such a mess of opening the account, and it knew that I had moved all of our savings into it to purchase some computers and some insurance. Ibbetson Limited, it explained, had had eight transactions, paid a fortune in VAT and was running at a loss so far of seven thousand pounds. It said the last bit in red, in case I had not noticed, although I had because obviously Ibbetson Limited owes that to us and I am jolly well not letting it get away with it, it needn’t think it can just slope off with some rubbish excuses.
I was completely enchanted with it. Every time Mark spends some money it will come and tell me all about it, I will know before he has even got back in his car at the petrol station.
It is going to make my life so much easier. My days of grubby taxi receipts stapled together with totals scrawled on the top are coming to an end.
There might be a future in this computer software malarkey.
You read it here first.
