I’m firing Samhain’s year-end off to my father Chartered Accountant so he can use the numbers for my personal taxes.

Here’s the system I use, which almost worked perfectly — and would have if I had followed it more religiously (as I am this year). This is a system that any fledgling microbusinessperson should be able to implement:

1. I bought an accordion file and labeled it “SIN Hard Records 2009″.
2. I scanned all hard (paper) receipts for business expenses and self-emailed them, then stored the original* in the accordion.
3. All digital receipts not emailed to me are printed-to-PDF (hooray, Apple!) and self-emailed.
4. All receipts (and invoices) now live in the cloud, specifically under a Gmail label called “2009 Taxes – SIN” (there’s also a “2009 Taxes – Personal” for things like stock statements).
5. Last, I balled up everything in the tag and emailed it off with a one page summary.

For example, I bought a bunch of graphic design and software engineering books in 2009, about $200-worth, from Chapters. Those receipts all lived in the hard file until today, when I scanned them and emailed them off to claim a deduction against revenue. Now those paper records are back in the file, archived, and also live in the cloud.

[Aside: remember to keep the receipt for the accordion in the accordion. I lost mine ]

As an indie operator 20% of each of your paid invoices should go into an account to handle end-of-year taxes. No one does this, but we all should.

* Apparently you still have to keep originals around — otherwise this is where you shred.