My accountant is not normally a super-effusive guy. He's an accountant, after all. But when he saw the documentation I pulled together for him he could not stop praising it. We had to go back and document all my income for 2007, and I actually found that three different clients had different totals in their records that I had in mine.
Two of the three could be explained because they were cutting checks at the end of one tax year and I was receiving them at the beginning of another. A fairly common thing. The third one was off by $1,200. And as it turns out, it was their mistake, not mine.
It's funny what passes for evidence. Though I guess, technically, it wasn't "evidence," per se, that we had to come up with. More like records. I have a super-simple system -- a little spreadsheet (not even in Excel -- it's a table in Word). I record every invoice I issue by number, and there are columns for the date it was generated, the client, the project, and the date payment was received. Apparently that's more than enough.
Again, it's not what I'd call hard evidence of income. That would be copies of checks and deposit slips and bank statements. But in this kind of thing, I guess just demonstrating that you have a clear and effective system of recordkeeping in place goes a long, long way.
So it's a great relief to have that mini-ordeal behind me.
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