Fiscal Responsibility Is The WOOOORST

Also, I hate accounting and book-keeping. I hate it like Gollum hates Bagginses. Like a lima bean and liver casserole.

Sadly, it’s a fact of life, and having officially reached a point with Patreon where I actually need to deal with that sort of thing in a more formal manner, I now have the dubious honor of shelling out part of my income for book-keeping software. I looked at a bunch of things and in the end, decided to say fuck it, and went with Quickbooks Self-Employed. They’re all more or less variations of the same basic thing, and at least I’m already familiar with Quickbooks.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours bashing my head against getting things set up, because it would have been SUPER EASY TO SET UP, except for the fact that my bank, in its infinite wisdom, doesn’t think that someone might want to, I dunno, BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD THEIR RECORDS IN A CSV FOR MORE THAN 2 STATEMENT CYCLES, and converting a bank statement from a pdf to a csv is basically impossible, so I have to manually create the damned cvs to import into the damned thing, so GO ME I GET TO DO A YEAR’S WORTH OF DATA ENTRY BEFORE I CAN DO THE NORMAL SET UP PROTOCOLS.

Oh, and then I have to figure out how to deal with the Patreon/PayPal issue, and get all that entered without triple-entering a shitload of duplicate data that’s all the same data, from each step on it’s little way…

This would have been so much easier last spring, or if my bank wasn’t technologically brainless. The temptation to borrow money from somewhere to pay someone else to deal with this is a likely more efficient manner than I have the knowledge set for is strong, to be honest. Sadly, my $68 a month isn’t enough for that option, so here I am, bashing my head against it, hoping to manage enough in time for getting our taxes done, and uuuuuuuuugh.

Yes. I’m whining about this, because while it’s a “good” problem to have, it’s also one that I’ve got a smidge of PTSD around (thanks, Hell Job!) and the fact that I’m having no luck finding the information I need online isn’t helping. I suspect the answer is, in fact, going to be “figure out how to come up with money to hire an accountant to get this set up properly so I can maintain it from there”.

/rant