For my regular readers to my blog, I appologize for not posting as regular as I wanted to. This is the downside to blogging I guess. What have I been up to?
Well, I was locked away the past 2 weeks in a Tax Planning class. Not 2 full weeks but 2 days out of 5 working days for 2 consecutive weeks. By the time the class is over, I felt too drained to write anything. Add the urgent things I had to clear at the office, overwhelm is an understatement.
Anyway, I learned a lot of good stuff at the Tax Planning class. Here are several tips for you regarding tax that I picked up.
1. Keep your receipts.
If you have spent any money, keep the receipt. You’ll never know when you might need it. This applies both to individuals and even more so, for business owners. Because of some changes in the tax law, of which I was not aware off, I could claim entertainment expenses in year 2004. This was not allowed up until 2003 ( this applies to Malaysia only ). So I lost out some over here due to ignorance. There are conditions you must meet in order to claim entertainment expense. The lesson here, keep your receipts.
2. Keep proper records.
Those who have gone through a tax audit would know the importance of having the proper records. For most people, doing boring stuff like keeping records and filing them away is bothersome and most of us don’t have a proper systems or the discipline to follow through. I use a software called ExpensePlus on my palm PDA to keep records to make life easier for me. The good thing about ExpensePlus is that it can sync to built in Excel worksheets format so that you can format your expenses any way you want to. I think ExpensePlus is also available for the Pocket PC version.
I made the mistake of not using ExpensePlus to track my expenses for several months when it crashed my Treo regularly. I have since gotten rid of the Treo and went back to using my faithful Clie. I’m sure there are other software you can use too. Before using this method, I use to write things down on my diary but found it too much of a hassle to transfer and calculate small expense items.
Remember that it must be simple to use and not something you must make major changes to you habits.
3. Get a Professional
Get professional advice to plan for your tax. Tax laws change all the time. If you are a DIY person, this is one area to not to DIY. In Malaysia, as an individual, the tax computation is quite straight forward. Even then, there are ways you can use to reduce your tax legally. Unless you don’t mind paying more to the government. That’s ok too 
That’s it for this post. I’ll write more once I summarize more tax tips a bit later.
Here is the 2nd part of this article.
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