To my fellow crochet business owners- you too can do it! (And hopefully already have)
I’ve been dreading doing taxes as a first year sole proprietor. With the help of my husband and homemade treats 
in bags for achieving certain benchmarks 
along the way (yes, bribing yourself to complete hard things is totally legit). I learned, compiled, checked, and rechecked my data. Then sent off my return. I just got notice back that it was accepted!
Now, I knew what info I needed eventually for sales and expenses, so I’ve been keeping that organized all year. (OK, except for my milage… but I have a better system this year for that.)
** Note: your gross sales before Ribblr and Amazon (or other places you sell) take their cut of the sale is the number you need to declare as your total gross income- I had to go back and add back in all the Ribblr and Amazon fees because I just recorded the amount I got. Oops.
What I didn’t know was about home office calculations and deductions, so I’ve been pretty busy gathering all that info. Too bad I store so much of my yarn right over our dresser so I cant claim exclusive use for that square footage. Sigh. Someday I hope to have a dedicated seperate room for my office. Right now I’m making use of my corner space office.
I used freetaxusa.com and it was very helpful and free. A few times I got hung up on verbiage, but I was able to figure it out with more research. Who knew there were such things like a Safe Harbor exception for certain equipment?
One of the hardest things was getting my printer to PRINT it out at the very end when my brain was mush.
And ….
Doing taxes is daunting and bribing oneself ( not bribery it is self employee incentives) should be a deduction too. 
