Fwd: Re: sole proprietorship with respect to my PERSONAL books?

[Ian Konen]

I think you're taking "Have to" too literally:  When you look up accounting
and business information I think the advice given assumes that you WANT to
track separately the question of "how profitable is my business" from the
question "why do I never have money to take my girlfriend to the movies?".
 Perhaps you do HAVE to answer the first question for tax purposes (you
might, even for a sole proprietorship), or perhaps you're just considering
switching side projects to something more lucrative.  Perhaps you are
seriously trying to start a business that will become your sole income
source and want to preserve the option to incorporate later if you're
successful.  In all those cases, the accepted approach of keeping separate
books for the business is probably also the most convenient approach for
what you want, even if you don't HAVE to do it.  OTOH, If your lawn mowing
business example is a just to earn a little extra cash on top of your
regular job because, you already bought the mower for your own yard so why
not use it to earn some extra dough?, then I don't see why you can't just
make an income account in your personal finance book for mowing income, and
treat mowing related expenses (gas and replacement parts for the mower) as
personal expenses.

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Paul Elliott
<pelliott at blackpatchpanel.com>wrote:

>
> you make some weird personal loan to yourself. I think this proves
> that in the case of the sole proprietorship, the most common, somebody
> needs to tell the other half of the story. Especially when so many
> web pages say that you have to have separate books for your sole
> proprietorship.
>
> --
> Paul Elliott                               1(512)837-1096
> pelliott at BlackPatchPanel.com               PMB 181, 11900 Metric Blvd
> Suite J
> http://www.free.blackpatchpanel.com/pme/   Austin TX 78758-3117
>
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-- 
Ian Konen
iankonen at gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/iankonen
978-821-6498