[Obligatory Disclaimer: I am not an accountant. The information in this article is general and based on my experience. Please seek the advice of a qualified accountant when preparing your taxes.]

As an actor – voice or on-camera – you may be able to take certain deductions against your business expenses. These can include expenses specific to acting such as audition mileage, your demo reel, head shots, recording equipment & software, acting classes etc; as well as more general expenses like mobile phone, automobile maintenance and home office supplies. Which expenses – and how much of them – are deductible is specific to your situation and should be determined by a qualified accountant. There may also be certain credits and deductions available specifically to performing artists, so you might want to use or consult with an accountant who specializes in that field.

I have had my taxes prepared by Joe Howard at Chuck Sloan & Associates for over 10 years now and am very happy with the service provided. This office is in North Hollywood, California and specializes in tax prep for “actors, performers and other members of the entertainment industry”. They provide a downloadable tax packet PDF that breaks out expenses into various categories. I’ve made my tax prep considerably easier by setting up the same categories in Quicken. Assuming I’ve kept up on my weekly bookkeeping, all I need to do before my tax appointment is spend 2-3 hours generating reports and taking care of a few odds and ends, and I’m ready to go. Using this system, my tax appointments are relatively quick and painless.

When I started out, I kept track of my expenses and income in a paper ledger. At tax time, I would transfer the data manually into Excel sheets by category. This was very time consuming and cumbersome. Do yourself a favor and DON’T DO IT THIS WAY! If you don’t already have one, get a personal finance software package and learn to use it. There are many out there; I have been using Quicken for 4 years now and love it. I use the Home & Office edition, but there are other versions which may suit your needs as well – none are that expensive. Quicken allows you to customize your categories, so you can set up business expense categories to match your accountant’s, as I have.

Do yourself an even bigger favor and stay on top of your bookkeeping throughout the year. By “bookkeeping” I mean data entry – entering your expenses and income into your software. Do this on a weekly basis and you will avoid the classic tax prep nightmare – 3AM, April 15th, passed out at your kitchen table amid a mountain of receipts, invoices, statements and tax forms – which the cat is happily rummaging through as you sleep.

Good luck!

JM

Thanks for visiting johnmatthew.com