It's tax time - are you ready? Chances are, if you started a home based child care business in 2007 you are feeling very overwhelmed about your taxes. I know that feeling! I ran a home daycare for nine years and tax season can be intimidating! Whether you are having a professional complete your taxes or you are doing them yourself, there are several things you need to know to help the process go more smoothly.
First let's talk about the issue of professional tax preparers versus doing it yourself. Which method is better? I personally have used both methods. The first year I needed to file taxes for my home child care business, I attended a workshop put on by a local community college that dealt specifically with taxes for child care businesses. It was extremely helpful. I would suggest asking around to find out if there is something like that available in your area. You can check with other daycare providers, local community colleges, or child care organizations to see if someone can point you in the right direction. After attending the seminar, I decided to do the taxes myself that first year. I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the situation and professional tax preparers can be costly. I was able to get help from the IRS through their website http://www.irs.gov, and over the phone (see website for phone numbers). It takes some patience to get through to them because sometimes the hold time is lengthy, but when you do get through the help is outstanding! That first year I did my taxes the old fashioned way...on paper! I completed them on paper for a couple of years actually.
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A few years into my daycare business I chose to have a professional complete my taxes, mostly because of some items to be addressed in our personal taxes that we weren't sure how to handle. I was relieved to find out that I had been doing a pretty good job with my business taxes! The accountant was able to find a few more deductions that I hadn't been claiming that proved to be very helpful. After that year, I chose to go back to doing my own taxes, but I decided to use one of the tax software programs. They turned out to be easier than I thought they would be and the online question center was very helpful. I loved that I was able to file my taxes electronically, which significantly reduced my wait time to receive my refund. I continued to complete my taxes using computer software for the duration of my child care business years. Personally, I think that you can successfully complete your business taxes yourself, especially using tax software, and save yourself significant money. It might be beneficial to have a professional do it the first year so you are certain that you are taking all of the deductions you should take. After that, you can look back on the first year taxes as you complete them yourself to ensure that you are completing them correctly.
What sort of deductions should you be claiming? One of the biggest deductions you should be logging is your mileage. This is actually one of the deductions that I wasn't claiming until I had a professional complete my taxes. I found out that I had been missing out on a huge tax savings by not keeping track of my mileage. I didn't fully understand what mileage I could claim for my child care business. I thought I could only claim mileage for field trips or training classes. How very wrong I was! A home daycare provider can claim mileage for ANY trip in which child care business is conducted. This means that every trip to the grocery store to buy food for daycare, every trip to buy art supplies or toys, every trip to the bank to deposit child care income, is a business trip and you should be keeping track of your mileage!
Mileage is deductible from your home to the location and back again. That being said, you need to be honest with your mileage calculations. If in one day you first travel to the bank to deposit checks and then you head to the grocery store to buy food before heading home, you can't count mileage from home to the bank and from home to the grocery store. You need to calculate mileage from home to the bank, from the bank to the grocery store, and from the grocery store to your home to be fair. Just to give you an example of how large a deduction mileage can be...I live in a rural area, so a trip to the grocery store and back for me is about 30 miles. The bank is even further. In an average year, I was able to claim approximately 10,000 miles for a deduction for my child care business! This comes out to be a 00-00 deduction! I know you are wondering what to do if you make a trip to the grocery store to buy both food for your business and food for your family.
Can you claim that mileage? Absolutely! You are still there conducting daycare business, so that mileage is deductible! I know your next question is, "I didn't keep track of my mileage for 2007, so do I lose out on that deduction?" Not necessarily. One method I use to calculate mileage is the receipt method. I am sure that you have been saving your receipts from trips to the store. You need them for tax purposes anyway (see next paragraph). You need to go back through your receipts and create a mileage log based on them. Count up how many times you went to each store and write it up, including the name, address, and reason for going to each store. Then you will need to logon to a website such as http://www.mapquest.com and choose the option for finding directions. Put in your starting address (usually your home) and the address of the store you went to. Then click on find directions. When the program lists the driving directions, it will also list the mileage. You will need to double the mileage, since the program only gives you mileage for the trip to the location, not for the return trip.
Once you have the roundtrip mileage for a certain store, multiply the mileage by the number of times you went to that store for daycare business in 2007. Voila...you have a mileage log! You will need to calculate the number of times you went to the bank for childcare also, and use the same method as above for calculating the mileage. If you don't save all of your deposit receipts, go back through your checkbook registers to find all of your deposits. Remember to include things like field trip mileage, or trips back and forth from the school if you pick up child care children from preschool or kindergarten. Using this method will give you a fairly accurate calculation of your mileage and can provide you with a huge tax deduction!
Another deduction that you should be claiming is the cost of food and supplies for child care. This is another huge tax deduction! There are two ways to handle food for child care. You can either shop separately for your daycare food than for food for your family, or you can shop for both at the same time and separate items for daycare later on your receipt. Personally, I didn't shop separately for two reasons. First, if you shop for food that is to be used for your home daycare business, then that food can ONLY be used for your home child care business! That means that if your son or daughter wants to take a granola bar to school for snack and you purchased those for daycare, you are going to have to say no. I know that sounds extreme, but if you are claiming those items as strictly child care items, you need to keep them separated from food for your family. Secondly, it is really a pain in the neck to do separate shopping for your family and your business! It means either separate trips to the store, or at least separate shopping carts in the store! The advantage to shopping separately is that you can claim every penny spent on food for child care on your taxes.
I chose to shop for my family and my business together and not to keep the food separated. It made things a lot easier in my house. However, it did make my record keeping for my business a little trickier. Once a month I had to go through my grocery receipts and mark off items that I knew were not used for child care, such as coffee or soda pop. Once I had eliminated those items from my receipt total, I then had to calculate which items on the receipt were food items, which were consumable items (like toilet paper) and which were non-consumable (like toys). I then calculated a total amount for that receipt of each of these categories and wrote it at the top of the receipt. Come tax time, I calculated a total amount spent for the year for each of these categories. Then, in order to fairly calculate a deduction for each of these categories based on how much was used for child care and how much was used for my family, I had to apply the time-space formula to each category.
The time-space formula is an invaluable equation that allows you to fairly claim child care expenses based on how many hours out of the year you spend being a daycare provider. The equation is fairly simple. First, you need to calculate the approximate amount of space in your home that you use for your child care business. You need to include every space that is ever used for daycare. You need to include your primary child care room of course and your kitchen. But you also need to include the bathrooms that the kids use, the dining area if they eat or do crafts there, the laundry room since you will invariably be washing blankets, sheets, towels, etc. that were used for daycare, any rooms in which children nap, your home office if you use it to create forms and file business paperwork, and any other place the kids use. You need to exclude any rooms that the children in your care never use. Be fair in calculating the approximate percentage of your home that is used in your business.
Once you have this percentage, you need to figure out the approximate number of hours you spent in 2007 performing duties related to your business. You, of course, need to figure out the number of hours per day that you actually care for children. You also need to take into consideration the approximate amount of time per day that you spend cleaning up from child care or getting ready for child care. Then you need to figure out exactly how many days you provided these services in 2007. You then multiply the number of hours per day by the number of days you provided care. That gives you the number of hours you spent in your business in 2007. Now you need to figure out the percentage of hours you spent in your business compared to the number of hours in a year. There are 8760 hours in a year. So, take the number of hours you spent doing daycare and divide it by 8760 and this will give you the percentage of time you spent doing child care in 2007. Finally, you need to multiply the percentage of time you spent doing daycare by the percentage of your home used for business to find a final percentage that you can claim for costs shared by your business and your family.
This gives you your time-space percentage. Here is an example: Let's say you decide that you use 80% of your home for your business. Now, you spend on average 10 hours per day on your business and you calculate that you spent 200 days being a child care provider in 2007. Multiply the 10 hours per day by the 200 days (10 X 200), to find that you spent 2000 hours providing child care services in 2007. Since there were a total of 8760 hours available in 2007, you will now divide your 2000 hours by 8760 hours (2000 divided by 8760) to find that you spent about 22.8% of your time being a daycare provider in 2007. You can round that up to 23%. For your final calculation, you need to multiply the amount of space used in your home by the amount of time spent doing daycare to find a final percentage that you can claim. In this case, you would multiply the percent usage of your home (80%) by the percent of time spent (23%) (80% X 23%) to get a final percentage of 18.4% or 18% since we would round down. This is the percentage of food, consumable items, utilities, and mortgage interest you will be able to claim for your child care business. The calculation takes a few minutes, but it saves a lot of headache in the end. Non-consumable items like toys or cookware are 100% deductible for your business.
If you have a professional complete your taxes, you will want to make sure to have all of your information with you at the initial meeting. This will save you from having to get information to him/her later and can actually save you money in tax preparation fees. My accountant charged me less because she had less work to do since I had done most of the information preparation done before I met with her. You will want to bring a sheet that shows the total amount of income for your business for 2007, a calculation of your time-space formula, a list of expenses (include a note about which ones should be multiplied by the time-space formula), a mileage log, and any other information relevant to the business (such as a tax id if you have one). Be prepared to back up all of this information with receipts if your accountant wants to see them. Don't stress if you don't have everything the accountant wants. You can get it to them later if necessary. If you don't have everything in order the accountant will let you know, but it will cost you more since the accountant will have to spend more time in preparing your taxes. Be as prepared as you can and you will have much better, and cheaper, results!
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tax preparation for home child care businesses. This seems like an overwhelming amount of information, but there is actually a lot more. Don't give up yet. There are a lot of resources for you to get more information, such as the IRS, an accountant, or a local organization. The best advice I can give a home daycare provider is to be incredibly organized. Keep all of your receipts, keep an accurate mileage log, keep an accurate receipt book recording income, and keep all of it readily available. If you follow this advice filing your taxes will be much easier!
Important Tax Deductions for Home Daycare and Child Care Providers
Eileen Michalczyk opened A Teacher's Touch Childcare in 1998. She has recently closed her daycare doors and now runs a successful marketing business from her home. To get more information on running a home childcare visit her blog at http://runningasuccessfulhomechildcare.blogspot.com
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