Just as it is with any type of business, doing the taxes in wedding photography is a task which is – well, taxing. This is especially true if you often forget where you kept the receipts or if your filing system is all messed up. I did have a hard time straightening out my taxes during my first year in the business, and I definitely learned my lesson from then on.

No matter how many years you have been in the business, here are a few tips that I can share with you when it’s that time of the year that you have to file your taxes:

• Although wedding photography is classified as a small business, there are still nuances to the tax preparation that you may not necessarily know about. As such, it helps to seek the advice of the pros – get a tax preparer who is a Certified Public Accountant.
• Erin Antognoli, an award-winning photographer, learned her lesson the hard way. She worked with a CPA who had a cookie-cutter approach to auditing her taxes – but it turned out that this is not applicable at all in our business. So what you need to do is carefully select the CPA to work with and make sure that they have a previous knowledge of the wedding photography business.
• Keep track of the ins and outs of your finances. This principle applies no matter which type of business it is that you are in, and with software like QuickBooks, this task is made easier.
• There are other aspects of doing your taxes which are best left to the pros, like computing for your depreciating equipment, deducting travel expenses and the rental for your studio space.

At the end of the day, if you have zero accounting background, make sure to leave the task of doing your taxes to the professionals and just focus on what you do best – which is to take beautiful wedding pictures.