Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Right brain, left brain: Tax Time

This is a photo of my little sun-room office. Keyword is little. I have two work surfaces that I swivel-chair between. One has my lovely big iMac where I look at art, review reference photos and post small paintings to my Daily Paintworks gallery. The other surface is where most of my tax preparation is taking place. Art images right brain, tax prep left brain.

I was in the middle of figuring out the percentage of our home that is used for my business and applying that to all expenses that are deductible. In 2015 we lived 5 months in one home and 7 months in this home. Different square footage, different percentages. I was just about to tackle Utilities with the percentage deductible by law as a business expense when my computer (right behind me) sounded "DING" for new email.

Swivel to right brain

There was an email from an artist I follow on Daily Paintworks. She paints DAILY! Her paintings are lovely - that's why I subscribe to her posts - and she isn't giving them away but every one is for sale. I wondered...does she really sell every one? I have been very fortunate with DPW sales but if I painted and posted every single day, I think I would end up with lots of inventory (which I don't want). So....

Swivel to left brain and grab the calculator.

Swivel back to right brain and iMac to look at how long she has been posting on DPW, how many paintings total are in her gallery, clicked on "show available", divided the available by the total to solve for the percentage of sales over the past 5 years.  Hmmmm...would I be happy with that percentage? What am I doing?

Swivel back to left brain and my tax deadline but thinking about art.




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