Backup Your Tax

I have already written about backing up your tax return before and have also covered how to backup some of the small business support tools that the ATO offers to customers. Just thought I would impress upon you once again just how important it is to backup your tax material.

This is what happened to me this week.  I prepaid all of my paper work to visit my Accountant. So I was organised. Now to save me some money, I thought I would calculate it all on a spreadsheet for him so that he wouldn’t have to do it and therefore would not charge me as much.

I have a few shares in my name, so I listed everything down in excel and summarised it all for him. I saved the file on my hard drive as well as on a USB stick to take it to the accountant. Before I visited him though, I made some changes following a few things that I had remembered. These were saved to the USB stick. During our meeting, he pointed out a few errors that I had made and I agreed to recheck everything and then send him the file.

The problem is, when I got home and started working on the file, I started working on the version that was on my USB stick. That was all fine, but what occurred to me was that I have lost USB sticks before. Keeping my tax info on a cheap USB stick is not the greatest idea. I know they come with passwords and other security measures but it still doesn’t make it any hard er to lose them. The other thing that occurred to me was that next year, when it is time to do my taxes again, I would be cursing the world looking for this USB stick.

So, I spent the time to update my hard drive with the latest version. I ensured that the file was also backed up with Carbonite, so should anything happen to my PC over the course of the year, my taxes would be protected.

I understand that these are tough times, and everyone is looking for ways to save a dollar here and there, but think about the effort and stress I could potentially be under, if as I lost that USB stick or your PC died with my taxes on it. My affairs are simple, but if you are a small business running a MYOB or other accounting package to record your takings, you should back it up.

We obviously recommend online backup, but any backup is better than no backup. Not so sure I would relly upon USB sticks for sensitive information like taxes.

The time I lost my USB stick, it had my resume on it and some other work files. It took me 4 hours to recreate that document. This was before I started working at Carbonite and new anything about back software (mind you I had an external  hard drive that was empty).