As many have said, the only sure thing in life is death and taxes. That’s a pretty glum way of looking at it, but for a sizable segment of the population, the tax burden continues to be a popular issue on forums and in public debates. But it’s not just about the tax burden.
For those Mom and Pops and small-scale merchants, a more looming issue is the cost of complying with a myriad of tax remitting and reporting regulations. Estimates in 2005 surmised businesses, nonprofits 
and individual taxpayers spent six billion hours filling out tax forms.
It may take an act of God or a miraculous shift in the way the U.S. Congress pursues its horse-trading approach to tax deduction legislation before this changes. In the meantime, if you’re buried in tax reporting and compliance issues, there’s one step you can take to lighten your tax burden without overburdening yourself with more to-dos: Get a handle on accurately tracking your expenses.
Many businesses don’t bother recording and deducting smaller expenses because there’s just not enough time left at the end of the day to do it. Yet not accounting for those expenses can really add up. Even if you’re in a lower tax bracket, many small-business deductions, such as meals, mileage or fees to attend business networking events, add up over the course of a single tax year to what may be thousands of dollars.
Why don’t more businesses take these deductions? Perhaps in the past, those annoying little receipts just didn’t seem worth the effort to track. There’s a reason for that. Most business-expense tracking systems are designed to handle expense tracking on a much larger scale. For the small business, it’s akin to renting a tractor-trailer rig to move a couple of small boxes. Plain and simple — it’s overkill.
The solution is beautifully simple. Consider adopting a simplified method of tracking tax-deductible expenses with software customized to suit the needs of the small-business owner. It’s a smart decision.