I wish I had a great photo for you all tonight. Or a big written post chock full of juicy tidbits or meaty ideas. But I don't have either for you all this evening because today was Tax Day.

Actually, my activity towards the eventual goal of the 11:59pm tax filing deadline this evening started yesterday. Back when I expected a refund every year, I couldn't get my taxes done fast enough in late January or early February. Now that I am not teaching, nor do I have a day job, but instead all my working efforts are those of the self-employed, it is all I can do to drag myself to Turbo Tax to get my taxes done in time.

The last two years, I knew before it all started that I had a loss or close to a draw, thus my incentive to do my taxes early was slim to none. This week I cut it very close, close in time and close in dollars.

I do not begrudge paying my taxes - as I do like paved roads and the like, nor do I begrudge giving a full accounting of my fiscal activities - it is a good discipline. But to sit down and do it, that is the hard part.

Luckily for me, TurboTax has really stepped up their game and rather than struggling a bit with the software or explanations or the user interface and then panicking that I would be audited by the IRS due to the bizarre TurboTax interface & lack of clarity, this year was easy with TurboTax 2008, unlike the evil 2005 TurboTax adventure.

TurboTax just worked this year. I had a choice of doing it online at the turbotax.com website or downloading the software on to my computer - or in my case, as a repeat customer, using the cd that came in the mail months ago. Rather than TurboTax walking me through tons of evil details that not even tax accountants understand at first glance, this year the program got smart enough to let me know when I should pay attention and when the details did not pertain to my situation. I love it when I am not drowned in details that make me panic.

Best of all the user interface allowed me to hop back and forth in between sections, finish bits, save and then hop somewhere else without complaint. And it was worth it to get the Home and Small Business edition, as it really was able to breakdown all the categories that as a small business owner / freelance / self-employed person would need to know and had expanded pop-ups to help explain each category of expenses that one is allowed to take for a business expense. There was only one time where I had to guess where to list an expense (domain name registry fees).

Big thanks to the design and development teams at Intuit for a good tax experience, rather than a panicked, evil one.

Intuit, I do have one big request: Please make a Quickbooks Simple Start for Mac OS X. Just sayin'... not all of us small business owners out there are MicroSquash junkies. I know I need to keep track of business expenses during the year, but I am not going to shell out $199 for the Mac edition of Quickbooks before I know if I like it & it will work for me. How about making Quickbooks Simple Start as an online service that is device agnostic?