December is when I sit down with our financial records and figure out what our taxes for the year are going to look like. Time to figure out if we need to donate some more to our favorite charities, or have given enough.

Time to write checks between our personal and business accounts so the expenses come out of the proper buckets.

Want an example of that last thing? In the summer we might buy something for the rental properties and charge it to our personal credit card, so my rental property company has to reimburse our personal account for that purchase.

Another is where the rental property account pays for the yard irrigation water for all the mountain property but we need to reimburse it for the share of the water consumed by our the grass around our personal residence located next door to the rentals.

During the year I enter all the transactions into Quickbooks and set up accounts receivables between the various entities so I essentially know who owes who what. Then, in December I settle all the debts.

This can be more complicated than you'd think because in the heat of the purchasing moment earlier in the year I might have paid a bill out of the wrong checking account, or paid back one of the entities double or triple what it was owed, or I might decide after more thought that it should be handled differently. And last year I made a forty-two cent mistake that I need to remember to resolve that this year.

Then, there are always corrections to be made in the Quickbooks program, where I haven't assigned a transaction to the proper account, or made some other classification.

After lots of trial and error I've discovered what works best for me is to make slips of paper the size of bank checks and write out practice checks and deposit slips so I can make corrections and tear them up without wasting real checks. This is the third year I've done it, and am looking forward to seeing if the process is continually improved with this method.

I'm starting on it tomorrow, so wish me luck. When it's done, I'll start on my Christmas card list.

Some knit scarves from a Red Scarf Project one of my cousins participated in: