RetireJapan

I asked about this in the "Self employment" board, but it occurs to me this might be a better place. There are a lot of questions, but please if you can answer just one that will be much appreciated.

I have been self-employed for >30 years, always submitting accounts generated with a spreadsheet from our expenses and sales. The tax office has now said that we aren't doing "proper double-entry bookkeeping" (DEBK), and removed an extra 500,000 allowance for two of the last 3 years (2018-2020). This is actually quite expensive, so I have resolved somehow to submit accounts for 2021 they that accept are "DEBK".

I was recommended https://freee.co.jp - which is one possibility - or perhaps I could get an accountant to do accounts for 2021 on a one-off basis. How much would an accountant charge to be handed a list of the relevant amounts and convert it to "proper" DEBK accounts? Or would they only be interested in an ongoing monthly arrangement. If an accountant does this, do they provide you with a copy of the whole accounts, including the proper DEBK part, or just the parts that have to be submitted with the tax form?

Then about freee.co.jp ... I signed up, and tried the demo of the basic system. Basically the example about entering the details of a receipt for expenses is very easy to understand. The devil is in the detaissls. Is there a way to enter a mass of data from a spreadsheet, or through an API? What about transactions not in yen?

The part of their objection which I understand and accept is that I have been writing down the total amount received from PayPal, rather than each individual transaction as a gross sale minus a fee (two entries, I presume). I have downloaded a csv file of these transactions, from which I can easily generate a readable version (conversion from American dates etc), but how do I get these into the accounts, short of hundreds of cut and paste operations?

I would be very grateful for any pointers.

We have been using Freee for a few years for our business - restaurant and guest house. We are a kabushikikaisha so have to submit a tax return and accounts, so the choice is to pay an accountant or use a service like Freee.

Overall Freee is quite good provided you have some basic Japanese. We used to have a professional accountant and full accounts with p+l, balance sheet, cash flow etc all as required by the tax office. When we signed up for Freee, we sent them these and they input everything so we had a starting point. Since then we have done the accounts ourselves - business turnover, fixed assets, depreciation etc and generated annual accounts for the tax office. I would say that 95% of the input is quite routine but there are always things which require explanation - last year for example we did a lot of sales using a local government coupon discount scheme and I needed to input this properly so the sales amount and subsidy from the government matched. Freee support helped with this, but it was all in Japanese so language ability is a must.

I have not found a simple way of bulk input beyond copy and paste. It is very annoying. However you can input a gross sale amount and a section for any costs to generate a net income (eg credit card sales deducting card fees).

I spend a week every year inputting everything - hundreds of entries for sales and all the costs. There are hundreds of receipts to go through and put in order. I just cannot justify the cost of an accountant/ book keeper to do this; in any case, I would end up doing the inventory and other bits so it is not as though I could ever get to zero involvement. What I am considering is finding an accountant to do a final review once I have input everything so that the tax submission is accurate and complete.

https://ty-tax-accountant.com/en/archives/3048

https://ty-tax-accountant.com/en/archives/3068