yet another reason that Samuel Johnson is smarter than me

For someone who was a math geek through high school, and who today can still add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers without a calculator, and probably even still swing a pretty mean square root, the dread that this time of year brings is inexplicable. Because I ordinarily love numbers. I'll happily jump into a spreadsheet jammed with client data, filled with media spends or call volumes or whatever, and I really love crunching them.

But ask me to do my expenses, or my timesheets, or, when I was freelancing, my invoices, and I will find any excuse to hide. I will clean my desk, or call clients to see if they want to go for lunch, or come down with the flu. Tax time is the worst of all.

I hate money, or rather, the need to do any kind of examination of my own money. I have an absolute aversion to dealing with numbers in a business context when my own money is on the line. When any such topic comes up – expensing a lunch, submitting mileage – I get the sinking feeling that I'm about to make a mistake that will cost me personally thousands of dollars. Somehow I will do something wrong on a form and the accounting police will swoop in and I will be charged and life as I know it will be over.

It's irrational and stupid, yes, I'm aware of that.

When you're a full-time employee at an agency, and a creative, there's usually a little bit of leeway accorded you. Agency accounting departments expect creatives to ill-tempered innumerate children, and so I've been able to use this low set of expectations to cover my guilty tracks.

As a freelancer, you can't afford this level of unreason. Otherwise, you don't eat. So you find some sort of minimum requirement that you can meet, day in and day out. For me, for instance, that meant dropping all my bills and receipts into a shopping bag near my desk. I could manage that. It meant that I'd have to spend several hours before meeting my accountant every year, tallying and cross-checking everything, but I could manage that, too. I'm sure that would horrify the suits, as it did my accountant. No weekly or monthly tracking of anything. No sense of what my accounts payable or receivable were. But I muddled through it pretty well.

Needless to say, I was slack with my invoices as well. This I really don't advise. I may be one of the few freelancers I know who never got seriously burned by an unpaid bill, but this was pure dumb luck on my part. The best thing you can do is get your invoices in quickly, and if you're doing an ongoing gig, as regularly as your client will take them.

Not many clients value work they get for free.

As every writer's friend Sam Johnson once said, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."