If you are an independent filmmaker in New York City, you are dealing with Federal, State, and Local taxes. Here are the things you want to remember:
Keep track of all your expenses for the year. This is extremely important and can be the difference between owing no tax whatsoever and owing a large sum. Here is a sheet that can help organize your expense categories:
Some choose to use Mint.com, freshbooks, quickbooks, or xero. For the least advanced user, I would suggest mint or freshbooks just to keep your expenses organized. I also highly recommend to use a separate bank account for the business and to keep business expenses separate. You may want to consider hiring a low-cost bookkeeper to keep track of your expenses.
Alternatively, if the amount of revenue you generate does not justify hiring a bookkeeper, you can keep track of the expenses in the excel sheet linked above, or just have your CPA download your bank activity and crunch the data themselves. Most CPAs will have a problem with this, as it is additional work, but there are ones out there that are good with data that will not mind.
