Accounting 101: Those Pesky ODSP Income, Mileage and Expense Reports for Business and Employment.

Louis Shalako

When filling out the Income and Expense Report form for the Ontario Disability Support Program, it is important to get all the information first. This report form is therefore filled out last.

It doesn’t matter whether you fill out the mileage form or the time sheets first. I do the mileage form(s), using rough notes that I collect day-by-day. My rough notes give mileage readings, where I worked, (perhaps from two or three different part-time gigs) and I also put down the number of hours. I have a clipboard. There is a pen and a few sheets of paper on it.

When I get in the car, I write down the date, the destination, and the mileage.

When I get to work, I write down the mileage, if I go somewhere on business, including Shared Services, I write down the before and after mileage.

The mileage forms are the most tedious and so I do them first. I do a few entries, checking them off on the rough notes as I go. I take little breaks because I hate paperwork. The whole thing might take an hour and a half on a bad day, i.e., I’ve been busy making too much money.

Then I go through and make up official time sheets. I check them off as I go.

The next thing to do is to gather all of your receipts and statements. Keep them all in the same place, and yet separate from your personal, household accounts. I write off the phone, the internet and other necessary business expenses. If I buy stamps, envelopes or computer equipment, I keep the receipt. In the case of my phone, the invoice actually comes to my email inbox and so I just print that out once a month. I print out my bank activity once a month.* If you have a business vehicle, keep all receipts for repairs, insurance, licenses and stickers. I do the math on a blank sheet and share that with the ODSP, who apparently aren’t very good at that sort of thing…

Add up all income. This is the figure that goes on the Income Report. Add up all mileage, multiply that by the rate of $0.40. This gives a figure in dollars. Enter the mileage and the dollar amount on the Income Report. Any slot on the form that is empty, I just put a stroke through it so they know that I saw it. (Nothing to report.)

Enter expenses in the appropriate slots on the Income Report. For example, there is a separate slot for banking charges. This is eligible, especially so as the ODSP may require you to have a separate account for business. Enter this amount, your monthly charges of $10.95 or whatever. Individual cases and circumstances may differ.

In my own case, I enter phone and internet, added together, on the appropriate line.

If you buy a printer, enter it under ‘equipment’, etc. If you take income and put it toward an investment into the business, it’s better to get approval, and enter this into ‘approved business investment’. (Assuming you bought a forklift or something.) This one appears to be for major investments into the business. A $700.00 computer probably doesn’t require approval assuming your old one blew up or something. It is, after all, essential to the business, in much the same way a radiator repair is essential to the business vehicle. I would never ask permission for that, as it is just plain bad policy.

On or about the seventh of the next month, I go to Shared Services downtown. I photocopy all sheets, statements and receipts.

I make two copies and give the ODSP the originals except the internet bill, the original I keep for myself. They want an original, pen and ink signature on the forms, which is just my interpretation. I don't really need that for my own purposes.

I keep one copy for my own records, and also provide a copy to my major employer and business mentor for their own records and tax-reporting. This gives me backup hard-copies in the case of fire, loss or destruction—and I don’t have to ask the ODSP for it.

Generally, it is more favourable to claim mileage as opposed to keeping fuel receipts.

This allows you to offset income which would otherwise be clawed back at the rate of $0.50/dollar once you get over their punitive, $200.00/month allowable income limit/barrier.

Just as an example, Party A spent roughly $10.00/day to put gas in the car in a recent month. That’s $300.00 in fuel expense for the business. Yet the mileage worked out to $541.00. This results in $231.00 in offset income. The client gets to keep that.

And why not?

You earned it, after all.

END

*My book royalties are shown on the printout of my bank account, which I report separately. 

Interestingly, the ODSP adds it all together after a year and scratches their collective heads, trying to figure out how to ding me for an overpayment. So far, I just haven't made that kind of money, although in the past, (2003), I have been forced to write them a cheque from my business account.

Thank you for reading.

Blogging for Money.

Guest editor Zach Neal.

Okay. So I’m blogging, or rather re-blogging for aclient. I’m charging fifteen bucks an hour. 

(That’s my minimum rate.) This involves reading the news, looking for stories that fit into a certain niche. That niche is a simple one. We’re looking for stories of a positive social, economic, cultural or political nature about Sarnia, Ontario, Sarnia-Lambton and surrounding environs. My clients are interested in income properties, and anything they can do to both learn about the local market, and publicize that to a greater audience, can only be a good thing. It’s a promotional tool.

It’s simple on the one hand and yet there is scope for some interpretation of what makes a good story and why we might want it. For a quick little re-blog of one story, with a link or two and a quick image, from the files or from a public-domain source on the internet, I charge one-quarter of an hour. Actually posting the story doesn’t take that long. Reading the news might take a lot longer than that, but I would normally be doing it anyways. I read all the local and other papers. What the client is paying for, to some extent, is my expertise—the fact that I’ve got a pretty good brain, and that I have some experience.

I’ve been doing the re-posting of stories for a long time, with my own agenda and for my own reasons. I’m bringing something unique to the table to begin with. I was already good at it.

Finding an image can take a few minutes. To go and take an original photograph can take fifteen minutes, an hour, perhaps longer depending on how far that location is. I can’t really charge the client for this, as the cost would be prohibitive and we wouldn’t be able to do some of the stories that we really want on the blog. Fifteen bucks an hour just for driving somewhere is out of the question.

For that, I rely on the $0.40/kilometre mileage rate for the Ontario Disability Support Program’s allowable deductions for business and employment. Let’s be honest, it helps to have a bit of business experience and with some good reading skills, I’ve learned the guidelines as best I can. As a former editor of a local newspaper once told me, not exactly unkindly, my mind tends to jump around a bit.

The mileage tends to offset excess income, which means I get to keep it dollar-for-dollar, rather than losing it at a claw-back rate of fifty cents on every dollar earned. And I have no doubt that I earned it.

When I take original photos, give up an hour of my time, do something for the client that takes a minute and I mark it ‘no charge’, on the old tab-sheet, that represents something, let’s call it commitment. When I monitor an ad on Kijiji, for crying out loud, bumping it up again for a nominal fee when the thing drops down a page or two, well, guess what.  

The customer doesn’t have time for this. They have no time, nor the interest, in doing it themselves—and while Kijiji is happy enough to bump an ad, for quite a bit more than I charge, (incidentally), they’re still not monitoring that ad. They don’t know or really care what page it has dropped down to. All their bots know, is that it has been superseded by x-number of subsequent ads and that therefore it is now on page 33.

When I add links into someone else’s story, or link to additional coverage, that represents some kind of value added to what was originally just a re-blog from our local paper.

If you were willing to go around to people’s houses, take pictures of the boat, the car, the old washing machine, take down the information, set up the ads and set up an account for them, charge some nominal fee, this might be an interesting little sideline business. For me, it is a revenue stream related to my writing skills. It really doesn’t depend on anyone else except the clients.

Sell their stuff for them and they are more than happy to pay it.

END