As a small business owner, your columnist is familiar with the annual frustration that visits many of our readers around this time of year – that of filing multiple tax returns.

Provisional and year-end forms must be dutifully completed in both a personal and business capacity, and since neither is really complex enough to warrant a thirdparty bookkeeper to do on your behalf, you set aside a couple of hours to DIY the accounts. Many times, this means unravelling the mystery of the “business source code” – a table of reference numbers that define industrial categories, which doesn’t seem to have been updated since 1901. It’s easy to find your category if you are a horse breeder or sawmill, for example, but try finding the code for a freelance writer or IT consultant.