Accounting for Creatives: Free Interactive Tax Tools for Freelancers and Small Business Owners

This is a free, beginner-friendly collection of interactive tools that teach the tax and bookkeeping basics every creative freelancer and small business owner needs. It is styled as a retro 1990s desktop, and each icon opens a self-contained mini-app. Tax figures use Georgia rules and are teaching estimates, not tax advice.

Tools included

• Schedule C Decoder — explains each line of the IRS Schedule C form in plain English with examples relevant to creative businesses.
• Hobby or Business? — a quiz based on the IRS nine-factor test that helps you tell whether your creative work counts as a business or a hobby for tax purposes.
• Georgia Quarterly Tax Estimator — estimates federal income tax, self-employment tax, and Georgia state income tax, and splits the total into four quarterly estimated payments.
• Deduction Sorter — a quick game for learning which everyday expenses are fully deductible, partially deductible, not deductible, or situational.
• Shoebox — a receipt-sorting game where you decide whether each receipt is a business expense to file or personal spending to toss, including wrong-tax-year traps.
• W-2 vs Self-Employed vs S-Corp — compares the same income taxed three ways and includes a reasonable-salary slider showing how an S-corp salary-versus-distributions split changes total tax and audit risk.

Created by Sarah Lawrence for the Accounting for Creatives workshop.