While homeowners are dealing with bad weather that damages their roofs, roofers are facing a storm of their own. Tax season has arrived, and residential roofing businesses all over the country are hurrying to get everything in order. Do you have the right documentation? Would you be ready if you had to be audited? Are all your transactions accounted for?

It’s a stressful time, but there are some ways to make it easier. With a little preparation, your business will be able to tackle your taxes with confidence and keep yourselves from being swept away by the storm. Here are two ways to set yourself up for a better tax season—if not this year, then in the years to come.

Put Your Records In a Single Place

So much of the stress of doing small business taxes is caused by issues with finding information and locating important documents. Maybe your filing system works for your office staff, but when it comes to bringing in a tax expert, you’re scrambling to explain where everything is. Maybe the information you need to verify your expenses is in several different places, and you’re spending a lot of time tracking it down. Or worst of all, maybe one of your important documents got lost or damaged. You need a way to keep better track of all this information and ensure that it stays safe and organized.

While it may be too late to go back and retroactively organize all of your paperwork, it’s not too late to start putting all your business information in a single place. When everything you need to know about your residential roofing business, from completed jobs to material orders to signed contracts, is more accessible, it makes many of your tasks easier, including gathering information for tax season.

Roofing software like AccuLynx stores this information in the cloud, keeping it secure, accessible, and free from damage. With features like SmartDocs, you won’t have to keep your company documentation in a file folder or scattered in many places. Contracts, estimates, material orders and more will be available in a single place, helping you collect what you need for tax season. AccuLynx also allows you to take detailed notes and associate them with a job, so if you have a question about what work was done or why a particular cost was incurred, you can look back at your job files to find the answer.

Use a Small Business Accounting Software

When it comes to doing your taxes, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Software for helping small businesses with accounting and taxes already exists, and can make your life a lot easier. If you don’t have an accountant or bookkeeper—or if you do, and want to give them a boost—using accounting software can relieve a lot of burdens around your taxes and deductions.

Some residential roofing businesses believe they’re doing just fine with spreadsheets or paper books. But accounting methods like this can be especially prone to human error, which can cause big problems, particularly when it’s time to do your taxes. When it comes to something as important as your finances, you don’t want to take the risk that you’re doing it incorrectly. Making sure your books are in order throughout the year and everything is accurately accounted for is crucial to your business success.

QuickBooks is the best-known and most popular accounting software, and with good reason. It provides an easy-to-use interface where small businesses can track expenses, accept payments, and balance their books. It has many features that are a big help at tax time, like the ability to track your miles, maximize your deductions, and save receipts. Using QuickBooks as your accounting software can take a lot of the guesswork out of taxes.

AccuLynx offers an integration with QuickBooks, so all this vital accounting information can be stored in the same place as your estimates and contracts, and you can sync financial data between both applications. Using this integration eliminates double data entry and reduces error even further, as well as enabling you to connect the dots easily between your jobs and your finances. When you combine AccuLynx with QuickBooks, your financial records get a powerful boost, and calculating what you owe in taxes is simplified.

The storm of tax season is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to lead to chaos and catastrophe. When you keep track of all your paperwork effectively, easily access important tax information, and use accounting software to manage your bookkeeping, you can equip yourself for a better experience at tax time. In fact, you might find that doing your taxes goes more smoothly than you ever thought possible, and you can save valuable time that can be used for growing your residential roofing business.