How to handle Client Deposits in Xero (or any finance software, really)
I haven't worked with Xero before, but can't you just set it up as accounts payable? Put in an accounts payable for the contract. When the client makes a payment, the accounts payable goes down and the cash goes up.
They actually do handle large scale natural disasters. However this is when the Insurance companies' reinsurance contracts kick in. One insurance company can have multiple reinsurance contracts to help them mitigate disasters like this.    The insurance company might be on the hook for the first 25 million of a catastrophic event, then a reinsurance company A will be on the hook for the next 50 millions in excess of the first 25 million, then reinsurance company B will be on the hook for the next 25 million in excess of the first 75 million, etc. Reinsurance is essentially insurance for insurance companies (joking called insurance inception). Additionally reinsurance companies can get reinsurance, called retrocession.   Source: I work for a specialized insurance banking and finance group in Dallas. Our clients have exposure on the Texas coast and Houston. Are you writing code for any particular platform? Can you say more specifically what your software does?  I'm interested in software development myself, and do a little freelance PHP/MySQL development along with general web design (web design is putting me through college, but I don't want to do it forever.), and I'd be very interested in learning how I could tie that into a finance career. Sorry to hear about your difficult circumstances. Secured Credit Card You may want to suggest a secured credit card. These are credit cards that are backed by a deposit that she would place with the credit issuer. The card issuer provides a line of credit backed by the deposit, with a credit limit not greater than the deposit. In this way, the card issuer is not putting any of their own money at risk. These cards are often used by students or high-risk borrowers to establish credit, and function like a normal credit card. This may be a good option for her to establish a history of handling credit responsibly. Given all of the activity you described, it's very likely the process of rehabilitating her credit will take a number of years. I would strongly recommend that you not assist her in placing the deposit for a secured credit card. If she can't put aside enough money for a deposit (often $500 or less), it's unlikely she'll be able to set aside the money to pay her card statements each month. Best of luck - I hope things work out well. If you've been using TurboTax, let me suggest a compromise: Let TTax fill out the forms, but then print them out and go through it again by hand. If you don't get the same numbers, investigate why. If you do, you can probably conclude that you could do it by hand if you really want to, especially if you have the previous year's returns as a reference. (I've gone through every version of this from before personal tax software existed thru hand-constructed spreadsheets to commercial software and e-filing (federal only; I refuse to pay for something that reduces THEIR work). I can't use the free online version -- my return's got complications it won't handle -- and I'm uncomfortable putting that much data on a machine I don't control, so I'm still buying software each year. I COULD save the money, but it's worth a few bucks to me to make the process less annoying.) Late edit: Note that a self-constructed spreadsheet is one answer to the annoyance of pencil and paper -- you're still doing all the data manipulation yourself, but you're recording HOW you manipulated it as you go, and if numbers change you don't have to redo all the work. And it avoids raw math errors. It does require that you enter all the formulas rather than just their results, and figuring out how to express some things in stylesheet form can be a nuisance, but it isn't awful... and once you've done it (assuming you got it right) updating it for the next year is usually not hard unless you've introduced a completely new set of issues. There isn't one. I haven't been very happy with anything I've tried, commercial or open source. I've used Quicken for a while and been fairly happy with the user experience, but I hate the idea of their sunset policy (forced upgrades) and using proprietary format for the data files. Note that I wouldn't mind using proprietary and/or commercial software if it used a format that allowed me to easily migrate to another application. And no, QIF/OFX/CSV doesn't count. What I've found works well for me is to use Mint.com for pulling transactions from my accounts and categorizing them. I then export the transaction history as a CSV file and convert it to QIF/OFX using csv2ofx, and then import the resulting file into GNUCash. The hardest part is using categories (Mint.com) and accounts (GnuCash) properly. Not perfect by any means, but certainly better than manually exporting transactions from each account. Assuming you have registered your activities as partnership and receiving this money as Individual, you need to show this under Schedule OS, 1d [other income]. this will be under the ITR-2 [tab CG-OS] XLS tax preparation utility given by Tax Department. The XLS can be found at https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/portal/individual_huf.do If the funds you are receiving are large [more than say Rs 500,000] then suggest you incorporate a partnership firm or company, there are quite a few exceptions you can claim lowering you tax outgo.  The fact that you are transferring funds to your partners can be an issue incase you get audited. You would need to have sufficient evidence to show that the money paid was for services rendered directly and not your income. It would be easier if you create a partnership or have the client directly pay to them. Again if the sum is small its fine, as the sum becomes large, it would get noticed by the tax authorities. "The solution I've come up with is to keep income in CAD, and Accounts Receivable in USD.  Every time I post an invoice it prompts for the exchange rate. I don't know if this is ""correct"" but it seems to be preserving all of the information about the transactions and it makes sense to me.  I'm a programmer, not an accountant though so I'd still appreciate an answer from someone more familiar with this topic." I'm not directly affiliated with the company (I work for one of the add-on partners) but I can wholeheartedly recommend Xero for both personal and business finances. Their basis is to make accounting simple and clean, without sacrificing any of the power behind having the figures there in the first place.