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“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Margaret Thatcher
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You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2010.
1. Entrepreneur.com gives ten important lessons on maintaining an email database for your company – GoSee
2. A rather straight-forward and controversial method to obtain email addresses for your database – GoSee
3. We maintain an email database with our firm to keep closer contact with our clients, staff and friends. Sign up for our email database on the front page of our blog – GoSee
Thanks, Jason M. Blumer
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Ever thought about owning your own company? Me too. It’s not always fun, but it is the best thing I’ve ever done. In helping many other business owners through the years, I’ve noticed something about buying and owning businesses that I thought I would share with you.
Don’t buy a job. When deciding to start or purchase your own business, make sure you don’t simply buy a job. Meaning, make sure you aren’t spending capital, taking on stress, and betting on your future just to have an annual salary in the end. You could avoid all the stress and go get one of those tomorrow. Your business (not job) should involve your passion, meet your family’s needs, create enough profits to secure your future and hopefully outlive you.
Is your business your job, or your passion? Leave it in the comments above.
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“Political correctness is just tyranny with manners.”
Charlton Heston
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(picture is from TaxGirl’s blog post)
There has been a lot of stir in the blogosphere lately about the new 1099 rules that will be required of you after December 31, 2011. As she normally does, TaxGirl, does a great job at helping us understand the truth vs. hype. Check her post about it here.
Take aways from her blog:
1. You will have to send 1099s to corporations now.
2. The threshold is still $600, meaning all payments paid to someone have to equal or exceed that amount (for the whole year) before you have to send them a 1099.
3. Sales of tangible goods are now included in what you have to report on.
4. There are provisions to possibly make the reporting NOT quite as bad as you have been hearing in the news. For example, here is a phrase in the new law:
The Secretary may prescribe such regulations and other guidance as may be appropriate or necessary to carry out the purposes of this section, including rules to prevent duplicative reporting of transactions.
Kelly’s post is very informative… you may want to check it out if you are a business owner!
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“There is nothing less equal than treating nonequals equally.” Huh?
Thomas Jefferson
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1. US payrolls increased in April (by 290,000 workers), more than they have since March 2006 (but unemployment still went up) – GoSee
2. Americans’ incomes rose in March by 0.3% (but so did spending) – GoSee
3. Manufacturing sector productivity grew 2.5% in the first quarter of 2010 – GoSee
Thanks, Jason M. Blumer, CPA
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Most of the time, I enjoy hearing from our clients. Today was not a good day though. This client in TN got hit directly by the flood waters… with no flood insurance. Ouch. We’re praying for the families devastated by this flood.
But the government has offered help for those affected by these devastating floods in TN (as long as you live in the affected county):
1. Payroll deposits due April 30 can be paid by May 17th now (the IRS’s fancy computers will automatically identify you if you live in the correct county and will apply penalty relief to your late payments).
2. Most tax returns don’t have to be filed until June 29, 2010 now.
3. Those affected by the floods can claim these losses on their tax returns as casualty losses. And the IRS is going to let you either amend your 2009 tax return or wait and claim the casualty loss on your 2010 return. Check with your tax advisor – depending on your 2009 income or your expected 2010 income, it may be better to wait and claim the loss on your 2010 income tax return… it just depends.
Other Helpful IRS tidbits:
The IRS has a disaster hotline: 1-866-562-5227
Publication 2194, Disaster Losses Kit for Individuals
Publication 2194B, Disaster Losses Kit for Businesses
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“I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
~ Edward Everett Hale ~
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One awesome benefit of putting your business processes and financial systems in the clouds is that you get constant updates for free. So Sweet.
Here are a couple of notes on cloud-based financials systems with recent great updates.
Mint.com Updates
Mint has added some pretty cool features to make it more useful to you, and more like your checkbook (BTW, you need to throw that thing away). Mint used to simply import your bank feeds and populate your online account with the transactions. But now, you can go into Mint and enter checks and debits BEFORE they come through your bank feeds. That makes it truly more like an online check register.
You can even put in something called “pending transactions” that are transactions you anticipate (like your recent spending spree at the mall) coming through your bank account. Just make sure to key in the correct date and amount so Mint can match it up to the real charge when it comes through your bank.
How to: login to Mint.com, hit “Transactions” at the top, then hit the button that says “+ Add a Transaction.”. You’ll see a new transaction open up. Look for “TYPE” and chose cash, check or pending.
QuickBooks Updates
A maintenance release (R6) has just been released for QuickBooks 2010 (you’ll find it here). They’ve resolved some issues with 64 bit Windows operating systems creating PDFs properly. All square now.
And now you can start a payroll run in QuickBooks, leave the payroll run to go to the bathroom, and come back and finish your payroll run later. It won’t send the payroll until you come back and finish everything. Pretty cool.
Other fixes include nerdy stuff for accountants like improvements to the Client Data Review feature, and fixes to various bugs that caused system crashes.
How to: if you aren’t prompted to upgrade your QB the next time you open the program (you should be), then open QuickBooks, go to “Help” at the top and choose “Update QuickBooks…” This release is a biggy and you’ll have to reboot when you are done installing. Do it when you ain’t got nothing else running (excuse the double negatives).
DON’T LIKE QUICKBOOKS? MAYBE YOU SHOULD LOOK AT XERO.COM. Read about it here!
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