Category: Accounting
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Why people prepare their own tax returns
Most Americans have the capacity to prepare their own tax returns. But should they? In cases where self preparation is not logical and is not cost-effective, what is the underlying reason driving the decision to self-prepare tax returns? This blog post explores some observations, Self-prepared tax returns About half of all individual tax payers can and should submit their own…
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Church and taxes
Congress gives at least four special tax considerations to churches*: First, churches are generally not required to pay income tax based on the result of their normal operations. This is the same as other tax-exempt organizations. Second, unlike other tax exempt organizations, churches are generally not required to file an annual informational filing with IRS.…
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Professional tax preparation fees for 2016
Average tax return preparation rates are published by the National Association of Accountants in the national and regional average tax preparer fee survey for 2016. The fee for my online remote tax services is typically about 1/3 lower than typical walk-in tax preparers. However, late season returns or services that do not use online cost savings are…
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No excuse accounting
Last week I wrote that there are no excuses for an accounting system that does not reconcile with the bank and financial accounts. This week Insightful Accountant carried this article about the improved reconciliation features within QuickBooks online accounting system. QuickBooks accounts for more than 3 out of 5 small business and nonprofit organization accounting systems. I think…
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Tax filing deadline and penalties
With less than three weeks until late tax filing deadline for 2015, I have only one signed engagement to complete a tax return and many clients who still haven’t filed. I need to emphasize that unless they actually hire me, and not just presume that I’ll take care of their tax filing requirements by the…
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How the decline in civility affects small business advice
I read much about how an overall decline in civility is evident in many parts of our modern life. I commented on this theme in my earlier blog post reviewing the 2005 book “Collapse” by professor Jared Diamond. Increasing tension between government and its citizens has always been an observed corollary of a declining society.…
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Cleaning up my old blog posts
I just finished manually de-duplicating my personal web page blog posts and found 267 duplicates of the 1200+ gross count. A few were reproduced up to five times. I do not know how that happened. It is possible that they were imported from different publishing sources years ago. There seems to be some harmful impact…
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Revisiting CRM for sole practitioner
It is time for me to revisit the topic of Client Relationship Management systems. I put together notes here in 2014 and in 2012 for the NJCPA. I am looking for a CRM that is well-suited for a sole practitioner CPA practice. I’ve been using Pipedrive and there are many things I like about it. Price…