Category: Small Business
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Contact and calendar management
revisiting issues with Outlook, Gmail, LinkedIn, iPhone I spent some time this morning reviewing the most basic technology tools for a business person: contact manager and calendar. I’ve gone back and forth between Google and Microsoft several times and finally settled on a Microsoft Office environment using Outlook last year for the reasons outlined in…
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HRA or HSA
comparison chart of Medical Savings Accounts, Health Savings Accounts and Health Reimburesement Accounts
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Save money on small business payroll processing by removing bundled fees
A no-load approach to small business payroll In the “old days”, small business payroll services were priced based on a formula that was a bit complex. Factors like frequency of payroll, number of employees, type of pay, benefits, and local taxes all factored into the cost. Year-end ad ancillary services were typically priced separately. To me,…
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A tale of two tax penalties
A small business client – a small charity – had an open wage tax penalty issue when I started working with them three years ago. I looked into it, got the amount decreased by a little bit and advised them to pay it ASAP. Then over the next two years they received two more tax penalty…
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CPA sends ultimatum to small businesses
I regret that had to send a few small business clients an ultimatum this morning over what appears to be an unwillingness to address new tougher IRS tax filing requirements. This follows after I notified clients of the new filing requirement a few months ago, offered to handle the flings, but they declined. While the business tax…
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Security upgrade for WordPress hosted small business web site
This week I noticed an apparent attempted brute force attack on this web site with over 10,000 blocked log-in attempts. This caused me to question and re-evaluate my data management plan and Privacy and Security protocols. This review is for my own satisfaction only, these is no indication that any of my systems or data have…
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My 2017-2018 economic and political forecast
“It’s still the economy, stupid” My fundamental forecasting premise is that the current federal administration’s fate and effectiveness in this divided country ultimately lies in the direction of the economy. Given the basic current macroeconomic factors: high stock market low interest rates high level of entitlements, and the low level of unemployment, I conclude that current…
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Support for ADP clients
Many of us think of ADP as a payroll company, and for good reason. The company is the market share leader in payroll processing and handles 1 in 6 of all paychecks issued in the United States. But in reality, ADP has transformed into a Human Resources management platform with over 100 specialized applications running…
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Trends in my blog traffic: strengths and weaknesses
I noticed a simple but striking pattern in the popularity and readership of my blog posts over the past year and thought I would share here for what it may be worth to others. The traffic report is compiled by Jetpack as a WordPress add-in for traffic on about 1,300 blog posts recorded since November…
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Dealing with opposing values in business
I briefly considered working with a business adviser who impresses me as brilliant. Yet business brilliance and social leadership do not necessarily go hand-in-hand. I realized that his values are exactly opposite mine as expressed in this social media post. Separately, I’ve also taken steps recently to distance my business from customers and vendors who do…