Category: Small Business
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OnlineAdviser gets a makeover
As I reviewed my first year in business (2015) it was obvious that I had 3 distinct problems with the business model and my personal habits. It was not completely unexpected. I operate a different and largely untested type of accounting practice under the brand name OnlineAdviser that relies almost exclusively on online technologies. While I…
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New small business support network announcement
NEW FREELANCERS SUPPORT NETWORK IN FORMATION – I am forming a peer-to-peer freelancers support network that is intended to be a closed membership online group of self-employed people whose primary focus and commitment is to help each other in business by sharing information, advice and expertise on an ongoing basis as needed. The atmosphere is…
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Disaster Recovery as a Service for small businesses
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can be a cost effective insurance policy for small businesses. Instead of having to buy and maintain separate servers, SAN, storage, network, firewall, rack space, the business can store copies of data and backups of that data on remote cloud-based services. This offers redundant methods of recovery from a wide range…
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Top ten tax saving strategies for 2016
Our U.S. federal income tax law includes a number of built-in strategies available to reduce income tax liability. Your ability to legally reduce your own income tax bill depends on your level of understanding and utilization of the opportunities available in five key areas of financial planning: Source of income and the legal format of…
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Use American Express with QuickBooks to save bookkeeping time
Typically the most time consuming task in small business accounting is recording the details of expense transactions. The built-in coordination between American ExpressOPEN business card and QuickBooks can cut that time requirement. Simply enroll in the “Connect to QuickBooks” feature at no extra cost to have transactions sent to QuickBooks daily. Employees can also have their transactions…
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How to deal with an IRS penalty
The IRS issues about 50 million taxpayer penalties each year to the pool of about 100 million taxpayers who file returns. That would 1 out of every 2 filers if the penalties were evenly distributed! In reality, multiple penalties are bundled together and assessed against fewer taxpayers. Yet the number of automated tax penalty assessments for…
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“Watcha gonna do?” – Tax professionals look at ACA compliance
How should a tax preparer handle suspected ACA penalties for small businesses? This post is inspired by the recent frustration expressed by an accountant who is a Facebook friend. My friend commented on one of my posts that even after a substantial investment of his time to learn and apply provisions of the Affordable Care act,…
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Quick Summary of Small Business Health Plan Informational Tax Filing Requirements for 2015
This post summarizes the new filing requirements under IRC 6065. This post pertains to only to small business employers with more than 1 but less than 50 employees covered by a health plan that either reimburses the cost of individual insurance or insurance other than employer-sponsored group health insurance or reimburses the cost of uninsured health benefits outside…
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Uninsured in 2016: by the numbers
3 days until the enrollment period for 2016 health insurance coverage ends. 1 in 12 do not have health insurance. 1 in 5 of those uninsured will pay a tax penalty. $969 is the average tax penalty for 2016.