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Ask many entrepreneurs and small business owners to show you their financial statements and they’ll likely open a laptop and show you their bookkeeping software. Although tracking financial transactions is critical, spreadsheets aren’t financial statements. In short, financial statements are detailed and carefully organized reports about the financial activities and overall position of a business. As any company evolves, it will likely encounter an increasing need to properly generate these...

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February 10, 2019

Business owners engaged in fraudulent activities often try to manipulate their companies’ financial statements. Fortunately for fraud experts, business owners’ tax returns aren’t as easy to misrepresent. Here’s how experts use them to locate hidden assets and income. Seeking buried treasure Certain items are more likely to provide information about hidden assets and income sources. These include: Form 1040, Line 1 — Income from wages, etc. If the individual receives...

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January 10, 2019

Many factors go into the success of a company. You’ve got to offer high-quality products or services, provide outstanding customer service, and manage your inventory or supply chain. But there’s at least one other success factor that many business owners often overlook: internal leadership training and development. Even if all your executive and management positions are filled with seasoned leaders right now, there’s still a major benefit to continually training,...

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December 03, 2018

For several years now, cloud computing has been touted as the perfect way for companies large and small to meet their software and data storage needs. But, when it comes to choosing and deploying a solution, one size doesn’t fit all. Many businesses have found it difficult to fully commit to the cloud for a variety of reasons — including complexity of choices and security concerns. If your company has...

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November 10, 2018

For certain employers, particularly small businesses, introducing a retirement plan for employees may seem like a daunting task. The company owner may feel that providing a full-blown 401(k) plan is his or her only choice, but that’s far from true. There are other options to consider that are relatively easier to administer and usually less costly to set up and maintain. One such plan is a SIMPLE IRA. Requirements and...

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October 28, 2018

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) includes a provision that Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said should lead to $100 billion in capital investments in distressed areas. The provision allows taxpayers to defer tax on capital gains by investing in such Opportunity Zones. And now the IRS has released proposed regulations for this tax incentive. The tax incentive in a nutshell The TCJA creates a new section of...

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October 26, 2018

If you’ve done any research into employee benefits for your business recently, you may have come across a bit of alphabet soup in the form of “HSA + HDHP.” Although perhaps initially confusing, this formula represents an increasingly popular model for health care benefits — that is, offering a Health Savings Account (HSA) coupled with, as required by law, a high-deductible health plan (HDHP). RequirementsAn HSA operates somewhat like a...

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August 31, 2018

Many employers sponsor 401(k) plans to help employees save for retirement. But sometimes those employees need access to plan funds well before they retire. In such cases, if the plan allows it, participants can make a hardship withdrawal. If your organization sponsors a 401(k) with this option, you should know that there are important changes on the way next year. What will be different Right now, 401(k) hardship withdrawals are...

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July 28, 2018

When business use of websites began, getting noticed was the name of the game. Remember pop-up ads? Text scrolling up the screen? How about those mesmerizing rotating banners? Yes, there were — and remain — a variety of comical and some would say annoying ways to get visitors’ attention. Nowadays, most Internet users are savvy enough not to be impressed by flashy graphics. They tend to want simplicity and the...

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July 18, 2018

Technology is tricky. Much of today’s software is engineered so well that it will perform adequately for years. But new and better features are being created all the time. And if you’re not getting as much out of your financial data as your competitors are, you could be at a disadvantage. For these reasons, it can be hard to decide when to upgrade your company’s accounting software. Here are three...

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July 11, 2018