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Preparing for Upcoming Taxes: 5 Things You Can Do Now

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Memphis Tax AccountantYour income tax obligation needs to be on your mind year-round. It may feel like we just put the last tax season behind us, but it’s always good to think of ways to get a jump on your taxes. If you haven’t started thinking about how to minimize your income tax obligation for this year, there’s still time.

Whether you’re a small business or an individual taxpayer, year-round tax planning is more than just a way to make tax preparation an easier, faster process. By keeping taxes in mind as you go through every 12-month period, you’ll be able to see where you might take specific actions early that will have an impact on what you end up owing. Make it a habit, and you’ll find that it just comes naturally to consider the tax implications of purchase and sales decisions.

Create a System

Effective tax planning requires more than just saving receipts and organizing tax-related documents in physical or digital file folders – though that’s a good start. Create a system in early January that you can maintain throughout the year (of course, a lot of your information will be stored in your accounting or personal finance application, if you use one). But you should be saving statements, receipts, sales forms – anything related to your income and expenses that will eventually feed into IRS forms or schedules.

Evaluate Your Expense-Tracking

Businesses: How do you—and your employees, if you have them—keep track of daily expenses? You may have forms like purchase orders and bills for the big ones, but you probably buy things on occasion that are just documented by paper receipts. How do you categorize and organize these so you won’t miss any when it’s time to complete a Schedule C? Is there a better way?

Do any of your employees make trips on behalf of your business? You really should consider subscribing to an online service that automates the process of creating and approving expense reports. If you’re not aware of these options, ask us.

Know Your Tax Forms

Individuals and businesses file some of the same forms and schedules, but some, of course, are different. Your previous years’ tax returns can be good resources for you. Refer to them occasionally as you go through the year and do some comparing, especially if you must pay quarterly estimated taxes. You may not remember from year to year what’s deductible and what’s not. Revisiting your returns will jog your memory and remind you.

Consider Generosity

Are you having a good year? You’ll have an idea of how your financial health is if you’re keeping up with income and expenses. You don’t have to wait until the end of the year to do any charitable giving that you’re going to do (although it’s usually best to hold off until the fourth quarter).

Learn How Changes Will Affect Your Taxes

This is so important for individual taxpayers. Did you get married or divorced, or have a child? Did you move? Buy or sell a home? Get a raise or, conversely, lose regular income for some reason? Did you have educational expenses? All these life events—and more—can change your income tax obligation.

Businesses often experience major changes, too, and your financial state at the end of the year is way harder to predict than it is for an individual with W-2 income. Stay on top of the impact of deviations in income and expenses created by events like the introduction of new products (or the loss of existing ones), personnel fluctuations, and major acquisitions.

Comprehensive Planning

Tax planning should be an element of your overall financial planning. If you have a business or household budget, you’re way ahead of the game. You can compare your actual income and expenses every month to those you built into your budget. A budget can be a tremendous tool as you plan for the current year’s taxes. If you’ve never created one, or if you’ve never stuck to one successfully, we can help you with this.

We’d also be happy to work with you throughout the year on taxes. We can get you set up with financial software if you’re not already using it and advise you on ways to work toward minimizing your next year’s tax obligation now with our robust Memphis Tax Services. Call us today at 901-685-9411.

7 Best Practices for QuickBooks Online

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Even if you’ve been using QuickBooks Online for a long time, it’s good to step back and evaluate your actions.

“Best practices” aren’t enforceable rules. They’re simply guidelines businesses commonly follow in one area or another. If you’re in retail, for example, one best practice might be to always ask customers checking out if they found everything they were looking for. This serves two purposes: It conveys a feeling of concern for the customer’s shopping experience, and it may also lead to increased sales.

QuickBooks Online has many best practices, some of which may serve multiple purposes, including these:

    • They keep your company data safe and clean.
    • They provide insight on your financial status.
    • They save time.
    • They can lead you to better relationships with customers and vendors.

Are any or all the following common practices for your business?

Reconcile accounts regularly.

One of QuickBooks Online’s most useful features is its ability to connect to your financial institution’s websites and download cleared transactions. QuickBooks Online also offers tools to help you keep your accounts reconciled online, like you used to do every month when your paper statement came. Reconciling accounts can help you uncover errors. It gives you a truer picture of your cash flow, and it improves the accuracy and timeliness of some reports.

It’s not a particularly pleasant process, but you should be reconciling your accounts regularly in QuickBooks Online. We can help.

Clean up your lists.

Some lists in QuickBooks Online aren’t overly long. You don’t have to worry about, for example, Payment Methods, Terms, or Classes. Your lists of customers and vendors, products, and services, on the other hand, can grow unwieldy over the years. This means it can take more time than it should to scroll through lists when you’re using those entities in transactions. It also puts unnecessary stress on your company file. If you can’t delete any, at least make them inactive.

Never leave QuickBooks Online open when you leave your work area.

This goes for everyone, even people who work alone and don’t access their company files away from their work areas. The obvious reason is to keep someone else from getting in and authorizing payments, for example, or otherwise compromising your financial information. It also protects the integrity of your data file in case your internet connection suffers some kind of outage.

Keep track of 1099 vendors.

Whether your company uses 10 vendors or a hundred or more, you may have to supply at least some of them with an IRS Form 1099 at about the same time you’re preparing W-2s for employees. Your 1099-related tasks will be much easier if those individuals and/or companies are earmarked. If you think vendors might need 1099s when you create their records in QuickBooks Online, click in the box to the left of Track payments for 1099 in the lower right corner. Not sure? Ask us.

Classify everything with care.

Every time you have to create a record or transaction where categories are involved (i.e., Classes, Customers and Vendors, Territories), check and double-check that you’ve assigned them the correct classification. Errors here can result not only in problems with daily workflow, but your reports will not be accurate. A related best practice: Create a meaningful group of Classes, and use them faithfully. They’ll help you make better business decisions.

To create your list of Classes, click the gear icon in the upper right and select All Lists | Classes | New.

View reports on a regular basis.

There are some advanced financial reports in QuickBooks Online that we should be creating for you on a regular basis, either monthly or quarterly. These include Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows. The mechanics of creating them aren’t difficult, but analyzing them is. You should be running reports on your own at frequencies that you think would be helpful, like A/R Aging Detail, Unpaid Bills, and Sales by Class Detail.

If you’ve been using QuickBooks Online for a while, you could probably come up with your own list of best practices. If you’re new to the site, consider scheduling some time with us to go over more of them. Develop good habits from the start, and there won’t be nearly as much need for troubleshooting down the road.

If you have any questions about QuickBooks accounting or need QuickBooks support and training, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Memphis CPA Firm. You can give us a call at 901-685-9411 or request a free consultation online.

Must Know Tax Rules for the Self-Employed

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If you’re in business for yourself, you know how challenging it can be to run your business and keep on top of your tax situation.  Rikard & Neal CPAs, PLLC, a Memphis Metropolitan area CPA firm, is a full-service accounting firm that caters to Memphis area businesses. We’re here to offer a refresher on the tax rules you need to be aware of if you’re a self-employed sole proprietor or are thinking of becoming one.

Income Taxes

As you probably know, sole proprietors do not file a separate federal income-tax return for the business. Instead, they summarize their business income and expenses on Schedule C of their personal income-tax returns.

Be sure to keep complete records of your income and expenses. Deducting all your ordinary and necessary business expenses will help minimize your tax liability. If you have losses, these are generally deductible against your other income, subject to special rules relating to hobby losses, passive activity losses, and activities for which you were not “at risk.”

Self-employment (SE) Taxes

Any self-employed person who has net earnings of at least $400 from the business is subject to SE taxes on those earnings. SE taxes generally track the Social Security and Medicare taxes paid by employees and their employers and are partially tax deductible.

Quarterly Estimated Tax Payments

Your net SE income will be taxable whether or not you withdraw cash from your business account. Moreover, you may be subject to penalties if you fail to make appropriate quarterly estimated tax payments.

Home Office Deduction

If you work out of your home, you may be able to deduct a portion of the costs incurred to maintain your home. You also may be able to deduct commuting expenses incurred to travel from your home office to another work location.

Health Insurance Costs

When tax law requirements are met, you may deduct your health insurance premiums as a trade or business expense, including premiums paid for your spouse, dependents, and children under the age of 27.

Retirement Plan

If you don’t already have a tax-favored retirement plan, you may want to consider establishing one. Contributions to the plan would be tax deductible, within certain tax law limits. Types of retirement plans available to sole proprietors include solo 401(k) and simplified employee pension (SEP) plans.

Don’t deal with tax issues on your own. Call us at 901-685-9411 to find out how we can provide you with the answers you need and learn more about our small business accounting services.

What Start-Up Costs Can You Deduct?

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Launching a new business takes hard work — and money. Costs for market surveys, travel to line up potential distributors and suppliers, advertising, hiring employees, training, and other expenses incurred before a business is officially launched can add up to a substantial amount. Rikard & Neal CPAs, PLLC, a Memphis area CPA, works with new and developing businesses throughout the Memphis area to help simplify business formation and incorporation procedures.

The tax law places certain limitations on tax deductions for start-up expenses. Let’s cover them.

  • No deduction is available until the business becomes active.
  • Up to $5,000 of accumulated start-up expenses may be deducted in the tax year in which the active business begins. This $5,000 limit is reduced (but not below zero) by the excess of total start-up costs over $50,000.
  • Any remaining start-up expenses may be deducted ratably over the 180-month period beginning with the month in which the active business begins.

Instead of deducting start-up costs, a business may elect to capitalize them (treat them as an asset on the balance sheet). Deductions for “organization expenses” — such as legal and accounting fees for services related to forming a corporation or partnership — are subject to similar rules.

Whether you need individual or business tax advice, give us a call at 901-685-9411, our Memphis CPA Firm can help. We’ve got the answers you’re looking for on tax preparation, tax planning, and incorporation services.

5 QuickBooks Reports You Need to Run in January

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The new year has begun. Does your accounting to-do list look like a clean slate, or are critical tasks from last year still nagging?

Getting all of your accounting tasks done in December is always a challenge. Besides the vacation time you and your employees probably took for the holidays, there are those year-end, Let’s-wrap-it-up-by-December-31 projects.

How did you do last month? Were you ready to move forward when you got back to the office in January? Or did you run out of time and have to leave some accounting chores undone?

Besides paying bills and chasing payments, submitting taxes and counting inventory in December, there’s another item that should have been on your to-do list: creating end-of-year reports. If you didn’t get this done, it’s not too late. It’s important to have this information as you begin the New Year. QuickBooks can provide it.

A Report Dashboard

You may be using the Reports menu to access the pre-built frameworks that QuickBooks offers. Have you ever explored the Report Center, though? You can get there by clicking Reports in the navigation toolbar or Reports | Report Center on the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.

QuickBooks’ Report Center introduces you to all of the software’s report templates and helps you access them quickly.

As you can see in the image above, the Report Center divides QuickBooks’ reports into categories and displays samples of each. Click on one of the tabs at the top if you want to:

  • Memorize a report using any customization you applied.
  • Designate a report as a Favorite
  • See a list of the most Recent reports you ran.
  • Explore reports beyond those included with QuickBooks, Contributed by Intuit or other parties.

Recommended Reports

Here are the reports we think you should run as soon as possible if you didn’t have a chance to in December:

Budget vs Actual

We hope that by now you’ve at least started to create a budget for this coming year. If not, the best way to begin is by looking at how close you came to your numbers last year. QuickBooks actually offers four budget-related reports, but Budget vs Actual is the most important; it tells you how your actual income and expenses compare to what was budgeted.

Budget Overview is just what it sounds like: a comprehensive accounting of your budget for a given period. Profit & Loss Budget Performance is similar to Budget vs Actual. It compares actual to budget amounts for the month, fiscal year-to-date, and annual. Budget vs Actual Graph provides a visual representation of your income and expenses, giving you a quick look at whether you were over or under budget during specific periods.

Income & Expense Graph

You’ve probably been watching your income and expenses all year in one way or another. But you need to look at the whole year in total to see where you stand. This graph shows you both how income compares to expenses and what the largest sources of each are. It doesn’t have the wealth of customization options that other reports due, but you can view it by date, account, customer, and class.

A/R Aging Detail

QuickBooks’ report templates offer generous customization options.

Which customers still owe you money from last year? How much? How far past the due date are they? This is a report you should be running frequently throughout the year. Right now, though, you want to clean up all of the open invoices from last year. A/R Aging Detail will show you who is current and who is 31-60, 61-90, and 91+ days old. You might consider sending Statements to those customers who are way past due.

A/P Aging Detail

Are you current on all of your bills? If so, this report will tell you so. If some bills slipped through the cracks in December, contact your vendors to let them know you’re on it.

Sales by Item Detail

January is a good time to take a good look at what sold and what didn’t before you start placing orders for this coming year. We hope you’re watching this closely throughout the year, but looking at monthly and annual totals will help you identify trends – as well as winners and losers.

QuickBooks offers some reports in the Company & Financial and Accountant & Taxes categories that you can create, but which really require expert analysis. These include Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, and Statement of Cash Flows. You need the insight they can offer on at least a quarterly basis, if not monthly. Connect with us, and we can set up a schedule for looking at these.

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January is a good time to run reports you didn’t have time to in December. Talk to us about which are most important.

QuickBooks provides templates for some reports that you probably need help analyzing, like Balance Sheet. We can help with these.

Have you explored QuickBooks’ Report Center? It offers a variety of tools and guidance for managing reports.

Did you create a budget last year? Now’s the time to run QuickBooks’ Budget vs Actual report. For help with all your QuickBooks needs for your business, you can contact our Memphis QuickBooks ProAdviors at 901-685-9411. Or, learn more about our QuickBooks Accounting Services on our website.

 

What to do Before You Start Your Business

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Are you interested in starting a new business? Make sure you do plenty of research and have a firm business plan ready before you take the plunge.

Rikard & Neal CPAs, PLLC, a Memphis area CPA Firm, knows how to work with new and growing businesses to help simplify business formation and incorporation procedures. Take a look at some of the things you should do before starting a business below, then learn more about our Entity Selection and New Business Advisory services.

Making the Transition

If you have signed a non-compete or confidentiality agreement with your current employer, review it carefully to make sure it won’t hamper your startup efforts. If your new venture is in the same industry, be careful not to burn any bridges when you leave your current job. Scout out your opportunities. Buying a franchise or an existing business is much different than building a new business from the ground up.

Growing Your Business

Where will your customers come from? You may have one or two great prospects, but that may not be enough. Can you count on referrals from current business associates? Take a good hard look at opportunities for expansion that exist.

Figure Out Financing

Even with great prospects, it may take some time until cash starts coming in on a regular basis. Do you have enough of a financial cushion to get you through? If your spouse has an outside job, your spouse’s earnings and benefits may help provide stability during the startup period. If you need funding, where will it come from? Have you considered looking for a partner or investor? Having a trusted Memphis CPA firm on your side can help answer a lot of these questions and get your new business on the right track with a strategic business plan.

Getting the Word Out

How much marketing and advertising will be required? Put together a comprehensive plan along with cost estimates. And, unless you’re familiar with the less traditional marketing and communication opportunities that today’s new media offer, you may want to enlist the help of someone who is.

Make a Budget

List every expense you can think of: rent, payroll (if any), phone and Internet service, computer equipment, website design, insurance, transportation costs, self-employment tax, etc. Then draw up a budget. Once your venture is up and running, you can use the budget as a guide in managing your finances. You can also lean on the support of a trusted Memphis CPA firm like Rikard & Neal CPAs, PLLC for all your business financial consulting needs.  We can assist with budgeting and strategic businesses planning.

Contact us today for more tips on how to ensure you’re following business best practices, and let us help you with your new business.  We offer a free initial consultation to new business owners. Let us know how we can help, or give us a call at 901-685-9411.