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8 Accounting Tips Every Small Business Owner Should Know

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Image of two young businessmen interacting at meeting in officeAs a small business owner, you probably think about tracking expenses and keeping up with tax deductions, but these aren’t the only critical accounting tips you should know. Whether you’ve been in business for a while or you’re a new start-up entrepreneur, read on for our 8 best accounting tips.

1. Outsource your bookkeeping.

For every business, bookkeeping is critical. This essential task is keeping organized records of your business’s income and expenses. If you’re like most small business owners, bookkeeping isn’t in your primary skillset. And even if it is, you probably don’t have time to crunch numbers and keep records. By outsourcing this critical task, you will free up your time; put this vital function in a professional’s capable hands and check one business owner-related stressor off the list.

2. Keep accurate records.

In addition to having someone overseeing your bookkeeping, it is up to you as the business owner to make sure you keep accurate records for your business. For example, you’ll need to account for:

  • Gross receipts are sales, deposits, credits, recipes, invoices, etc.
  • Expenses include all receipts, canceled checks, or anything else that shows the cost of doing business.
  • Fixed assets should be recorded so that annual depreciation can be calculated.

Pro tip: For tracking receipts, you may want to use a receipt scanning app on your smartphone. It makes it easy to scan and store receipts electronically instead of maintaining a large paper file.

3. Keep an accurate inventory.

Keeping accurate inventory records provides you with current data that reveals whether you can take on client requests or additional projects with inventory on hand and when you need to order stock. It also helps you identify trends over time and make basic predictions about your business operations. All of these factors allow you to plan and strategize about your business. This ability is critical to developing and maintaining a small business over time.

4. Separate personal and business accounts.

The most important reason to keep your personal and business accounts separate is taxes. As a business owner, you can deduct expenses like travel and office supplies; however, you must provide supporting documentation for these expenditures to claim them. Lumping personal expenses in with business expenses makes a tedious mess of separating expenses and could knock you out of some deductions. It is best to have a separate line of business credit, separate credit cards, and a separate bookkeeping system to be safe.

5. Have (and maintain) a budget.

You should have developed a budget when you created your business plan to make projections about revenue and expenditures. But beyond that, you must maintain a working budget at all times. This approach helps you stay on track with what you spend versus what you take in, and it provides accountability so that if you do get off track with your spending, it is readily apparent and can be corrected quickly.

6. Work with a tax professional.

When the average business owner attempts to complete their taxes, it costs them about 40 hours in valuable time. And even then, chances are, a professional’s help will be needed to ensure the business is getting all the deductions to which it is entitled. So why not start with a pro? After all, tax preparation fees are a tax-deductible business expense.

7. Plan ahead.

When a small business implements the accounting tips on this list, it allows for planning with accuracy. Accuracy is the key term. Anyone can guess what might happen, but only with accurate records and observations about business patterns can you confidently make targeted predictions. For example, a small business that tracks income and expenses can detect patterns that reveal the best time for large investments and expenses.

8. Monitor business performance with financial statements.

Again, we cannot emphasize the importance of logging income and expenses. It helps in the day-to-day operation of your small business and provides information about overall business performance. For example, income statements help your business determine profit or loss, a balance sheet shows assets and liabilities, and a cash flow statement shows how much money goes in and out of your business in a given time, as well as how much cash remains. These types of financial statements are also imperative when asking banks and investors to secure financing or funding.

With these eight tips, you can keep your small business on track, establish valuable patterns of business behavior, and make sound financial decisions for your business’s future.

If you would like help with some of these accounting tasks, contact us now.

Expand QuickBooks Online’s Features: Use Integrated Apps

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Expand QuickBooks Online’s Features: Use Integrated Apps

Are you finding that you need more flexibility in an area of QuickBooks Online? Maybe it’s time to try an integrated app.

When you first started using QuickBooks Online, you probably found that it supplied the tools you needed to manage your accounting – and then some. But if your business has grown or become more complex, you may need more functionality and flexibility in one or more areas, like time tracking and billing.

There are hundreds of add-on applications that integrate well with QuickBooks Online in the QuickBooks Apps store, which you can find here. Many of these apps are free, but most have subscription fees. They’re designed to amplify the power of QuickBooks Online’s own features. The site will remain your home base, but you’ll have to learn enough about the add-on apps to understand how they work and how they integrate with QuickBooks Online.

Here are some of the most popular add-on solutions from the QuickBooks Apps site.

Expensify

QuickBooks Online allows you to record expenses. Its thorough form templates ask you for numerous details, like the vendor, product or service, amount, and billable status. Completed expenses appear in a table. You can run any of several related reports, like Expenses by Vendor Summary. If you use the QuickBooks Online mobile app, you can snap photos of receipts that are turned into expense forms by QuickBooks Online and partially completed with the receipt data.

But Expensify ($5-9 per month for one user) does more. It’s a robust expense management system that handles everything from receipt processing to next-day reimbursement. Where QuickBooks Online only supports basic expense tracking, Expensify allows you to create expense reports and follow them through multi-level approvals. It features automatic credit card reconciliation and expense policy enforcement, as well as bill pay and invoices/payments. Two-way synchronization with QuickBooks Online means you can work in either application and your data will be replicated in the other, as is the case with all of these integrated solutions.

QuickBooks Time

Formerly known as TSheets, this powerful time-tracking application builds on QuickBooks Online’s time management and payroll features. QuickBooks Time ($8-10 per user per month plus $20-40 monthly base fee) is now owned by Intuit, so it’s embedded directly in QuickBooks Online.

Your employees can track their hours on any device, from any location, and they will instantly be available in QuickBooks Online so managers can review, edit, and approve timesheets. That data can then be used in areas like invoicing, job costing, and payroll. Advanced features include scheduling capabilities, overtime monitoring, GPS tracking, and real-time reports. The Who’s Working window shows you where your staff members are working and what they’re doing, in real time.

Method:CRM

QuickBooks Online does a good job of helping you create profiles of customers and storing them for quick retrieval. But some businesses need more than that. They need true Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Method:CRM ($28-49 per month per user; discounts for annual subscriptions) is an excellent partner for QuickBooks Online in this area.

 

When you integrate Method:CRM with QuickBooks Online, you no longer have to do duplicate data entry to keep track of your customers and their sales profiles and histories. You get a shared lead list and activity tracking (emails and phone calls), and your customer records contain the information a sales team needs, like customer details, interaction, transactions, and services performed. Leads are stored in Method:CRM until they’re customers, and you can track sales opportunities from a customer’s initial interest through the final sale.

Two More Advanced Integrated Apps

QuickBooks Online provides basic inventory-tracking capabilities, but if your business has more complex needs, an integrated application like SOS Inventory ($49.95-149.95 per user per month) should be able to meet them. Built for QuickBooks Online from the ground up, the application offers advanced features like sales orders and order management, assemblies, serial inventory, and multiple locations. And if you need more sophisticated bill pay, invoicing, and payment processing (with multiple automated approval levels) than QuickBooks Online offers, you might look into the highly-regarded Bill.com ($39-69 per user per month).

Growth Is Good, But Challenging

We wanted to introduce you to a few of the hundreds of integrated apps available for QuickBooks Online because you should know that there are options for expanding on the site’s built-in capabilities. As your business grows, so does your need for more sophisticated accounting. QuickBooks Online may still be able to serve you well with the help of one or more of these add-ons.

You may also want to explore the possibility of upgrading your version of QuickBooks Online. We encourage you to consult with us if you’re outgrowing QuickBooks Online. We can help you explore the options so you can spend your time planning for your company’s future instead of wrestling with your accounting application.

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Are you outgrowing parts of QuickBooks Online? There are hundreds of add-ons that can expand on its features. Ask us about this.

QuickBooks Online lets you track expenses, but you’ll need an integrated add-on like Expensify to create expense reports.

Do you need true Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? You might integrate Method:CRM with QuickBooks Online.

Is your inventory too complex for QuickBooks Online? An integrated app like SOS Inventory can serve you well. We can help.

Choosing a Business Entity

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Many factors are involved when choosing a business entity

Are you planning to launch a business or thinking about changing your business entity? If so, you need to determine which entity will work best for you — a C corporation or a pass-through entity such as a sole-proprietorship, partnership, limited liability company (LLC) or S corporation. There are many factors to consider and proposed federal tax law changes being considered by Congress may affect your decision.

The corporate federal income tax is currently imposed at a flat 21% rate, while the current individual federal income tax rates begin at 10% and go up to 37%. The difference in rates can be mitigated by the qualified business income (QBI) deduction that’s available to eligible pass-through entity owners that are individuals, estates and trusts.

Note that non-corporate taxpayers with modified adjusted gross income above certain levels are subject to an additional 3.8% tax on net investment income.

Organizing a business as a C corporation instead of as a pass-through entity can reduce the current federal income tax on the business’s income. The corporation can still pay reasonable compensation to the shareholders and pay interest on loans from the shareholders. That income will be taxed at higher individual rates, but the overall rate on the corporation’s income can be lower than if the business was operated as a pass-through entity.

Other considerations
Other tax-related factors should also be considered. For example:

  • If substantially all the business profits will be distributed to the owners, it may be preferable that the business be operated as a pass-through entity rather than as a C corporation, since the shareholders will be taxed on dividend distributions from the corporation (double taxation). In contrast, owners of a pass-through entity will only be taxed once, at the personal level, on business income. However, the impact of double taxation must be evaluated based on projected income levels for both the business and its owners.
  • If the value of the business’s assets is likely to appreciate, it’s generally preferable to conduct it as a pass-through entity to avoid a corporate tax if the assets are sold or the business is liquidated. Although corporate level tax will be avoided if the corporation’s shares, rather than its assets, are sold, the buyer may insist on a lower price because the tax basis of appreciated business assets cannot be stepped up to reflect the purchase price. That can result in much lower post-purchase depreciation and amortization deductions for the buyer.
  • If the entity is a pass-through entity, the owners’ bases in their interests in the entity are stepped-up by the entity income that’s allocated to them. That can result in less taxable gain for the owners when their interests in the entity are sold.
  • If the business is expected to incur tax losses for a while, consideration should be given to structuring it as a pass-through entity so the owners can deduct the losses against their other income. Conversely, if the owners of the business have insufficient other income or the losses aren’t usable (for example, because they’re limited by the passive loss rules), it may be preferable for the business to be a C corporation, since it’ll be able to offset future income with the losses.
  • If the owners of the business are subject to the alternative minimum tax (AMT), it may be preferable to organize as a C corporation, since corporations aren’t subject to the AMT. Affected individuals are subject to the AMT at 26% or 28% rates.

These are only some of the many factors involved in operating a business as a certain type of legal entity. For details about how to proceed in your situation, consult with us.

© 2021

Employers: The Social Security wage base is increasing in 2022

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Employers: The Social Security wage base is increasing in 2022

The Social Security Administration recently announced that the wage base for computing Social Security tax will increase to $147,000 for 2022 (up from $142,800 for 2021). Wages and self-employment income above this threshold aren’t subject to Social Security tax.

Background information

The Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) imposes two taxes on employers, employees and self-employed workers — one for Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance, which is commonly known as the Social Security tax, and the other for Hospital Insurance, which is commonly known as the Medicare tax.

There’s a maximum amount of compensation subject to the Social Security tax, but no maximum for Medicare tax. For 2022, the FICA tax rate for employers is 7.65% — 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare (the same as in 2021).

2022 updates
For 2022, an employee will pay:

  • 6.2% Social Security tax on the first $147,000 of wages (6.2% of $147,000 makes the maximum tax $9,114), plus
  • 1.45% Medicare tax on the first $200,000 of wages ($250,000 for joint returns; $125,000 for married taxpayers filing a separate return), plus
  • 2.35% Medicare tax (regular 1.45% Medicare tax plus 0.9% additional Medicare tax) on all wages in excess of $200,000 ($250,000 for joint returns; $125,000 for married taxpayers filing a separate return).

For 2022, the self-employment tax imposed on self-employed people is:

  • 12.4% OASDI on the first $147,000 of self-employment income, for a maximum tax of $18,228 (12.4% of $147,000); plus
  • 2.90% Medicare tax on the first $200,000 of self-employment income ($250,000 of combined self-employment income on a joint return, $125,000 on a return of a married individual filing separately), plus
  • 3.8% (2.90% regular Medicare tax plus 0.9% additional Medicare tax) on all self-employment income in excess of $200,000 ($250,000 of combined self-employment income on a joint return, $125,000 for married taxpayers filing a separate return).

More than one employer

What happens if an employee works for your business and has a second job? That employee would have taxes withheld from two different employers. Can the employee ask you to stop withholding Social Security tax once he or she reaches the wage base threshold? Unfortunately, no. Each employer must withhold Social Security taxes from the individual’s wages, even if the combined withholding exceeds the maximum amount that can be imposed for the year. Fortunately, the employee will get a credit on his or her tax return for any excess withheld.

We can help

Contact us if you have questions about payroll tax filing or payments. We can help ensure you stay in compliance.

© 2021

Business Start-Up Costs — What’s Deductible?

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Rikard & Neal QuickBooksLaunching 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.

The tax law places certain limitations on tax deductions for start-up expenses.

  • 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.

Example: Gina spent $20,000 on start-up costs before her new business began on July 1, 2020. In the 2020 tax year, she may deduct $5,000 and the portion of the remaining $15,000 allocable to July through December of 2020 ($15,000/180 × 6 = $500), a total of $5,500. The remaining $14,500 may be deducted ratably over the remaining 174 months.

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.

Call us at 901-685-9411 and request a free initial consultation to learn more.

2021 Q4 tax calendar: Key deadlines for businesses and other employers

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2021 Q4 tax calendar: Key deadlines for businesses and other employers

Here are some of the key tax-related deadlines affecting businesses and other employers during the fourth quarter of 2021. Keep in mind that this list isn’t all-inclusive, so there may be additional deadlines that apply to you. Contact us to ensure you’re meeting all applicable deadlines and to learn more about the filing requirements.

Note: Certain tax-filing and tax-payment deadlines may be postponed for taxpayers who reside in or have a business in federally declared disaster areas.

Friday, October 15

If a calendar-year C corporation that filed an automatic six-month extension:

  • File a 2020 income tax return (Form 1120) and pay any tax, interest and penalties due.
  • Make contributions for 2020 to certain employer-sponsored retirement plans.

Monday, November 1

Report income tax withholding and FICA taxes for third quarter 2021 (Form 941) and pay any tax due. (See exception below under “November 10.”)

Wednesday, November 10

Report income tax withholding and FICA taxes for third quarter 2021 (Form 941), if you deposited on time (and in full) all of the associated taxes due.

Wednesday, December 15

If a calendar-year C corporation, pay the fourth installment of 2021 estimated income taxes.

Friday, December 31

Establish a retirement plan for 2021 (generally other than a SIMPLE, a Safe-Harbor 401(k) or a SEP).

Contact us if you’d like more information about the filing requirements and to ensure you’re meeting all applicable deadlines.
© 2021