Category Archives: Accounting

Accounting

Trip Expenses You Can Deduct For Your Business

One of the best things about being in business for yourself is that you get to write off a lot of expenses. This includes travel; not everything, but a lot of things. We will cover some of the things you get to write off and when.

Air Travel – if you have to fly anywhere you get to write off the cost of your flight and your bags if you have to pay for that. You even get to write it off if you get to the airport and upgrade to first class because the airline is offering a deal.

Car Rental – if you have to rent a car it’s covered, but you don’t get to write off any mileage if you go that route.

Mileage – if you don’t rent a car and drive instead, you get to write off all mileage associated with your trip. Here’s the other side. While you’re out of town, you get to write off all mileage, which includes weekends. Say you’re an hour away from a beach and you’re using your own car because it’s too far to drive home every weekend. It all counts as part of mileage.

Hotel – your hotel costs are covered for write offs. Any clothing you wear for business is covered if you need to have it cleaned and pressed. However, your personal clothing isn’t covered specifically, although you might be able to get a package that includes everything but that’s rare. Meals that you eat in the hotel are covered, but not personal convenience items or snack items you might buy in the hotel store.

Meals/Food – all of your meals are covered whether you eat in the hotel or not. If you stop for ice cream or a milkshake, that’s not considered a meal so that doesn’t count. If you’re staying in an extended stay hotel and you decide to buy food at the grocery store, you can write that off.

Clothing – if you need to buy new clothes to go to your client’s office those items are covered. But if you buy something like t-shirts, shorts or sunglasses, those items won’t be covered.
 

Accounting

3 Most Important Things You Need In An Accountant

Suffice is to say, there are a lot of accountants in the world. Probably not as many as there are lawyers, but one is never really sure. Truth be told, most accountants are pretty good at what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t have any business. If someone tries to tell you they’re the best accountant in town, they’d better be talking about their search engine ranking or something other than how accurate they are.

If all accountants are pretty accurate, that means you have to have other criteria to look at so that you can judge who you want to hire. This is where intangibles come into play. What do you want in an accountant both short and long term? How do you want to be treated? What do you want to see? We can’t speak for everyone, but here’s 3 things we believe are important for any accountant that you want to work with.

1. Trustworthiness. This might seem like something that would be common among accountants until you think about it some more. Who remembers the name Arthur Andersen? That’s actually an easy one, as they were the accountants that “fixed” the numbers that, when caught, brought down both Enron and their own company, to the extent that they had to change their name just to survive.

A name that’s less known by many people who know what it’s related to is David Friehling, who was the accountant for Bernard Madoff, the man who pulled off the greatest Ponzi scheme in American history at billions of dollars over the course of 20 years.

Both of these accounting firms were very good but, as it turns out, weren’t very trustworthy. If you have an accountant that will do anything they can to hide assets or fix the books for any other reason, well, if they’ll do it for you they’ll do it to you as well.

2. Someone you can talk to. Let’s face it; a lot of people could probably do their own bookkeeping but the overwhelming number are probably better off letting someone else handle that, and other financial aspects of their business.

However, sometimes you sit down and start talking to the person handling your books and they’ll use terminology that you don’t understand. Or suddenly your mind goes off and starts watching last night’s game while your accountant is talking to you because they’re not interesting enough to listen to.

If someone is talking to you about your money you need to know what they’re talking about. And you need them to be engaging enough so that you’ll listen, and if need be ask questions. If your accountant is talking at you rather than talking to you, they’re the wrong person for you to be working with.

3. Sometimes tells you what you don’t want to hear. Sometimes things aren’t going great. Everyone knows who Elton John is, correct? Many years ago he sued his accountants because his money was low. It turned out that he was spending way too much, and his complaint was that they told him he was doing it but he thought it was their job to either stop him from spending it or helping him grow that money so that he could continue to spend as he pleased. He lost the case because the judge told said his accounting firm told him the truth, and it was his problem is he didn’t like what they were telling him; that’s paraphrasing the actual words.

Good accountants will make sure you know what’s going on, and won’t be afraid to let you know when things aren’t going well. They’ll help you by giving you advice, whether you take it or not. They won’t be afraid to do the right thing because they’re worried about losing your business, or worried that you might talk badly about them later on, possibly causing their business harm. If you can possibly with with your accountant to get things working properly, isn’t it better knowing the truth than pretending it’s not happening?
 

Accounting

5 Items You Can Deduct From Your Taxes

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Most people don’t itemize, but for those that do, especially if you’re self employed, you will find that there are lots of little ways you can save some money on your taxes, which could end up gifting you a refund if you’re lucky. Let’s look at 5 of these things.

1. Health care costs. Actually, you won’t save money on medical bills per se, but you can write off any health insurance you pay for right now if it’s a business expense, and once the health care bill kicks in you can write that off if you end up having to pay out of pocket for it. Right now you can also write off some of your expenses if you have a Health Savings Account.

2. Mileage. Almost everyone with a small business knows that they can write off mileage, but many people forget to track it. You might need to either start carrying around a notebook or track the mileage once for those places you visit often and then remember to track that whenever you go to those places again.

3. Cell phone costs. If you pay for your cellphone and you use it for business you can write off certain portions of your bill. You won’t be able to write off the entire amount if you’re on a family plan but you can certainly write off half of it. If your bills are exorbitant you might be asked to prove which calls were for business and which ones weren’t, but if you’re under control you should be fine.

4. Home office expenses. Not only can you write off all the things you buy to use in your home office but you can also write off a portion of the house expenses that you use while you’re in your office. This includes your mortgage, electricity, if you have someone who cleans the house and even if you have someone who cuts your grass, although that one might be harder to track. If you have any maintenance done in your office such as painting the walls you can write that off. Don’t push things like trying to get a discount on your cable because you have a TV in your office though.

5. Travel. If you’re a small business you actually get to write off one business trip a year whether you really take one or not. You have to be incorporated to do this however, and it’s a way to get a deduction from taking a family trip. You get to claim at least one night of your trip as a shareholders meeting, and if you conduct any type of business at all you can claim other days as well. However, you won’t get away with claiming an entire cruise as a business trip unless you were hired by the cruise line so don’t even try.
 

Accounting

5 Things Your Accountant Needs From You For Your Business Taxes

Even though it’s late for those of you who aren’t filing for a tax extension, the fact of the matter is that when it’s time for your accountant to do your taxes, there are things you’re going to want to have ready to give him or her so they can do their job properly. Listed below are the 5 most critical things they’re going to need, though not necessarily in this order.

Mileage – Even if you use your vehicle for personal reasons as well, keeping track of your business mileage is very important because it will offer legitimate deductions that will help bring your tax bill down. If there are places you go all the time you should have an estimated mileage count for that, and then you just have to totally track your mileage for anything outside of that. You only get to count what you don’t get paid back for expenses. And if you used a rental car, you don’t get to claim mileage.

Receipts – Anything that’s somewhat business related, you need to make sure you keep your receipts for it. This includes business meals, stamps, any supplies you might use for business, buying a new smartphone, etc. If you need to you can write little notes on them; for instance, I write little notes on all my receipts for business meals in case anyone wanted to track who I was meeting for business purposes.

Bank Statements – Hopefully you have a bank account that’s specific for your business, which is easy to use. For my purposes, I also give my accountant my personal account statements, just in case they see something that pops out that they can use. Your bank statements will show any payments you got for the year, as well as some of your business expenses. You’ll probably need to go through your payments and expenses and highlight where some of the money came from if you earned it in different ways so they can categorize it for you.

Any statements showing estimated tax payments – I bring this one up because if you’re like me, you don’t always pay your estimated taxes from your bank account. I paid some of mine with a credit card, and thus I had to go back and retrieve those statements online to give to my accountant for my records.

Any pertinent W-2′s or 1099′s – Truthfully, your accountants can do your taxes if you don’t have these statements by using your business bank account information, but any of these you have makes it easier for them. The times I didn’t use them was when they either came late or were incorrect.

Accounting

Why We Teach Quickbooks

T. L. Wall Accounting helps businesses and individuals learn how to budget and track their money. We offer services where we can do it for them, but often they want to do it for themselves. When people go looking for a solution that will help them track these things on their own, we recommend and teach Quickbooks.

Quickbooks is business accounting software that can also be used for home budgeting. There is a learning curve to it, but most people can learn how to use it in a day or so. It allows you to track income and expenses, categorize them so you know what they are when you run reports, and you can even use it to create checks so you don’t have to go out and buy them from anyone. If you run a large office you can network it so that everyone has access or you can run the program as a standalone.

This is very powerful software. You can generally categorize in 3 categories, depending on whether you want to track bills, revenue or employees. It interacts with Microsoft Excel and Word. You can also print information out in a pdf format, in case you want something that can’t be altered. You can use it to send out invoices. You can use it as a contact management system, as it will interact with Microsoft Outlook as well.

In other words, if you want total control of all the financial aspects of your business or personal life, Quickbooks will get it done. Of course, it all still takes time, but if you want to know what’s going on at a moment’s notice, this program is great to have. And yes, there are tutorials, but if you need help, that’s why we’re here. We provide both group and individual training, customized for your needs.