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How to Overcome Accounting Challenges Most Small Businesses Face

June 23, 2022 by admin

Businessman and woman working on computersPerhaps the number one action you can take to support the financial health of your small business is to stay on top of accounting. Make sure you’re aware of most small businesses’ accounting challenges and learn how to overcome them. We’ll tell you how here!

Banking

You’ve been banking for years, and you know how to manage the task. However, when you own a business, banking isn’t like managing personal checking and savings accounts. Unfortunately, many small business owners use their personal funds to pay for business expenses, especially when first starting out. Even small costs add up over time. This “cross contamination” of spending between personal and business accounts can lead to costly mistakes, not to mention headaches for your accounting team. Keep personal expenses, and business expenses separate all the time. Have dedicated bank accounts and credit cards only used for one or the other. If you need to track down an expenditure, you only need to look in one place.

Budget

When bank accounts are separated, budgeting becomes exponentially easier. You can even use an accounting software program to help you keep up with money coming and going to and from your business. However, recognize that simply entering information into a software program is not the end of the work when balancing a budget. Thinking that is true ends up being the downfall of many small businesses. Budgeting for a business means forecasting to ensure that unexpected expenses can be covered, managing inventory, taxes, and more. A shift in any direction can throw off any budget. That’s why many small businesses opt to outsource their accounting. The known upfront expense of doing so can far offset costly budgeting errors down the road.

Unexpected expenses

As mentioned above, you must consider the unexpected as part of your budget. Additional (new) taxes, payment delays from customers, rising costs of materials and supplies, new employee training, etc., are all possibilities. A qualified accountant is aware of these unexpected expenses and others that your business could face and knows how to prepare you for them. Awareness of what could financially happen in business is crucial to long-term profitability.

Payroll

While unexpected expenses are likely the most daunting for a small business, payroll is almost always the most significant. Payroll entails more than what you pay employees. New employee classification, if incorrect, could cost you a bundle in penalties. Other payroll-related accounting challenges are pay accuracy, proper tax filing, compliance, and paid time off tracking.

Unless you’re an HR professional, and chances are you’re not if you’re the business owner, consider recruiting a qualified accountant to help you manage payroll. It will save you headaches in the short term and money in the long term.

Taxes

A conversation about accounting and small business isn’t complete without discussing taxes. The tax struggle can be daunting, from filing to making sure you pay enough but that you don’t overpay. A significant challenge regarding taxes is merely keeping up with the ever-changing tax laws. A qualified accountant or CPA will be up-to-date on new regulations and guidelines so that you don’t have to be.

Overcoming accounting challenges like these is easy with a qualified accounting team on your side. Consider outsourcing your accounting needs so that your focus remains where it should – on running your business your way.


Contact our accounting professionals now for help managing your small business finances.

Filed Under: Business Best Practices

Hiring An Independent Contractor? How QuickBooks Online Can Help

May 24, 2022 by admin

performance-reviewsAre you taking on a worker who’s not an employee? QuickBooks Online includes tools for tracking and paying independent contractors.

The COVID-19 pandemic created millions of self-employed individuals and small businesses. Whether they chose to, or circumstances forced them to, these new entrepreneurs had to learn new ways to get paid and to prepare their income taxes.

If you’re thinking about taking on a contract worker, you, too, will have to educate yourself on the paperwork and processes required to comply with the IRS’ rules for his or her compensation. It’s much easier than hiring a full-time employee, but it still takes some knowledge of how QuickBooks Online handles these individuals.

You’ll also need to make certain that the person you’re hiring is indeed an independent contractor and not an employee. The IRS takes this distinction very seriously. If you’re at all unsure of your new hire’s employment status, we can help you sort it out.

Creating Records for Contractors

Once new contractors have accepted your offer, you’ll need to have then fill out an IRS Form W-9. You can download a copy here. Employees complete the more detailed Form W-4 so that the employer can withhold income taxes correctly, but you won’t have to withhold taxes for your contract workers. They will be responsible for calculating and paying quarterly estimated taxes and filing an IRS Form 1040 every year.

You, though, will be responsible for sending them an IRS Form 1099-NEC (Non-Employee Compensation) every January if you paid them more than $600 during the previous year. You do not need to send a 1099-NEC to a corporation or to an LLC that is treated as a C Corp or an S Corp.

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You can complete the Vendor Information window for each independent contractor, checking the box in front of Track payments for 1099.

Using the information the contractors provide, you can create records for them in QuickBooks Online. If you don’t have a QuickBooks Payroll subscription, you can set them up as 1099 vendors. Click the Expenses tab in the toolbar and then on the Vendors tab. Click New vendor in the upper right to open the Vendor Information window. Complete the fields for the worker and be sure to check the box in front of Track payments for 1099, as shown in the partial image above.

The vendor records you create will appear in QuickBooks Online’s Vendors list (again, Expenses | Vendors). Click on one to open it. You can toggle between two tabs here. The first, Transaction List, will eventually display all your financial dealings with that contractor. Vendor Details opens the record you just created, which you can edit from this screen.

Paying Contractors

When independent contractors send you invoices, you’ll return to this same screen. There are three ways you can pay them. Click the down arrow next to New Transaction in the upper right corner to see your options (or look down at the end of the row while you’re in list view). You can record the debt as a Bill if you want to pay it later (or if that’s the way you structure your recordkeeping). If you’re paying it right away, you can create an Expense or write a Check.

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You can choose an option from this vendor action menu to pay your independent contractors.

When you click one of these, QuickBooks Online opens a form with many of the contractors’ details already filled in. You’ll need to complete any additional fields at the top of the screen, and then either record the payment or debt under Category details or Item details, depending on how you do your bookkeeping. Either way, you’ll be able to enter the quantity and rate and/or amount and mark it billable (with a markup percentage, if you’d like) to a customer or project.

You’re probably going to want our help here, since there’s more than one way to pay independent contractors. If you subscribe to QuickBooks Payroll, you can use the service’s contractor features, which include the ability to invite your contractors to fill out their own records in QuickBooks Online. You may also want to add an account to your Chart of Accounts, and we’d want to offer guidance there. And you need to ensure that you’re classifying payments correctly, so they’ll appear in 1099 reports and 1099s themselves.

Creating records for independent contractors and paying these individuals seem like they should be simple operations. But anytime you’re dealing with payroll issues, you’re dealing with peoples’ livelihoods – and the IRS. We strongly encourage you to let us help you get this right. Contact us, and we’ll make sure you’re handling your worker payments with absolute accuracy.

Filed Under: QuickBooks

How QuickBooks Online Helps You Track Mileage

April 20, 2022 by admin

qb-recordsWith gas prices so high, you need to track your travel costs as closely as possible. Consider getting a tax deduction for your business mileage.

If you drive even a little for business, it’s easy to let mileage costs slide. After all, it’s a pain to keep track of your tax-deductible mileage in a little notebook and do all the calculations required. If you do rack up a lot of business miles, you probably forget to track some trips and end up losing money.

QuickBooks Online offers a much better way. Its Mileage tools include simple fill-in-the-blank records that allow you to document individual trips. You can either enter the starting point and destination and let the site calculate your mileage and deduction or enter the number of miles yourself.

If you use QuickBooks Online’s mobile app, it can track your miles automatically as you drive (as long as you have the correct settings turned on). Here’s a look at how all of this works.

Setting Up

To get started, click the Mileage link in QuickBooks Online’s toolbar. The screen that opens will eventually display a table that contains information about your trips, but you need to do a little setup first. Click the down arrow next to Add Trip in the upper right corner and select Manage vehicles. A panel will slide out from the right. Click Add vehicle.

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You’ll need to supply information about your vehicles before you can start entering trips.

You’ll need to supply the vehicle’s year, make, and model. Do you own or lease it, and on what date was the vehicle purchased or leased and put into service? Do you want to have your annual mileage calculated by entering odometer readings or have QuickBooks Online track your business miles driven automatically? When you’re done making your selections and entering data, click Save.

Entering Trip Data

You can download trips as CSV files or import them from Mile IQ, but you’re probably more likely to enter them manually. Click Add Trip in the upper right corner. In the pane that opens, you’ll enter the date of the trip and either the total miles or start and end point. You’ll select the business purpose and vehicle and indicate whether it was a round trip. When you’re done, click Save. The trip will appear in the table on the opening screen, and your current possible total deduction will be in the upper left corner, along with your total business miles and total miles.

If you want to designate a trip as personal, click the box in front of the trip in that table. In the black horizontal box that appears, click the icon that looks like a little person, then click Apply. Now, the trip will appear in the Personal column and will not count toward your business tax-deductible mileage.

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When you select a trip in the Mileage table, you can mark it as personal so it’s not included in your business tax-deductible miles.

Personal Trips Can Count, Too

If you use your vehicle(s) for personal as well as business purposes, tracking some of those miles can also mean a tax deduction. For tax year 2022, you can deduct 18 cents per mile for your travel to and from medical appointments. Note: Medical mileage is only deductible if medical exceeds a certain percent of AGI. Be sure to check with the IRS yearly tax code, as they update the mileage amounts annually.

And if you do volunteer work for a qualified charitable organization, the miles you drive in service of it can be deducted at the rate of 14 cents per mile. You can also claim the cost of parking and tolls, as long as you weren’t reimbursed for any of these expenses. Obviously, the IRS wants you to keep careful records of your charitable mileage, and QuickBooks Online can provide them.

QuickBooks Online doesn’t track these deductions, but you’ll at least have a record of the miles driven.

Auto-Track Your Miles

The easiest way to track your mileage in QuickBooks Online is by using its mobile app. You can launch this and have it record your mileage automatically as you’re driving. Versions are available for both Android and iOS, and they’re different from each other. They also have more features than the browser-based version of QuickBooks Online, like maps, rules, and easier designation of trips as business or personal.

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The iOS version of Mileage in the QuickBooks Online app

In both versions, you’ll need to click the menu in the lower right corner after you’ve opened the QuickBooks Online app and select Mileage. Make sure Auto-Tracking is turned on. Your phone’s location services tool must be turned on, too. There are other settings that vary between the two operating systems. You can search the help system of either app to make sure you get your settings correct if the onscreen instructions aren’t clear enough.

Of course, you won’t see the fruits of your mileage deductions until you file your 2022 taxes. But you can factor these savings in as you’re doing your tax planning during the year. Please let us help if you’re having any trouble with QuickBooks Online’s Mileage tools, or if you have questions with other elements of the site.

Filed Under: QuickBooks

Cash Flow Strategies for Cash-Strapped Businesses

March 20, 2022 by admin

Cash is critical to the functioning of every business. Maintaining a healthy cash flow not only allows a company to meet its financial obligations but also gives it the flexibility to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

All too often, however, small businesses find themselves in a cash crunch, struggling to pay the bills and stay afloat. The good news is that businesses can take various measures to manage cash flow more effectively.

Controlling Expenses

A good place to start is by reviewing expenses to determine if there are areas where you can shave costs by contracting with another vendor or renegotiating existing contracts. Costs for ongoing goods and services, such as utilities, shipping, and telecommunications, should be reviewed frequently to see if expenses can be reduced. And when paying suppliers, consider whether it makes financial sense to take advantage of any early payment incentives that may be offered.

Keeping Debt in Check

Debt can be a useful tool if used properly, so be sure to keep it at a manageable level. Before your business takes on a new loan, reach out to multiple lenders and compare the terms they offer. When acquiring equipment, consider whether leasing may be a better option than borrowing money to finance its purchase. For short-term financing needs, a line of credit is a helpful tool. The lender will base interest charges only on the amount your business draws from the credit line.

Managing Inventory

Maintaining excessive inventory can tie up cash unnecessarily. If your business carries inventory, avoid overstocking. Your inventory management system should be able to indicate the minimum quantities that you need to keep on hand in order to meet your customers’ needs.

Simplifying Billing and Collections

Employees who handle billing and collections should have specific, clear guidelines. By standardizing the process, you help ensure your business will be paid promptly. You can speed up payments by offering discounts for early payment or by encouraging your customers to pay using electronic funds transfer. To help minimize the problem of unpaid accounts, consider making follow-up calls or sending email or text message reminders within a set period after you have provided goods or services or when a bill’s due date passes. Minimizing Taxes When Possible

Deductions and credits can help your business limit its tax burden and boost its cash flow. A knowledgeable tax professional can keep you informed of any special tax breaks that may be of value to your business, such as the energy credit for the acquisition of various types of alternative energy property.

Make Planning a Priority

Identifying the causes of reduced cash flow and taking steps to rectify a cash flow crunch is critical to the ongoing success of your business. Proper cash flow planning can help you make better use of budgets and employ financing and capital more effectively to increase revenues as well as boost profits. If erratic cash flow is a recurring issue for your business, it can be helpful to gain the insights and the input from an experienced financial professional.

Filed Under: Business Best Practices

How to Maintain Customer Records in QuickBooks Online

February 16, 2022 by admin

quickbooksYour customers are your company’s lifeblood. Make sure their records are thorough and up-to-date.

When companies buy other companies, what’s often considered the most critical asset? The customer list. When a business is damaged and data possibly lost, which set of records do they most hope to recover? The customer list.

You probably spend most of your time in QuickBooks Online working with transactions and reports, but your customer records deserve equal time. If they’re incomplete or otherwise not maintained well, you lose time filling in the blanks when you’re trying to complete a task that requires complete customer profiles. Your searches and reports may not tell the whole picture. Your relationships can suffer, and you may miss out on sales opportunities.

QuickBooks Online provides excellent tools for creating and maintaining comprehensive customer and sub-customer records. Here’s a look at how it all works.

Moving Your Customer Data In

There are two ways to create customer records in QuickBooks Online. If you have an existing database in Outlook, Excel, Gmail, or Google Sheets, you can import it. This will save you an enormous amount of time, but it’s a challenging process. You select the file you want to import, and then you have to “map” it by matching the fields in your database to fields in QuickBooks Online. You’ll likely need our help with this.

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To import a customer file into QuickBooks Online, you’ll have to “map” its fields. We can help you with this.

Your other option is to enter records manually. This is time-consuming, but the more information you can include about your customers from the start, the better. You can always edit your records to add, delete, or modify what you originally entered.

To get started, hover over Sales in the toolbar and click on Customers. Then click on New Customer in the upper right corner to open the Customer information window. The only field you’re required to complete is Display name as. You may want to do this if you have a new customer on the phone and you want to concentrate on the conversation. You can take notes about their contact information and fill in the record later, when you’re off the phone.

But wherever possible, as we’ve already said, complete as many fields as you can. You’ll enter name and billing and shipping address and phone number(s) on the opening screen. You can also supply contact details like fax number and website.

Creating Sub-customers

You’ll notice a checkbox that says Is sub-customer. QuickBooks Online lets you “nest” related records under the “parent” record. This can be an actual customer, but many people use it to document jobs they’re doing for the customer. So if you’re a contractor, for example, you might have sub-customers like Sun deck and Spa.

If you want to set up such a record, enter the job name and click in the box next to Is sub-customer. Two fields will open below that allow you to select the parent customer and to indicate the sub-customer’s billing status. The remainder of the fields will automatically fill in with the parent customer’s contact information.

Quickbooks Online tips

You can set up jobs as sub-customers in QuickBooks Online.

Supplying Details

When you’re setting up individual customers, you should add as much detail as you possibly can to each record, beyond basic contact information. QuickBooks Online’s record templates display a number of tabs running horizontally across the window. The most important of these are:

  • Tax info. Are the customers taxable or exempt? If taxable, what is his or her Default tax code? (If you haven’t set up sales taxes yet and need to, please let us help. It’s complicated.)
  • Payment and billing. Do they have preferred payment and/or delivery methods? Will you be assigning default payment terms, like Net 30 or Due on receipt? What is their Opening balance? If they’re brand-new customers who have never ordered from you, this will be $0.00. If they’re existing, active customers, enter any outstanding balance they have with you as of the date that you enter. This must be correct, to avoid any problems with the customers’ ongoing balances. Questions? Ask us.

Other tabs here are self-explanatory. When you’ve entered everything you can, click Save. The new record will now appear in the Customers list and will be available to select from the drop-down list in transactions.

There will be times when you have to refer back to these forms to answer questions. By maintaining detailed, accurate customer records, you’ll be ready to respond. If you have questions about any of the information requested, or about other elements of QuickBooks Online that are puzzling you, please contact us so we can set up a consultation.

Filed Under: QuickBooks

Expand QuickBooks Online’s Features: Use Integrated Apps

January 10, 2022 by admin

Casual man working on laptopExpand 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.

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Using the QuickBooks Online mobile app, you can snap photos of receipts and complete the expense forms provided.

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.

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You can record and store customer details in QuickBooks Online, but Method:CRM adds true Customer Relationship management to the site.

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.

Filed Under: QuickBooks

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