Tracking data is then entered into a system where data is kept about the item. A simple system may be a spreadsheet.

There are also software apps more sophisticated than spreadsheets that track all of the fixed assets for a company, including original cost, depreciation method and history, and tax treatment. 

You never know how many of an item you might have until you record and count them.  How many computers (and computer parts) do you have lying around your office?  Extra desks and chairs? Maybe you even have extra office space or extra land. 

Part of being a great entrepreneur is fully utilizing all the resources you have at your disposal.  Where can you put to better use the extra assets you have? Could you sell the surplus items?  Or donate them for a write-off? Do you have extra room to rent out to a tenant, earning rent? 

Sometimes we’re so focused on operating the core of our business that we don’t see what else is a money maker right in front of us. In addition to focusing on income and expenses from operations, consider the resources you have in your fixed assets.

For assistance with developing or reviewing your a fixed assets schedule, please give us a call.
 
And if you do sell some of your fixed assets, be sure to contact us so we can help you book the transactions properly.  

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact us, your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact us, your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.

Internal control is a very special phrase in the accounting profession. Tactically, it’s the set of processes that help a company produce accurate data throughout the organization, follow reporting requirements and laws, and maintain consistency and accuracy in its operations. Strategically, it’s an entirely new way of thinking and doing business.
 
Internal control helps to reduce organizational risk. A blunt way of putting it is internal control is what you put in place to avoid mistakes, intentional or accidental, and to control accuracy and quality. It impacts every aspect of an organization.

• Have someone check that your bank balance matches the reconciled amount in your books, and that someone should be different from the person who does the reconciliation.  This is an example of what’s called segregation of duties. 
• Lock up paper checks and use the missing check number report to make sure none of the stock could be used for nefarious purposes.
• Have employees sign in and out equipment that they take home.  This is part of asset management.
• Write and enforce a hardware and software use policy that includes items like employees should make sure their anti-virus software is active at all times, they should not bring in disks or CDs, and they should not download games or other unauthorized programs.  This protects from computer viruses and helps to avoid catastrophic network failures.

 
There are literally hundreds of internal control procedures that should be implemented in small businesses as they grow into larger businesses. 
 
Internal control is typically a big part of an audit or an attest function in accounting; it determines how many additional procedures an auditor needs to do in order to provide assurances about the reliability of the financial reports.  But it’s also just good plain common business sense to implement as many internal control processes as are cost-effective for your business to protect it at the level of risk you’re comfortable with. 
 
If you’d like to discuss the idea of internal control further, please feel free to contact us at any time.  

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact us, your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.

As we get through the craziness of tax season, a few reminders are always a good thing. Check out this article for a good overview of common tax subjects that you may deal with both personally and as a business owner. And if you have questions, please contact us for tax review and preparation services as well as tax planning for the upcoming year.

​Remember: You don't need to pay full price for your accounting software and services! For special discounts on QuickBooks products and services not available when buying directly from Intuit, click the button below or contact us to discuss your business needs. 

The information presented is of a general nature and should not be acted upon without further details and/or professional guidance. For assistance in identifying and utilizing all the tax deductions to which you are entitled, please contact us, your CPA or tax preparer.

The products and services your business sells make it unique. The same thing is true of how these items are set up in your accounting software.  Whether you’re using QuickBooks Online or something else, getting your products and services set up right can impact the quality of the information you can get out of your accounting system. 
 
Here are the types of items you can set up in most systems.
 
Inventory Items

Inventory items are used in retail and wholesale businesses. They are physical items that the system can keep count of for you.  You can purchase or make the items, and the associated cost is usually tracked when a shipping receipt or bill is entered.  They are sold when a sale is made and an invoice or sales receipt is entered. 
Transactions using inventory items impact a lot of accounts on both the balance sheet (cash, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventory) as well as the income statement (cost of goods sold, sales, and returns).  The inventory item can be tied to default sales and purchase accounts in most systems. 

Non-Inventory Items

QuickBooks offers a type of item called a non-inventory item. There’s a big difference in that non-inventory items do not have quantities associated with them. They don’t increase or decrease the inventory account. But they can be tied to default sales and purchase accounts like inventory items above. 
Examples of non-inventory items include items purchased for a specific job, such as a contractor purchasing appliances for a custom home, items you sell but do not buy, such as an e-book or other digital product, and items you purchase but do not sell, such as shopping bags. 

Service Items

A service item is a special type of non-inventory item. There are no quantities, which makes sense because services are not physical items. They also are only connected to a sales account and not a purchase account. 
With service items, you could set up service packages or hourly rates. 

Bundles

A bundled item is a group of items that were designed to be sold together. For example, if you sell a gift basket of coffee products, you would bundle the items used to create the basket.   

Assembly Items

An assembly item is a special type of inventory item where the quantity is tracked, but it differs from an inventory item in that it can’t be sold separately because it is a component and not a whole item.  Assembly items are available in larger accounting and inventory apps, such as QuickBooks Enterprise, and are used in conjunction with a Bill of Materials or other build feature.
An example is a set of shelves. The assembly components are the individual shelves and the frame pieces that you may want to keep counts of. An inventory item that contains the shelves, the frames, and other parts is “built” from the assembly items.  The nuts and bolts could be non-inventory items or assembly items, depending on whether you wan to keep count of them or not. 

Sales Tax Item

Sales tax is a very special type of item used on an invoice or sales receipt to calculate sales tax due on the order. In many accounting systems, it’s usually kept in a separate list from the other product and service items. Rates can be entered for each sales tax jurisdiction.

Other Items

Some systems have an “other” category to capture items such as freight, shipping, handling, and other add-ons to the sale. 

Tracking Profitability

Setting up the right type of products and services is critical to matching costs and revenue for accurate insights into gross margin. This section of your accounting system is also the one that’s most different from industry to industry and company to company.

For best results when setting up Products & Services, be sure you get professional help from experts who know both the software and your industry for best results. Contact us to find out how we can assist you!

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact us, your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.

One main goal of marketing is to acquire leads that will hopefully turn into buying customers and even repeat customers. To start measuring your marketing efforts, we need to find out where those leads are coming from and measure which ones became your customers. That means we need to develop a system that tracks a customer from lead source to sale.
 
The hard part is that some of this needs to be done outside the accounting system.  The good news is that there are many tools and analytics available to help in this process.
 
One of the first things to do if you don’t already have it set up is to record the lead when they enter your sales process. Enter basic information about them in your CRM (customer relationship management system) and be sure to ask them how they found out about you.  This will help you track the lead back to the campaign or channel that they came in on. Once they’ve made a purchase, you can connect the lead to the customer record and track revenue by marketing source. 
 
If your leads come in digitally, there are many automated tags you can set up to track where they originated, whether it was from the web site, a particular web page, a social media account or a link from an email you sent out.
 
An important statistic for businesses is cost per lead, how much it costs to generate one lead for your business. The cost will vary by channel or marketing source. For example, someone coming from your website will cost less than someone coming from social media in most cases.
 
Once you know how many leads to generate to make a sale, you can start calculating what your marketing budget should look like.  More importantly, you’ll be able to forecast your revenue more accurately, too.
 
While numbers are probably the last thing you think about when you’re doing your marketing, they can be very effective for your bottom line.  There are many metrics beyond cost per lead that would be valuable to measure as well.  Here are just a few of them:
 

• Number of leads (in total or per channel)
• Number of press mentions
• Number of direct mail pieces sent out
• Number of email subscribers
• Number of social media connections per platform
• Number of posts sent, number of shares, number of comments
• Total web visitors, new and returning
• Google rankings for keywords
• Number of customer reviews per site, ratio of positive to negative reviews

 
You might not think of accountants when you are doing your marketing, but we encourage you to think about the “numbers” part of marketing, the financial side. And as always, if you want help developing these processes and metrics, please reach out.

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.

​The start of a new year also means that it’s the perfect time to revisit old business strategies from last year so that you can maximize your revenue for 2019. If your financial numbers were fantastic last year, that’s great! Keep the strategies that worked for you and cut the ones that didn’t.

If your financial numbers weren’t amazing last year, or maybe you’re just interested to see how you can increase your revenue, we have you covered. Here are 10 ways you can boost your revenue this year:

1. Revisit your current prices and make adjustments as necessary.
Many people will tell you that increasing your prices will increase your profits, but that’s not necessarily true. Increasing your prices by a small amount might increase your profits without turning away existing customers, but make sure you research your competitors’ prices and adjust based on what makes sense in your market.

2. Bundle your services or products together.
Make your products or services more attractive by bundling them together and pricing them at a better deal than purchasing the services or products separately. Customers that only want one particular product or service should still be able to purchase the product or service à la carte, but offering different packages of increasing value makes it much easier to upsell to clients and increase your business revenue.

3. Offer free gift with purchase.
Tacking on a complimentary or free service to your products or services could be the small push needed to close sales. Even better, you could add a complimentary or free service to your highest-quality bundle. As an example, the cosmetics industry has been doing this for decades.

4. Start a new product or service line.
If you’re limited to just a few products or services, it’s time to expand. If you mow lawns, offer a leaf collection or snow removal service. If you sell shoes, add socks. If you manage a restaurant, consider offering alcohol. Expanding the scope of what you’re selling will provide you with additional revenue. 

5. Expand your geographic reach.
If you’re still only offering services and products locally, consider expanding your reach, especially because the internet is so readily available nowadays. Think about which services you can offer virtually; some may require you to invest in cloud-based delivery systems. If you only sell products at a physical location, ecommerce is a huge industry and you could definitely increase revenue by having a storefront online.

6. Learn to say “no” to bad clients.
This may seem counter intuitive, but learning to turn away bad clients is really important. When clients are ungrateful, unreasonable and just take up too many of your resources, you have to realize that they are unprofitable. By turning them away, you can devote more of your attention to building relationships with your best customers and creating new, profitable opportunities.

7. Make your online presence known.
Everyone uses search engines and social media to find the right business to serve their needs, so make sure you can be found online. Create a website for your business and make sure your have business pages on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You’ll have to develop some marketing strategies and optimize your site to rank high, but, when done right, these channels can drastically impact the amount of revenue you get.

8. Manage your online reputation.
When you have many good reviews, your credibility goes up and your business is more appealing to potential clients and customers. If your clients leave you an amazing testimonial, it’s a good idea to ask them to post it online as well—especially on Yelp, your Facebook Business Page, and Google Reviews. On the other hand, negative reviews will look bad to potential clients and can negatively impact your revenue, so make sure you respond appropriately to the review and show potential clients that you care about getting things right.

9. Encourage customers and clients to sign up for a continuity program.
Do you have loyal customers? Reward them by offering a membership or continuity program with VIP benefits. Retail, restaurants, and service businesses can set up privileges like faster service, discounted prices, and frequent purchase rewards that many consumers will pay a small monthly fee for.

10. Encourage customer referrals by building and nurturing customer relationships.
Connect with clients and build strong relationships through effective communication, providing exceptional service, getting feedback, addressing concerns, and showing appreciation. Doing so can increase repeat customers, customer referrals and your business revenue.

If you’re looking to boost your business revenue this year, definitely give these strategies a try. 

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.

In response to the 2018 Wayfair decision by the Supreme Court, at least 30 states have instituted new regulations related to sales tax collection by remote sellers. Will your business be affected?

​Check out this article to learn more about California's adoption of economic nexus.

Check state nexus requirements here.

​Please feel free to reach out to us for assistance if you find yourself facing economic nexus challenges.

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.

But you might want to consider putting together a short, 1- to 2-page concise document that includes the basic components of a typical business plan: mission, vision, strategies, and objectives. 

Mission Statement
 
A mission statement describes what the company is in business to do. And while you could simply state a mission similar to “Our mission is to sell our products and services,” you may want to think bigger than that in terms of how you want to be known or to impact more than your customers. 

Vision Statement
 
A vision statement describes your company’s future position.  It’s what you aspire to be.  It could again be, “Our vision is to sell more products and services than any other business.” Or it could be more inspiring and uplifting. 

Business Strategies, Goal and Objectives
 
Your business strategies support how you’ll get from where you are to what is stated in your mission and vision statements. While there may be many ways to accomplish your mission and vision, strategies are the approaches you’ll take to get there. 
 
Goals are measurable destinations with a timeline that are created from your strategies. Objectives finally get down to the nitty gritty and state the tactics and action plans you need to execute to put all of this work into play. 
 
Each of these items can be written out on a few lines, taking up all together no more than a few pages.

The benefits of having a concise business plan are many: if you think of an idea you want to do, you can check the plan to make sure your idea falls under your vision, mission, and strategies that you’ve laid out for the year. If it doesn’t, then you’ll know that your idea would take you off track from your plan, and you know how easy that can happen these days with all of the distractions and options available to us.      
 
You may want to add additional sections to your plan depending on your strategies. If you plan to launch a new product or execute new marketing strategies, you might want to add a Market Summary section. If you seek new funding, you might want to have a section on funding options. With business planning, it makes sense to do what’s relevant, and nothing more or less. 
 
We wish you the very best in 2019, and if we can help you with the financial management side of your business, please reach out. 

This is general information and should not be acted upon without first determining its application to your specific situation. Please contact your CPA or tax advisor for additional details.