By Stuart Eisenberg and Marla Miller The IRS defines an opportunity zone as an “economically distressed community where new investments may be eligible for preferential tax treatment.” The Treasury has certified nearly 9,000 of these districts across all U.S. states and its territories, including the entire island of Puerto Rico. An opportunity zone designation has…
Small business owners looking to convert their organization to an employee-owned company may have an easier path thanks to a new law signed by President Donald Trump last year. Before the law was passed in August 2018, the rules surrounding loans backed by the Small Business Association (SBA) used to create Employee Stock Ownership Plans…
The data in your QuickBooks company file contains some of the most sensitive information on your computer. Make sure it’s secure. Your customer list is gold. And those Social Security and bank card numbers in your payroll, client, and vendor records need to be protected from intruders and only viewed by authorized employees. It’s not…
There is an excellent chance that even if you’re an expert in your particular industry, you’re probably not an expert in small business finances. This may not seem like that big of an issue on the surface. However, in order to make the best decisions possible for your company, you need to have complete and…
The problem with discarding all of the records for a particular year once the statute of limitations has expired is that many taxpayers combine their normal tax records with the records that substantiate the basis of their capital assets. The basis records need to be separated and should not be discarded until after the statute…
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The new international lease accounting rules are causing some CFOs to reconstruct how they gauge corporate performance. Previous rules allowed some leases to be recorded in footnotes to financial statements. CFOs must now report leases on the balance sheet as assets and liabilities. Rather than recording lease payments as operating expenses, companies now need to…
The tax code places limits on the amounts that individuals can gift to others (as money or property) without paying taxes. This is meant to keep individuals from using gifts to avoid the estate tax that is imposed upon inherited assets. This can be a significant issue for family-operated businesses when the business owner dies;…
Although Congress, as part of the recent tax reform, promised to do away with the alternative minimum tax (AMT), it only did so for C corporations; as a result, the AMT still applies to individuals. Congress originally developed the AMT in 1969 as a means to prevent high-income individuals from using tax shelters to reduce…
One of the reasons we like QuickBooks is because it uses language and processes that are familiar to small businesspeople. Instead of using the term “accounts receivable,” it has a menu label that says Customers and menu items that use phrases like Create Invoices and Receive Payments. You would have to go into the Chart…
