Easy Accounting Techniques

By Wayne Messick

 Because of their importance to business owners for their insights into virtually everything financial, accountants are no longer considered solely someone who oversees the bookkeeping. Most enlightened business owners consider their accountant’s opinions on everything from tax issues, to financial planning, to their ultimate objective of total business and personal asset protection.

If your business accountant sees themselves as simply a tax adviser, someone immersed in the traditional technical accounting roles usually attached to their profession, that’s fine for them, and for you too as long as they are conversant in issues more typically referred to a tax planning for the future and if they are part of a network of business accountants who offer these other vital services.

Business accountants, whether they specialize in tax preparation, tax controversy, or tax law - can not know everything you need them to know in order to provide you with the range of services required of a growing evolving business. The business accountants whose broad based education and experience allows them to understand when there are issues that are outside their areas of expertise, in other words they know what they don’t know, and who are not so propriety in nature that they will let their clients suffer rather than referring them to a specialist - are the preferred professional for you on several levels.

For example if your accountant realizes that, through their questions and their understanding of you and your business, that your bookkeeping system needs upgrading - and they are willing to recommend a bookkeeping, your business is the beneficiary. Their reputation is at stake when the recommend the bookkeeping firm, so they will choose carefully on your behalf. And since the bookkeeping firm wants the business to keep coming in from several business accountants - they are more likely to treat your engagement more seriously than if you just dropped in off the street.

The same holds true of financial planners, insurance agents, lawyers, and other professionals recommended by your business accountant. It creates a win, win, win relationship between each party.

Many of the best business accountants, while they may have started out doing the write-up work typically associated with an accountant, filing taxes and other required forms to the state and federal government - have taken serious steps through continuing education in accounting and related fields.

Most do so to enhance both their understanding of the options and opportunities available to you and so they will recognize these options and opportunities earlier rather than later, so they can steer you toward the experts in these areas. For example becoming a Certified Financial Planner does not mean they want to dole out financial planning advice - it could mean they want to know more about the benefits available, to put dollars and sense in their discussion of the importance of their recommendations, so you’ll be more proactive than reactive when it comes to financial matters.

So, if business accountants are becoming more well rounded as overall financial advisers for your business, where do you find one if you are not happy (or not sure you’re happy) with the one you’ve got? How do you go about looking for a tax advisor and what’s the benefit of beginning the search today rather than next week or next month?

The best place to start, as usual, is where you are right now. For example if the business accountants you know seem willing to have an open discussion about their areas of special interest and if they are interested in the team concept - where planners and advisors from several disciplines collaborate together on your behalf - I’d say you were half way there.

The other half really comes down to which of the business accountants you know or know of that you feel the most comfortable with. Let’s face it, talking about the details of your business, why you have made the decisions you’ve made in the past, and what’s important to you in the future - is not easy and you will only have those key strategic conversations over the long haul with people you are comfortable with.

And you can learn a lot by interviewing them. That’s right, business accountants should be interviewed - just like you interview other professionals. It’s interesting that you have never interviewed an accountant or lawyer - unlike your daughter’s piano teacher, or your son’s camp counselors or tennis coach.

If you do not interview perspective professionals - then you have to live with their results, and pay for their mistakes or decisions they make on your behalf without knowing you as well as they should when then are acting for you. And if you don’t interview them you will never know if they are terminally afflicted with the NIH syndrome. The NIH syndrome will stifle the scope of knowledge available to you, cause you to miss opportunities, and live in fear that you are missing other important benefits available to business owners whose business accountants and other advisers are not infected by the NIH syndrome.

What is the NIH syndrome? It’s the belief by your advisers that the only good ideas are theirs and anything “not invented here” is to be discounted and most likely discarded. Who becomes infected with the NIH syndrome and is it a symptom of other issues you should know about. In short, those infected with the NIH syndrome are so insecure of their past and present advice that they want to keep you away from others who might, with good reason, question that advice. They may offer suffer from severe financial proprietary disorder, a constant fear that if you talk to another adviser you may take your business elsewhere. Or they may be manifesting an advice-deity complex that assures them that they have all the answers.

Business accounts or other professional advisers who suffer from one or more of the variations of the NIH syndrome should be avoided at all cost, and if you already have one - get rid of them immediately.

Where can you look, today, to start the search and interview process that will help you select the best from a range of business accountants? Simple, call three successful business owners in you industry that are 20-50 miles away from you. Ask them if they are really really pleased with their business accountants and if so will they introduce you. If you live in a remote area you may have to ask that question of successful business owners that are not in your industry, but hopefully that won’t be necessary.

When you interview the business accountants whose experiences are in the same industry as you are - they are likely to be conversant with the issues you and your peers face and no doubt will be able to recognize problems that you will face in the future and can do something about because they were brought to you by them in advance.

The savings, not only if fees for the time they would otherwise have to spend to learn about your industry, will come from the fact that someone else has already paid for the research that won’t have to be done for you and they will be able to illustrate the costs and penalties they have experienced when people in your industry did not act proactively to head off these inevitable problems.

If you want to be successful, put together a team of professionals to help you. Typically, management of the progress of the team falls to the business accountants you have on board. They understand that the valuable insights of their

business accountants can help them focus on what is important to them, their family, and the business - for years to come.

Accounting

management accounting techniques

By Syntacticsinc

 To get your web page onto the internet, you will need to find a reliable web hosting company. And exactly what is web hosting?

A web host is a company that has computers hooked up to the internet 24/7. These computers are called servers and IP numbers are assigned to it in order that they may be found by other computers hooked up to the internet. It is on these servers that all your web files are stored, be they HTML files or web pages, graphic files, CSS files or JavaScripts.

Going back to reliable web hosting company, Syntactics Inc. is a web development company which offers web hosting services has proven their credibility by hosting several websites in the past 8 years. This year to mark the holiday season, they are launching their year end sale of custom business website for only $199. Their website sale package consists of five pages custom business website. These pages are your home page, products or services page, contact us +form page, about us page and 1 extra page where you can add anything you want. The website sale package also includes FREE implementation of Google Analytics; it will track every person who visits your website. It will show how people find your website; by this you will know how to enhance their visiting experience. Home page on page optimization; this will help your custom business website achieve top ranking home page and site submission to the largest search engines on the net; Yahoo, MSN and Google. These search engines are where people will search for your website as these are the most widely used search engines in the net.

Before anything else these are Syntactics web hosting service provisions:

1. Content must be provided before the project starts

2. You are allowed to use ten pictures in your website

3. There is an additional cost for flash, additional pages & features

Go on, get ahead of everyone else and get a custom business website for only $199!

Host your website with Syntactics Inc. today! If you do, you will only pay $1.99 each month! 50% savings every month on hosting costs! That is the greatest deal for this season.

Visit http://www.syntacticsinc.com for more information.

Find more about Visual Foxpro Development,

Outsourcing Philippine Services and

Outsourcing Programmers at www.syntacticsinc.com.

Accounting

cost accounting techniques

By Michiel Van Kets

 The function of a chartered accountant can be intricate to understand, the majority just associates them with tax returns. This however, is far from all a chartered account is and if that is the only thing you are asking your regular accountant to do, then you are missing out on a valuable source of information advice and knowledge. You can use an accountant for more things than just your tax return, if you are not; you are missing out on a valuable and informative resource. Chartered and tax accountants are proficient in a multitude of services, they can help you with as well as financial to personal matters and should be considered as a useful source of advice and assistance.

You should inform your accountant anything that goes in your family. Up to a point of course! Everyone wants to keep the amount of tax they pay to the government down. With this information they can then plan, valuate the suitable strategies when it comes down your tax issues and investment plans.

One of the main tasks you expect from an accountant is that they can help reducing the amount of tax you need to pay. If you provide them with all necessary details they can put this information to good use and plan how you can save money in the long-term. A good accountant will come up with good strategies that will make it possible for you to save money for future events, such as college funds and marriages.

Chartered accountants operate in all sectors of business and finance, including public practice work, government, and the private sector. In Australia they are gathered under the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Australia and go under designated letters CA. Some senior members of the Institute may be nominated Fellows and may then be recognized under the letters FCA.

So to the question, what does a chartered accountant exactly do?

They can certainly help you out when it comes to preparing income tax returns, and that goes for both personal or for business areas. Business tax returns can be arranged for companies, superannuation funds, partnerships or trusts, capital gains tax and rental properties. They can provide services to help legally lessen defer and plan tax payments. Other areas you can expect an accountant to be of valuable help are Business tax, business acquisitions, sale of shares or property or disposals and appropriate tax structure.

Australian chartered accountants based in Sydney or other areas will have experience of the Australian Tax Office (ATO), and can give you information and on Business Activity Statements and Goods & Services Tax.

Whether it is for personal use or for a business, financial planning is a crucial tool you should embrace to secure the future, for any planned or unforeseen events. A financial planning service should include superannuation products for maximising retirement benefits and meeting superannuation guarantee obligations, investments for building wealth including property, shares, fixed interest and managed funds as well as various insurances for protection from economic loss in the event of disablement, accident, illness or death,.

Superannuation can be managed to save and invest money whilst you are working to use in your retirement. For many Australians, this is the second largest asset after the family home. Chartered accountants can inform and advice you on Self Managed Superannuation Funds (SMSF) and other available choices.

If you have already have a business or are registering a new one and need help then see a chartered accountant who can help with this and the accounting. They will be able to offer valuable advice on increasing profits by the application of useful financial plans and systems. A chartered accountant can help you in many areas; business valuations, payroll services, accounting services, strategic planning and salary packaging, financial statement preparation and computer accounting software are just some of the areas they operate in.

A modern and resourceful accountancy agent will be eBusiness ready, meaning a lot of the communication will be via email and income tax returns can be arranged from computerised accounting files, such as Quickbooks and MYOB. The agency you choose should be informative and experts in their field of work, they must be able to answer any questions concerning your personal or business account.

You can find chartered accounting firms on the internet. Regardless if you are an individual, operates a small business or a large corporation, they will be able to help in locating solutions to reach your financial goals.

Michiel Van Kets provides article services for Nicole Flannery who writes articles for ARW. Adrian Raftery Wawrzyniak. (Chartered Accountants Sydney) offering a suite of professional financial services and proactive solutions to help clients reach their financial goals. If you are looking for accountants , information or advice on accountants Sydney visit ARWs website

Accounting

accounting techniques

By Wayne Messick

 True, a Buy Sell Agreement is an important document - one that will insure the continuation of your business and enable your family to receive the greatest return possible for your lifetime of work. If there is money behind it.

If the cash isn’t there a Buy Sell Agreement could end up being a disaster, because it could obligate your family, heirs, partners etc. to attempt the impossible - causing the entire enterprise to collapse along with your family’s security.

Small business accountants are often consulted by the business owner and the other members of the business owner’s advisory team when drafting a Buy Sell Agreement is imminent. They are consulted about business valuation, income, tax planning and similar matters. Isn’t there something else they should be consulted about?

If your small business accountant has any experience at all yours is not the first But Sell Agreement they’ve seen. This is not there first experience with the process and they may have lived through the execution of Buy Sell Agreements their other clients have in place at their death or dissolution of their business.

The question is, should they offer advice whether requested or not, dealing with the most pressing question business owners should be asking their advisors - where will the money come from to fund the agreement, how much will it cost, and can we afford it?

You see, unless it is backed up by money, a Buy Sell Agreement is a worthless piece of paper. Ask your attorney what will happen when their perfectly crafted Buy Sell Agreement can not be executed because the money isn’t there. This is a contract right? Are their possible repercussions when your family can’t live up to it’s terms? What are they?

If you intend for the company to stay in family hands, perhaps your son or daughter who are already in place and learning the ropes, the need for a Buy Sell Agreement is to convert some of the value of the company into cash so any other children can receive their inheritance in cash. And it’s so your widow will have financial security that is not 100% dependent on the next generation’s ability to run the company.

If you intend to sell your interest to a partner or perhaps to an outsider - you want the entire amount in cash if possible so all your kids and your widow will receive the maximum return on your lifetime of hard work.

There are actually only four ways you can fund your Buy Sell Agreement - to make it worth the paper it is printed on.

You or your partner, or outsider can begin now to set the money aside in a special escrow fund untouched until needed, your estate or your outside buyer can borrow the money at your death to make the cash available for your family, your estate can set up the terms of transfer to be on an installment basis, or you can buy life insurance.

Small business accountants are uniquely positioned to give you accurate insights into which of these four options is a real possibility and just how one scenario will work out for you compared to another. Not asking your business accountant do run through this exercise should not excuse them.

You put your faith in your small business accountant to do what they know is right and to tell you about the elements of your business and other financial affairs you’d never think on your own. For example:

Is it possible, given the current and projected status of your business, your tax bracket, and prevailing interest rates for you or your partner to set aside enough money in a separate account to complete the agreement? How much money in before tax dollars will be needed? How many dollars of additional sales are required to have that much left over? How long will it take to fully fund the agreement? Where will the money come from? What happens if you or your partner dies beforehand?

Borrowing depends upon whether or not somebody believes you or your partner have the assets and income to repay the debt plus interest. If lenders do not have confidence that they will get their money back they won’t loan it. If money is tight they may not be able to loan it. What is the additional cash flow required to repay the loan plus interest? How much money in total will be necessary to fulfil the terms of the agreement? Is this possible? Does it make good business sense?

The installment sale is really just another way of borrowing the money - except the people you want the agreement to protect are the ones guaranteeing the loan. What if business is bad? The cash flow required will be the same unless the family gives them a break on the interest - but that doesn’t seem right does it? Most people who come up with the installment idea plan to use part of the extra profits from the business to make the payments. Does that seem logical - that the business could lose you or your partner, make enough money to replace either one of you, and at the same time generate enough extra money before taxes to pay the note plus interest? Shouldn’t you ask your accountant to run the numbers for you before you rely on this 19th Century business transfer approach?

Life insurance. No matter whether you like the idea or not, life insurance is the most efficient way to make sure that funds are available exactly when they’re needed. The full amount is guaranteed immediately. It’s budgetable and payable in advance - while you are still around and in charge. Ask your accountant to do the numbers - compare the options, who’s taking the risks, what’s the bottom line etc.?

Make sure your small business accountant invites your life insurance agent to every meeting where the terms, options, and funding of the Buy Sell Agreement are being discussed. There are many types of insurance your accountant has no reason to be familiar with. Your accountant and your life insurance agent may be able to collaborate successfully on a strategy that combines all four funding approaches to create the optimum solution for you and your family business.

It is also vital that your spouse is included in these discussions and understands what’s at stake. Your spouse and you should determine together what’s important and consider together the best way for the agreement to provide the money that will result in the accomplishment of your objectives.

Remember, the goal is to maximize the value of your business so you and your family receive a fair return on your years spent building the business.

And there is no substitute for cash, delivered to your family at the right time in the right amount, in the right way, and at the least cost to everyone.

If you want to be successful, put together a team of professionals to help you. Typically, management of the progress of the team falls to the business accountants you have on board. They understand that the valuable insights of their

business accountants can help them focus on what is important to them, their family, and the business - for years to come.

Accounting

accounting techniques in