Summer is a great time of year for most businesses to pause for just a little while to take stock, congratulate yourself on what you’ve accomplished so far this year, and make big plans for your future. Here are five summertime strategies to help you regroup, reassess, and rejuvenate your business. 1. Mid-Year Review If your business runs by the calendar year, 2014 is already more than half over. This is a perfect time to stop and reflect where you’ve been, what you’ve accomplished, and where you want to go next. You can make this process as informal or formal as you want. Some firms hold complex retreats; you may simply need some quiet time on a weekend where all your family is busy doing something else. If you’ve never done any planning and feel like you need a guide, consider the book, The One-Page Business Plan written by Jim Horan. 2. Take a Vacation There’s nothing better to rekindle your creative juices than to get away from the business for a while. Summertime is when most people take vacation, so if your business is not having its busy season, this might be a good time to go away for [...]
Burbank CPA General Musings: Do You Know Your Weakest Business Link?
You’ve already built a solid business that you have great pride in. Yet, if you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re on a constant search for how to make your business better. One way to focus your search is to look for the weakest link in your business. From a return-on-investment standpoint, working on and fixing your weakest link is the highest payback thing you can do. It lifts your entire company up and makes it stronger. The key is to look as objectively as possible at what might be holding your business back from being even greater than it already is. Here are four major areas where you can look for your weakest link: 1. Client-facing interactions A great area to start looking is where you have interactions with clients. These include things like phone greetings, email, websites, your storefront, your presence at networking meetings, client service interactions, your proposals, invoices, and thank you notes. What jumps out at you as the weakest link when you look through the above list? Perhaps it’s as simple as recording a more friendly voice mail greeting or as complex as getting your website redone. Don’t get overwhelmed if a lot of these items need [...]
Tax Musings of a Burbank CPA: IRS to Impose Direct Deposit Limits to Prevent Identity Theft
A major problem of tax fraud the IRS is trying to combat is fraudulent preparers filing multiple returns and having many refunds direct deposited into the same account (usually belonging to said preparer). So the IRS is planning to put some direct deposit limitations on tax refunds starting next January. See more details in this article in AccountingToday by Michael Cohn: http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/irs_watch/irs-impose-direct-deposit-limits-prevent-identity-theft-71230-1.html So in the future you can only deposit three direct deposits into the same bank account; more than three will get a notification from the IRS that any refunds over three will be mailed by check to the taxpayer’s address of record. Time will tell if this will help prevent tax fraud or just a change of tactics by the bad guys! For financial, accounting and tax musings, You can count on us to count for you! Email: bstonercpa@sbcglobal.net Phone: 818-317-6035 Website: www.briantstonercpa.com Android and the IPhone: Has been Featured On https://twitter.com/bstonercpa