As business owners, we may be so busy making sure the bills get paid and the product gets out the door that we may not be quite as proactive about our own compensation. To pay themselves, many new business owners take what’s left after employees and vendors have been paid, and that ends up being their paycheck. I’d like to propose a whole new way: entrepreneurs should be paid three times, once for what they do, second for the risk they take, and third for the going concern they’ve built. If you’re not getting paid three times, here’s how it can work. First: Your Services Just like the employees and contractors we work with, we should get paid for the actual work we perform in our business. Most of us wear many hats in our business, and we should get paid for all those hats! As your business grows, the tasks you initially performed will be delegated to employees. They would never go without a paycheck, and you shouldn’t either.The amount you pay yourself should be similar to the market rate you would have to pay someone if you hired someone else to do the jobs you are doing. As [...]
Five Hidden Talents of Your Accountant
When you think of an accountant’s duties, you might think about traditional tasks, such as tax preparation, bookkeeping, and financial statement preparation. Here are five additional tasks that accountants can help with that you might not think of. 1. Evaluating Current Accounting Employees How can you know if your accounting employee is a star that does everything right, is organized, and is fast? Or if you’ve accidentally hired someone who talks a good game but is doing everything wrong, takes way too long based on your size company, or is making unnecessary and costly mistakes? Your external accountant can often help you objectively evaluate your current staff and point out their strengths and weaknesses so you can create the right training programs for them, communicate the right message at review time, or take the proper HR steps you need to. Your accountant can also help to train your bookkeepers so that they are more efficient. If your bookkeeper is not performing at the level of pay you are providing, it can be an inefficiency in your business. Your accountant can help you make sure you are not over- or underpaying your current staff. 2. Hiring a Bookkeeper For your businesses [...]
Is Your Data Backed Up? Seven Often-Overlooked Places
Hopefully, you’re already making backups of the data on your business server on a regular basis. It’s simple to set up data backups automatically and then forget about them until you need them. But have you ever looked around to see if there are any gaps in your backup strategy? Here are seven places to look to make sure all your business data is backed up safely. 1.Online Calendar Do you use an online calendar? If you use a calendar such as Google Calendar, then it’s a good idea to keep a backup in case something happens to it that’s out of your control. In Google, go to Settings from the Settings menu, click the Calendars tab, and Export your calendar to get your backup. 2.Website It’s common for business owners to rely on their webmaster to have a backup of their website, but this is often not within the scope of the webmaster duties. Check with your webmaster to get a backup of your website files so that you are protected against hackers, hosting problems, and more. If your blog is in the same place, make sure you have a backup of it as well. You may also want [...]