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Protect Yourself From Invoice Scams

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Paying on phony invoices is an occupational risk for small businesses. They are regularly the target of scammers hoping to take advantage of sloppy bookkeeping, inattention on the part of employees and poor communications between the people in the firm ordering goods, those receiving them and those approving payment. All too often they are paid unwittingly along with a number of other routine bills.

Scammers have fake invoice production for such things as stationery or cleaning services, down to a fine art. Their invoice will include names (perhaps established by a prior phone call to the business for some innocuous seeming

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Sketching Out The Competitive Landscape

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For anyone trying to grow a business, one of the necessary tasks is to map the competitive landscape and continue to keep tabs on how things develop in it over time.  With a good understanding of the competition facing your business you’ll be able to spot and exploit opportunities as they develop.  Ignoring the competition or letting success lull you into a false sense of security could mean nasty surprises further down the road. The following points can help you start developing a strategy:

  • Identify your competitors: Your competition includes anything that could draw customers away from your business. For example, for a movie theater, other cinemas represent a direct competitor. But there are also a number of indirect competitors that need to be outmaneuvered as well. These are businesses after the same customer dollar as you. For the movie theater, cable TV networks, DVD rental stores and even online movies all represent competitors.

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New rules for divorced parents & depedent deductions

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The IRS issued in 2007 regulations addressing various issues pertaining to divorced parents and who can claim the dependent exemptions. These new rules take affect for most divorced parents with the filing of your 2009 income tax return.

Beginning for years beginning after July 2, 2008 (so 2009 for calendar year individual taxpayers) the IRS will no longer accept a divorce decree in lieu of Form 8332, Release of Claim to Exemption fro Child of Divorced or Separated Parents, even if the decree contains all of the information otherwise found on the Form 8332 and is not conditional in any respect (for example, conditioned on child support payments being current, etc.).

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Watch out for taxes if you sell your life insurance contract

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The IRS has issued two new rulings addressing the sale and surrender of life insurance contracts from the point of view of policyholders and the investors. In this down economy, it can make good economic sense to sell an insurance policy that is no longer needed, or maybe can no longer be afforded.

The sale of an insurance policy is the sale of an asset; however, the gain could be either ordinary income (taxed like wages) or capital gain income (generally a lower tax rate). You will also need to take into account your investment in the policy (your tax basis).

Now, this discussion does not pertain to someone selling their insurance policy when they are either chronically ill or terminally ill. In those circumstances special exclusions generally will apply.

There are three situations under which you may be selling your policy.

  1. Surrender of the policy to the issuer for cash value.
  2. Sale of the policy with cash surrender value to an unrelated person.
  3. Sale of the policy with no cash surrender value to an unrelated person.

Here are the examples for each situation which demonstrate how the tax bite is determined.

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You’re being audited and you’re missing records, now what?

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So you’re facing an audit and your records, or a portion of them, have gone missing. Or, you’re just a normal entrepreneur chasing from one project to another and your record keeping habits were just, well, not habits at all. You may not be able to produce receipts, bills or other written documentation for all the items on your tax return. That’s when you must turn to reconstructing your records or gathering together the best proof you have for the IRS.

The law does not require perfect record keeping habits—it’s just simpler that way. It’s perfectly legal to reconstruct your records in any way to provide adequate evidence that what you claimed on your return was, in fact, accurate.

Dealing with Disasters

For those who haven’t experienced a disaster first hand it’s difficult to imagine, even from the graphic images fed to us by the media, the realities of the situation. What pictures cannot convey is the frustration of an owner watching their business suffer through the several days or weeks during which power is unavailable, transport facilities are out of operation, communications are down and access to the premises is prohibited. It’s exactly those restrictions that can spell the death of a business caught up in a disaster and unprepared to deal with the consequences.

Are you prepared? Ask yourself these questions, they cover some of the most critical aspects of keeping the business afloat after a disaster.