Ask Your Accounting Firm: How Will the New Rule on Leases Affect Me in 2019?

There may be a variety of leases you depend on to run your business in Nashville. Office space is the least of it; you may also be leasing a vehicle, piece of equipment, furniture, or another type of asset.

If you plan on entering more leases in the foreseeable future, check in soon with your trusted accounting firm. A new regulation on leasehold accounting, IFRS 16, will take effect in January 2019. It can potentially impact your business in the long run and day to day.

What is this new regulation?

To date, companies must classify their leases either as finance or operating. In a finance lease, the asset remains owned by the lessor throughout the lease period (as with anything rented). In an operating lease, the asset could be eventually transferred to the lessee (as with a loan). As such, operating leases are counted simply as expenses, while finance leases can be considered assets or liabilities—items that must be listed in a balance sheet.

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Disaster Preparedness Is a Topic You Should Discuss with Your CPA

Tennessee may have been spared from the hurricanes that have hit nearby states over the last several months, but even small business owners in Nashville should take time to assess their own preparedness for natural disasters. If the city sees a calamity that’s anything like the floods of 2010, it is best to know how to mitigate and manage the disaster’s effects.

For small business owners, disaster preparedness includes ensuring your records will survive the event and understanding how your finances can recover after the fact—tasks for which your trusted CPA is qualified to help.

Document all transactions and operations

Properly documenting all transactions and operations is always a good business practice. However, keeping close track of your inventory, payroll, bookkeeping, equipment, supplies, and the like will also serve an essential purpose should disaster strike.

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Starting a Small Business? Clarify These Payroll Basics with Your CPA Firm

Part and parcel of starting a small business in Nashville is determining how many employees you will need, and how you will hire, manage, and—last but not least—pay them. As you set up shop, don’t forget to discuss these payroll basics with your CPA firm. They will affect your business down to the details of operations and your bottom line.

Worker classification: employees vs contractors

There are two main ways to classify your workers: employees or contractors. As opposed to employees, contractors would only work with you on specific projects, invoice you for services rendered based on an hourly rate, and receive no benefits whatsoever. Employees, on the other hand, are essential to your day-to-day operations, and receive salary and benefits. These distinctions are important not only because they impact how you’ll get the services you need, but also because they dictate the tax requirements you should fulfill.

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Virtual Services of an Outsourced Accounting Firm: Your Questions, Answered

You may have already heard of the benefits of virtual accounting. Whether or not you work out of Nashville, using the virtual services of an accounting firm can help you access important financial data easily, enjoy the increased efficiency of digital bookkeeping, and save resources that would have been otherwise spent on maintaining an in-house accountant.

But what is it like working remotely with an accountant? Your questions can be answered right here.

Will I still retain control even while outsourcing?

You might wonder if things could slip right under your nose since you won’t be able to check in on the accountant poring over ledgers in your office. The truth is, just because you give up a brick-and-mortar setup doesn’t mean you’ll be ceding any responsibility or control.

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How Entrepreneurs Can Benefit from Smart Tax Planning with a CPA

Avoiding hefty fines for filing errors and inaccuracies isn’t the only reason why small businesses and entrepreneurs need to pay more attention to doing taxes. As any reputable CPA will tell you, tax planning yields plenty of advantages for your Nashville business. By analyzing your company’s financial situation from a tax perspective, you not only ensure tax efficiency but reduce tax liability as well. Here are some of the benefits you can look forward to.

Estimate Future Expenses

Tax planning can be extremely useful for predicting losses and expenses for growing companies. If you need to acquire new equipment or spend money for a business expansion project, you can take out a loan at the best time in terms of tax liability. Getting a loan when your peak income drops or near the end of the tax year will help you maximize tax deductions on loan interest. However, experts urge entrepreneurs to remember this rule of thumb: never incur additional expenses only to gain a tax deduction. It’s just not worth the risk.

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What the GOP Tax Overhaul Entails, According to a CPA Firm

After more than three decades, the U.S. senate approved the biggest overhaul in the tax system last December. Though the cut to corporate taxes might seem to be the most impactful element of the tax overhaul, a CPA firm will tell you that this is just one of the many things in the tax overhaul that may affect your business.

Under the tax overhaul, or the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, modifications to the Internal Revenue Code, including changes to credits and deductions, have been implemented. Such modifications have been made in hopes of spurring economic growth. Businesses in Nashville, however, might face a different kind of tax overhaul in the near future.

How the tax overhaul will affect businesses

Perhaps the biggest change made by the federal tax overhaul is the provision lowering the corporate tax rate to a flat rate of 21 percent. By doing this, lawmakers hope to encourage large corporations to set up shop in the United States, thereby stimulating economic growth. Having said that, several factors are still at play before a foreign corporation can move to the US.

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A Financial Review by Your Accounting Firm: How Will It Help Your Nashville Business?

There may come a time when you need a loan or a grant for your Nashville business. Perhaps you’ll be testing a new product; perhaps you’ll need money to buy equipment; perhaps you’ll simply need the extra funding to keep operations rolling. Whatever the case, there’s one thing an accounting firm can do for you: conduct a review engagement.

What is a review engagement?

A review engagement is one form of attestation service – like an audit – that a CPA performs to assure stakeholders that the financial information you present them is fair and reliable. Essentially, it is a vote of confidence for your business.

If all goes well, a review report will state that nothing has come to the accounting firm’s attention to suggest that your financial statements are not in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. No “material modifications” should therefore be done to them.

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Tips from Your Nashville CPA: How You Can Start the New Tax Year Right

Are you relieved that tax season is over? Returns filed and receipts in hand, you feel like you can finally get back to running your small Nashville business without worrying about numbers for the IRS.

While that might be partly true, the fact of the matter is it’s never too soon to start preparing for the next time you file taxes. Accounting, after all, is part of daily operations.

Here are a few tips from your Nashville CPA to ensure your books – and business – will be in order right from the start of the new financial year.

Track your finances more efficiently

Let’s start with the basics: If you were all over the place heading into the last tax season, you should organize your files better starting now.

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Running Out of Time Before April 17? Get a CPA Firm to Help You File a Tax Extension Instead

It can happen to anyone in Nashville: you thought you had everything prepared for the tax filing and paying deadline. But, now that April 17 is drawing closer, it seems you might not get your submissions sorted after all.

Rather than risk filing an incomplete tax return, you should do the next best thing by that deadline: request for a tax extension with help from a CPA firm.

A regular request

Tax extensions – which grant another six months to file taxes – are given regularly to those who request it by the year’s original deadline. They help ensure that taxpayers file their reports correctly and comprehensively.

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2018 Tax Season: The Crunch Time Checklist for Your Nashville Business and Your Partner Accounting Firm

Are you prepared to file federal taxes for your small business in Nashville? The deadline for reporting last year’s finances is fast approaching. By now, you should have gotten in touch with your trusted accounting firm to ensure all your statements will be in order.

Here’s a quick checklist of what you should be doing – or should have already started doing – heading into the crunch of the tax-filing season.

Know your deadlines

Simple, right? April 15 is the last day for filing taxes, year in and year out. Not quite. The due date for your business depends on the type of legal entity it is registered as.

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Ask Your CPA: What Do the Tax Reforms Mean for Your Small Business in Nashville?

The last few weeks of 2017 brought sweeping changes to the country’s tax laws, leaving no taxpayer unaffected. Though not all reforms included in the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act take effect immediately, you should consult your trusted CPA and tax adviser about what the new provisions could mean for your small business in Nashville.

Cuts with conditions

The new tax bill particularly hits small firms because it allows “pass-through” entities – which are taxed on the individual owner’s level, rather than the corporate – to deduct up to 20% of their income. But the exact percentage of deductions depends on several things. Read more from this blog post: http://bit.ly/2BqIjUT

CPA Firm: Three Quick Tips to Make Computing Personal Taxes a Breeze

Although the April 17, 2018 deadline for tax returns is still a few weeks away, there is definitely nothing wrong with getting a head start with your computation. After all, it’s better to start early since this will give you enough time to properly compute the taxes you owe and make any adjustments as necessary.

Unfortunately, not everyone understands the intricacies of computing taxes, which may lead to mistakes in the computation. This may seem like an innocent error, but these mistakes could lead to the IRS knocking on your door and asking for an explanation—and that’s a kind of stress you’re better off avoiding. One of the best ways to do that is to employ the assistance of a respected Nashville CPA firm, like Evan Hutcheson, CPA, LLC.

Of course, there are other steps you can take to help ensure that you file an accurate tax return and reduce the amount of stress that you have to face.

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