Category: Operations

Article Contributed by Dominique Molina

Small business owners know that, especially during those first few years you’re in business, it’s important to save money where you can. Many tasks – from sweeping the floors to keeping the books – fall squarely in your lap. The savings realized by not hiring a janitor or a bookkeeper then go into growing your business, with the ultimate goal of being able to afford to hire someone to do those things for you.

When it comes to taxes, however, the savings isn’t as cut and dried. Yes, it will cost you to have someone do your taxes, but in many cases the additional tax savings will more than pay for it.

Here are some reasons why you should seriously consider hiring someone to do your taxes:

1. Your business includes large amounts of equipment or inventory. If you’re a consultant who works from home and doesn’t have to deal with specialized equipment, maintain an inventory, or worry about other capital expenses, you might not need someone to do your taxes. However, each of these expenditures has significant tax implications. The difference in how you treat these expenses can mean literally thousands of dollars of difference in your tax bill. Paying an expert to make sure those expenditures are optimized for tax purposes will pay for itself.
2. You have employees. The moment you hire someone as an employee, your tax situation can change dramatically. You have certain obligations you need to meet, including things such as payroll taxes. You need to make sure those things are handled correctly. Your tax expert or accountant can help you with that process when you first start to hire employees, and then again at tax time. If you primarily use contract labor, however, the situation can be much simpler and may not require that kind of expertise.
3. You sell retail goods. The moment you sell retail goods, you’re required to start collecting sales tax. Sales tax collecting and reporting can be a significant task, and if you mess it up you can face significant fines and penalties. Trust a tax professional to handle your sales tax function.
4. You operate in a highly regulated field. Some small businesses have to deal with more government oversight than others. If your business falls into that category, chances are pretty good that there are some tax implications, as well. A tax expert can help you make sure you’re meeting all of your reporting and compliance requirements.
5. You want to plan your tax strategy. Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t treat their tax situation in a proactive manner. They simply file their taxes each year, and then forget about them until the following year. This is a mistake. By developing a solid tax strategy, you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars each year in your tax burden. A tax expert can help you map out those important business decisions ahead of time.
6. You’re unsure about what can and can’t be deducted when you work from home. A home office can be a tremendous asset in terms of your tax situation, but there are very stringent rules about what is and isn’t deductible about a home office. The same goes for using a personal vehicle for business purposes. A tax professional can help identify those items that are eligible for deduction, tell you what you need in the form of documentation, and help you avoid making deduction errors that could result in significant fines.
7. Your business could benefit from financial advice. Many tax preparers are also skilled accountants. They can help you examine your business on a regular basis to make sure that you’re in the best tax situation, of course. But they can also help you to analyze various components of your business so that you identify where there are opportunities for improvement or increased efficiency. An accountant who’s an expert at analyzing business data will save you money both in taxes and in your day-to-day operations.

Many small business owners are quite capable of doing their own taxes. This is especially true of service-based businesses, where there’s not a whole lot going on in terms of complexity. That said, most small businesses can realize at least some savings by hiring someone to do your taxes. It’s simply a matter of finding a tax professional to work with that you trust, that’s experienced dealing with businesses like yours, and who fully understands the trends and changes to the small business tax landscape.

About the Author

Dominique Molina is President of the American Institute of Certified Tax Coaches, an organization of tax professionals who are trained to help their clients rescue thousands of dollars in wasted tax and is a registered educator with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA). In addition to her blogging and speaking engagements, Dominique also provides engagement letter, accounting marketing and a range of accounting templates to her clients.

Article Contributed by Stefan Russel

Making the world your office.

When the idea for Vilondo. com – a site for luxury villas in Bali – came up about a year ago the philosophy was, that it should be possible to work on Vilondo from everywhere in the world. Here I am one year later. The business is up and running and we have worked on Vilondo from as different places as San Francisco, New York, Copenhagen, among rice paddies in the Mekong delta in Vietnam, Hawaii and Bangkok. Guess where I am sitting now? In a beach café on the tiny island Gili in Indonesia looking at the brightest blue water you can imagine. Here are no cars, only bicycles and horses, but here’s Internet like almost everywhere in the world, apart from the most remote places.

I thought that other entrepreneurs might find inspiration in the way we are doing things, hence this article. At first I was considering writing a hard-core business style article, with some nice buzzwords. I had even made some up for the occasion, but Lifestyle management was already taken, location transition did not sound that cool and actually, what we are doing isn´t rocket science, so instead I will try to describe a regular day at our Bali “office” which is where we have our base right now – I am just in Gili for a few days.

A day at the Vilondo office

As the beams from the Balinese sun hits my face I open my eyes. I consider closing them again and get some more sleep, but decide on getting up and take a quick shower. I can’t remember the last time I used an alarm clock. From my bathroom window I see rice paddies as long as my eye can reach. The color of the rice paddies is intensively green in the early morning light. I love the sight of rice paddies in the morning.

Time to get dressed for work – I basically have to uniforms the light blue swim shorts or the bright blue swim shorts. I choose the light blue pair as the bright ones still feels a little wet from last night’s swim. I pick up my laptop and head for breakfast.

As soon as I open the door from my air-conditioned room I can feel it’s going to be a warm day. I cross the pool area and enter the kitchen.  Tivi – our super hero helper – greets me with a smile and a good morning. She has already prepared breakfast. It is Indonesian style today – chicken, rice and an egg. I pour myself some coffee, pick up my plate, cross the little bridge over the goldfish waters that separate the kitchen area from our outside gazebo.

I eat my breakfast while I check the news on my laptop. No one else is up yet, so the only sounds are the running waters from the pond and from afar the calls to prayer from the local minaret. The Muslims are a minority in Bali, but they certainly know how to make themself heard.

Mads, my partner shows up and we spends some minutes discussing some new ideas before we dig in to our separate work.  A few hours later the temperature is hitting the 30 degrees Celsius level and it is time for a cool down in the pool. A couple of the other guys living and working in our shared villa join us. The fact that everybody’s in their thirties or close to, doesn´t stop us from getting into water fight. Some of the other guys have developed splashing techniques close to perfection. I still have some way to go, so I get out of the pool with water in my eyes, ears and nose.

After lunch the heat forces me into my air-coned room where I spend the afternoon working, including a Skype meeting with a European business partner. As the sun is about to set temperature gets more tolerable and we decide to go for a run on the beach. As we run sweat dripping through the local villages we are met with smiles everywhere and looks that range from amusement to disbelief.

Back at the villa, a huge pile of chicken satay sticks and bowls of salad and rice are awaiting us. Soon after only the wooden sticks from the satay are left, leaving our plates assembling a messy game of pick-up sticks.

We spend a little time rounding of the days’ work as the moon and the stars enter the sky. The day ends with a movie in our outdoor cinema. There is nothing like Hollywood action in the tropic night with the local geckos contributing to the soundtrack. A little later I hit my perfectly made bed and goes to sleep.

Can anyone do it – it sounds expensive?

I guess if you are running an oyster bar or produce sparkling wines moving to an exotic location is probably not an option, but anyone who mainly do business on the Internet can do it. It does not have to be for life. It can be for a few inspirational weeks or months.

It is definitely not expensive. My living expenses are about half of what they would be if I had to live in a small apartment in any major Australian, European or American city and if you need to hire personnel, prices are unbelievable low. For the most basic jobs you can hire someone for around 100$/a month, which of course is nice when you are starting up a new business.

If you have question about the article or about Vilondo in general you are more than welcome to contact me.  You can find our contact information on our website Vilondo.com

About the Author

Stefan Russel is co-founder of Vilondo villa rental – an Internet based company that rent out luxury villas in Bali.

When you’re looking to grow a small business, your marketing strategy is one of the most important things you need to consider. However, even though e-marketing can be a fantastic tool for businesses looking to make more of what they do, it’s important to be careful with the action you take so it has as much impact as possible.

This is why it is so important to consider customer relationship management whenever you are working on anything to do with e-marketing. This is particularly important for small businesses, as it is likely much of your business depends on high quality customer service and understanding your market base.

Companies like SAGE offer CRM software is something that can help you to coordinate your e-marketing campaigns and target your marketing at the right customers. This really matters because marketing incorporates many different departments of your business – the finance team need to know what’s going on for their accounts, the sales team need to be in the loop so they know exactly what to sell and your customer service staff need to know about the topics that are currently relevant to your customer base.

This is why a good CRM system will help you so much: it helps to centralise all your e-marketing information so communication between teams is made easier and more manageable. Employees can also use the software to track the progress of marketing campaigns so they know what action needs to be taken and when – you can also generate reports based on your activity, which can be a useful measure of your success.

Also, as you are probably aware, targeted marketing can be much more effective than a mass mail-out sent to your entire contact list. After all, your customers are likely to be a diverse bunch, with different interests. If, for instance, you are looking to market a particular product, you could use your CRM software database to identify the customers who have purchased something similar in the past and use them as the base for your campaign.

Good CRM systems also typically integrate e-marketing functions so you can carry out much of your work within the software, which is another useful management tool. For example, you could collate different groups of customers to send different emails to, and utilise marketing templates to form the material for your campaign. You can then utilise the report functions of your software to track issues such as your email click-through rate and determine your ROI.

Anyone reading this will undoubtedly be familiar with the internet, so you will most likely also be aware that often, using the internet can end up as something of an advertising overload. This helps to illustrate just how important it is for your e-marketing to be targeted and relevant to your customers, rather than just another generic advert on the internet. CRM solutions might not be able to guarantee all your customers will respond to your e-marketing, but they can certainly help ensure that you are sending the right message to the right people, giving your small business the best possible chance of marketing success.
 

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The retail industry is one of the biggest industries in the world. Whether it is selling pans, toys, clothes or anything else imaginable, the retail industry makes huge amounts of money in every country. There are hundreds of different jobs in retail areas, from marketing to HR and everything in between. Billions of people are employed in the retail industry and it is always busy, even in an economic downturn. If you own a retail business, no matter how big or small it is, there are lots of things you can do to try and beat competitors and gain more sales. This is particularly important in economic slowdowns as businesses battle it out to survive. One important thing that every retail business must try and do is manage their power effectively.

Striking window displays that attract the attention of passers-by can have a huge impact on the sales of a business, particularly in a high street with a lot of footfall. When people have a lot of shops to choose from it is important to make sure that they choose yours. Lighting at the top of a display will show what products you have on offer in your window and make people want to come into your shop. When lighting a window display, customers should not be able to see cables as this looks unsightly and will make the shop appear unprofessional. A rubber cable tidy will keep cables together safely and can be taped to the floor out of the way so customers cannot see it. A white cable tidy could also be used if the shop has a white wall or windowsill as customers will not be able to see the cable tidy when they look through the window.

A power distribution rack may also be beneficial to help a retail outlet look tidy. Most shops now use an electronic till and a computer to manage sales and the company website. The computer and the till are usually on or under the sales desk and loose, tangled cables will make the shop look untidy and unprofessional. If the owner uses a power distribution rack, all the electronic appliances, including the till, the computer and the phone, can be plugged into one place behind the desk. A cable tidy can then be used to keep these cables safe and out of the view of the customer.

In retail, little things that make the shop look better can make a huge difference. A shop will look more professional if it is free from cables and its power is managed effectively. This will help a shop remain competitive in a cut throat environment.