http://www.articlealley.com en-us editorial@articlealley.com Extend your tax return to October 15th and you've got good company. Roughly forty percent of taxpayers extend their tax returns. (Anyone can extend by completing the very simple, 4868 form, which is available from the www.irs... http://www.articlealley.com/article_656945_19.html 06th October 2008 As the end of year approaches, many small business CPAs and bookkeepers find their stress levels rising. In only a few short weeks, these accountants know they'll see silly bookkeeping errors in many of their small business clients' books--errors that ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_656944_15.html 06th October 2008 If you're a small business owner, you know all too well you need a decent bookkeeping system, right? Decent accounting and bookkeeping means you know whether or not you're making a profit. And such a system lets you make better decisions about the prod... http://www.articlealley.com/article_628596_15.html 08th September 2008 Weary of paying $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 each and every year for mediocre advice from a financial planner or investment advisor? You should consider employing a do-it-yourself approach to financial planning. By following a handful of steps, you can a... http://www.articlealley.com/article_625086_19.html 08th September 2008 Some CPAs and attorneys say there's an eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not invest in real estate inside a corporation." And, usually, this proclamation holds true. Investing in real estate within a corporation means you lose many of real estate's tax be... http://www.articlealley.com/article_621664_19.html 05th September 2008 Incorporation offers a small business owners a great way to reduce liability and taxes. Unfortunately, the rules for professionals who want to incorporate are be tricky. Fortunately, one can make incorporating a professional practice like law or medicine ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_616663_18.html 03rd September 2008 The limited liability company option gives the small business owner a great tool for reducing both taxes and legal liability. But the LLC setup process for professionals (doctors, lawyers and so forth) sometimes gets tricky. To ease and expedite the setup... http://www.articlealley.com/article_615343_15.html 02nd September 2008 Are you beginning a new entrepreneurial venture? Or are you a business owner who needs to find a better accountant? Choosing a CPA is easier when you employ the five following tips: Determine Whether You'll Outsource Your Bookkeeping Some businesses... http://www.articlealley.com/article_607861_15.html 22nd August 2008 Starting a business? If you're not careful, you may find that you've terribly complicated your accounting before you even realize what's happened. Fortunately, by following five simple tips you can keep your small business finances clean, lean, and low-co... http://www.articlealley.com/article_602635_15.html 18th August 2008 Business owners often assume that a traditional corporation, or "C corporation," provides a good platform for saving money and growing wealth. As a result, these individuals do their investing inside their C corporations. Superficially, this wealth-bui... http://www.articlealley.com/article_598864_19.html 14th August 2008 Thinking about incorporating your business or investment in Nevada? Consider these seven tips to make the process easier, to minimize mistakes, and to avoid trouble. Tip #1: Don't choose Nevada unless you operate in Nevada Let's get this first tip o... http://www.articlealley.com/article_589329_15.html 24th July 2008 New small businesses often decide to consider the incorporation option, and that's logical. Incorporating a small business usually reduces the business owner's legal liability and often saves the business owner (and any outside investors) quite a bit in t... http://www.articlealley.com/article_586028_18.html 23rd July 2008 Incorporating a business often makes good legal and tax sense. Absolutely. But new entrepreneurs need to know that a handful of incorporation scams often ensnare small businesses. And that is truly unfortunate. Getting entangled in an incorporation sca... http://www.articlealley.com/article_579737_15.html 18th July 2008 Businesses, their owners and investors regularly worry about asset protection. Of course, sometimes, people worry too much about lawsuits and unethical creditors. And, sure, prudent management of a business or investment combined with a good insurance pol... http://www.articlealley.com/article_573780_18.html 10th July 2008 A tricky question that new limited liability company bookkeepers often have concerns how to record correctly the payments made to the owners. Are the payments wages, for example? Partnership draws? Or something else entirely different? Limited liabilit... http://www.articlealley.com/article_570970_15.html 07th July 2008 More than 3,000,000 businesses operate as Subchapter S corporations. But that's not really a surprise if you understand a bit about tax law. An S corporation doesn't pay corporate income taxes, which can take as much as a fifty percent whack out of profit... http://www.articlealley.com/article_570016_19.html 05th July 2008 Starting your business as a limited liability company? You'll obviously want to use a good name. Sadly, the process is trickier than you may think in today's business world. You've got legal, marketing and even internet-related issues to ponder. For... http://www.articlealley.com/article_564223_15.html 26th June 2008 If you manage a small business or venture that's setup as an LLC, setting up Microsoft's Small Business Accounting software can be sort of complicated because of the LLC itself. Fortunately, you can try some easy techniques for getting your new accounting... http://www.articlealley.com/article_563021_15.html 25th June 2008 Running your small business as an LLC or limited liability company? Installing the QuickBooks accounting software in your situation can be complicated. But in a sense, that's a good thing. The complexity comes from the financial flexibility that your limi... http://www.articlealley.com/article_559266_15.html 20th June 2008 Is your cashflow tight? Are you juggling overdue bills and simultaneously asking for early customer payments? Yikes. You may want to consider trying these five, mostly quick tips for improving your cash flow: Tip #1: Invoice Often and Quickly Perha... http://www.articlealley.com/article_556146_15.html 13th June 2008 Small business owners usually minimize their taxes by operating as a sole proprietorship, partnership or S corporation. Or by operating as a limited liability company taxed as a sole proprietorship, partnership or S corporation. However, even though C ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_555950_15.html 13th June 2008 Incorporating a business delivers benefits. Liability gets limited at least a little bit. And incorporating usually means the business reduces its income taxes or the payroll taxes or both. But incorporating creates some extra costs and headaches. And... http://www.articlealley.com/article_551448_15.html 05th June 2008 According to the IRS, S corporations now outnumber regular corporations. The popularity of Subchapter S corporations shouldn't really surprise people, however. S corporations provide two big tax savings to small business owners. First, they typically d... http://www.articlealley.com/article_546667_15.html 25th May 2008 New business owners always seem to wring their hands over the incorporation question. Should they, or shouldn't they, incorporate their new business. Or, no, wait. Maybe an S corporation or limited liability company makes more sense? This obsessing ove... http://www.articlealley.com/article_545988_15.html 23rd May 2008 You can and should track any improvements and repairs you make to a property by using your Money account and category information. However, the steps you take to record improvements to a property and the steps you take to record repairs to a property actu... http://www.articlealley.com/article_543379_15.html 21st May 2008 Copyright (c) 2008 Stephen Nelson If you start researching small business pension options, the alternatives quickly overwhelm. Banks, financial planners, insurance agents and many others clamor for your attention and offer up what they tout as the obvi... http://www.articlealley.com/article_540599_15.html 20th May 2008 Copyright (c) 2008 Stephen Nelson Want to turn your accounting into a business power tool? Interested in morphng your bookkeeping into a true secret weapon that lets you create a more profitable business? Simply apply these five techniques... Trick ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_534809_15.html 11th May 2008 If you have an Internet connection and you click the Fund button in the Portfolio window, Money displays web pages that purport to help you pick an appropriate mutual fund. We know you didn’t buy this book to get investment advice. Nevertheless, we want... http://www.articlealley.com/article_524796_63.html 28th April 2008 Microsoft Money's Options dialog box (choose the Tools menu’s Options command) includes an Investments tab. The boxes and buttons on the Investments tab let you make changes to the way in which Money’s investment record keeping works. Setting ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_507000_19.html 03rd April 2008 The steps for producing a Money report or chart are very simple. In a nutshell, you just select the report you want and identify the range of transaction dates that should be included in the report. To produce a report or chart, take the following steps: ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478300_19.html 21st February 2008 You begin to really tap Money’s power when you use the information from the Money account registers to summarize and organize your personal or business financial affairs. And the principle way you perform this summarization and organization is through M... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478299_19.html 21st February 2008 There are several common errors that account reconciliation won’t catch. We’ll briefly describe these errors here, because if you know about them—and most importantly know their effect—you are less likely to make them. You also increase the chance... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478296_19.html 21st February 2008 There are several common errors that account reconciliation won’t catch. We’ll briefly describe these errors here, because if you know about them—and most importantly know their effect—you are less likely to make them. You also increase the chance... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478292_19.html 21st February 2008 Balancing, or reconciling, your bank accounts represents an important financial management task. By regularly reconciling your records with those of the bank, you improve the accuracy of your bookkeeping, you assure that bank errors haven’t been made, a... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478290_19.html 21st February 2008 You don’t need to print checks with Money. You can still write checks by hand. But Money lets you print checks easily, which can be a time saver—especially if you have a lot of checks to print. To print checks in Money, you record the checks in the a... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478285_19.html 21st February 2008 To record an account transfer, you record the transfer in one of the accounts involved in the transfer. For example, if you are moving money from your checking account to your savings account, you record the transfer in either the checking or savings acco... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478283_15.html 21st February 2008 Mechanically, automatic withdrawals work the same way as any other withdrawals. For example, paying your mortgage payment via an automatic withdrawal works identically to paying your mortgage payment using a check. Similarly, automatic deposits work the s... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478281_15.html 21st February 2008 Debit card transactions work exactly like checks. The only difference really is that you don’t have a check form, but rather a bundle of electronic, digital information that runs from the store’s debit card machine to your bank’s computer. This mech... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478278_19.html 21st February 2008 You record deposits in the Money account register in roughly the same way that you record a deposit in a paper register. You note the source for the deposit along with the date and the amount. In the case of a payroll check, for example, you would indicat... http://www.articlealley.com/article_478268_15.html 21st February 2008 You’ll typically need to record a check that pays multiple categories. For example, suppose you use Money for tracking the finances of a small business corporation you operate and you write a check to the office supplies store, but the check (in the amo... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469245_15.html 06th February 2008 To record the checks you write using Money, start the Money program, pick the account you used to write the check, and then describe the check in detail, including the payee, the check date, and the amount. This process works almost identically to the eq... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469243_15.html 06th February 2008 The Money Help menu, which appears when you click Help on the menu bar, provides information about using Money through its eleven commands: Help Topics, Online Help, Help For Quicken Users, Ordering Checks, Microsoft On The Web (which displays a submenu o... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469242_15.html 06th February 2008 So here's a question that individuals and small businesses have to ask themselves every year: Do I need to upgrade the Microsoft Money software again? Should you upgrade Microsoft Money every year? This is a good question. Every fall, the cor... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469240_15.html 06th February 2008 Individuals and small businesses sometimes balk about using personal finance and small business accounting programs like Microsoft Money for online banking or online investing. However, the sign-up process is usually very straightforward. And--and here's ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469237_15.html 06th February 2008 You start Money in the same manner that you start any Windows program. Starting the Money Program If during the installation process you agreed to have shortcut icons placed on the Windows desktop, you can simply double-click the Money short... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469234_15.html 06th February 2008 Installing the Money software is easy. All you need to do is insert the Money CDROM—this is the CD that comes in the Money box—in your CD-ROM drive. Then follow the on-screen instructions. After you insert the CD, Windows looks at its contents to f... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469230_15.html 06th February 2008 Excel provides useful statistical functions for finding the variance of a data set. In general, these variance functions retrieve a set of values stored in a worksheet range and then make the expected calculation. A variance, just to remind readers, is... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469227_15.html 06th February 2008 Excel provides several hundred prebuilt formulas, called functions, that provide a shortcut to constructing complicated or lengthy formulas. In general, a function accepts input values, or arguments, then makes some calculation and returns a result. <b... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469218_15.html 06th February 2008 A factor you’ll want to consider as you choose the best Excel chart type is the relative strengths and weaknesses of each chart type. One could, of course, write an entire book on this subject. But you may find it useful to consider the strengths and w... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469215_15.html 06th February 2008 How Excel Sees Chart Data To easily use Excel for charting, you need to learn three key terms: data points, data series, and data categories. Data Points are the Basic Building Blocks The individual values you plot in a chart are c... http://www.articlealley.com/article_469213_15.html 06th February 2008