Determining Business Interruption Losses
No business expects a significant business interruption, such as may be caused by a tornado, fire, explosion, looting, blackouts, or other natural or “unnatural” forces. But when an interruption does occur, it is often necessary to determine the economic loss from the interruption so that a claim may be filed with an insurer or against…
Basis? Variance? What Do These Words Mean?
Understanding accounting and tax terms is crucial to your financial success. Yet the language of money management can be confusing to investors, business people and taxpayers alike. Sometimes even simple words have more than one meaning. For example, you know that a credit is the red-ink side of an accounting journal entry. You also know…
Six Steps to Preparing Your Business for Sale
Selling your business to a third party could provide you with a lucrative and effective exit strategy. To maximize your proceeds, prepare both yourself and your company for a sale. Taking action now will help you to be better prepared and improve the salability of your business. To do this properly, consider taking the following…
Does Your Organization Have Unrelated Business Income?
This is the first article in a series exploring the world of unrelated business income. Insights provided by Gelman, Rosenberg & Freedman’s Nonprofit Tax Principals, Steven Kelin and Richard Locastro. Even though an organization is recognized as tax-exempt, it still may be liable for tax on its unrelated business taxable income. The unrelated business income…
One-Third of Business Sales End Because of Price Gap
Nearly one in three sales of a business enterprise fell through during the past year, most because of a valuation gap in pricing, according to a new study. And the price gap for those transactions that didn’t close was most often between 21-30 percent, the 2014 Capital Markets Report of Pepperdine University found in surveys…
The Impact of Taxes on Your Retirement Savings
Retirement savings have such a huge impact on our future lives, yet most people spend more time planning a vacation than they spend planning for retirement. They also know more about what the taxes would be for the unlikely chance of hitting the lottery than they know about what the taxes will be on their…
Seven Steps to Improving Your Succession Planning
Finding a successor to take over a business is an underestimated challenge, according to a recent study on succession planning by Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. While most businesses know that having a succession plan is important, few are doing enough to prepare. The study found that companies tend to plan for succession to…
Hiring on Upswing at Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofit organizations are a huge employer in America. In fact, other than the manufacturing and retail industries, nonprofits employ more people than any other sector – 10.7 million people. And those numbers are expected to increase in 2014 as nearly half of 400 nonprofit groups in a new study say they will be hiring new…
Fingers Still Do Walking – But on Keyboard
The Yellow Pages are out. The Internet is in. The Internet even counts more now than word of mouth. When it comes to the way the public chooses an attorney, methods have drastically changed in the last decade, according to the results of a new study by FindLaw.com. In 2005, only 7 percent of consumers…
IRS Flooded with Responses on Political Activities
The IRS has received more than 150,000 responses to proposed regulations for tax exemption for “social welfare“ organizations – a record for an IRS rule-making comment period. “It is going to take us a while to sort through all those comments, hold a public hearing, possibly re-propose a draft regulation and get more public comments,”…