Clean Up Hidden Liabilities Before Selling Your Business
You are ready to put out feelers for selling your company. Perhaps you have contacted your CPA to have some preliminary due diligence begun. As you prepare to finalize your asking price, issues arise that you hadn’t planned on. Hidden liabilities – those unplanned-for nuisances that can depress the value of your company – can…
Hobby Expenses Deductible to Extent of Hobby Income
Most people are probably familiar with the general tax rule about hobbies: You can deduct expenses only to the extent that you have income from the hobby. This rule applies to individuals, S corporations, partnerships, estates and trusts. There is a certain pecking order in deducting these expenses: 1. Deductions a taxpayer can claim whether or not…
Engaging Younger Workers Takes Different Approach
Employees are central to the success of most business ventures. Whether you make widgets, build houses, or provide services, employees play a crucial role. Knowing how to manage and grow employees to do their best is a challenge. The youngest employees in our workforce are classified as the Millennial Generation. The dates of the generation…
Drive New Revenues by Thinking Outside the Box
While managing expenses is extremely important in this economy, it’s also critical to look at the other factor in the profitability equation – increasing revenues. Revenues drive your business, and your products and services drive your revenues. Most business owners started their companies because they had something other people were willing to pay money for….
Fraud Vulnerability: Ask Yourself These 8 Questions
Business owners don’t want to believe that a trusted employee would steal from the company. But the truth is that every organization is at some risk of internal fraud. That doesn’t mean you can’t rein in a lot of that risk. Your company’s degree of vulnerability depends partly on your industry, as well as on…
How To Proceed When Fraud Is Suspected
When a fraud is suspected, organizations must proceed quickly, but carefully. In most situations, simply calling the local police won’t help. False allegations or a wrongful termination may backfire against an employer and cause worse damage than the fraud itself. Prematurely tipping off an employee or co-conspirators may result in losing opportunities to obtain information…
The Problem with Transaction Multiples
Business owners, appraisers and their jurors – auditors, judges, other parties affected by the appraisals – sometimes have a lapse in judgment when considering “comps,” guideline companies that have published valuation multiples. Any measurable differences between a subject company and its comps can be – and typically are – used to exclude transactions that would…
Cost of Fraud to Retailers on the Rise
The rising use of technology at retail stores has opened new opportunities for sales and made shopping more convenient for customers. But along with that convenience comes the ever-increasing problem of fraud. In fact, LexisNexis reports that 2014 saw a 33 percent spike in fraud incidents over the past year, making it the worst on…
Warning: Set Reasonable Compensation In Nonprofit Organizations
Determining the amount to compensate top leaders in a tax-exempt organization can be a daunting task, considering that tax-exempt and for-profit organizations compete in the talent pool. Although there are measures of a tax-exempt leader’s effectiveness, a commonly used measure on the profit side is not available in a tax-exempt situation. That measure, of course,…
Fraud: Do You Know It When You See It?
The subject of employee dishonesty is a delicate one. Owners generally want to trust their employees, and given all the other battles owners fight on a daily basis, they are often not as vigilant as they can or should be. Vigilance requires an investment of time and money in return for an uncertain payoff. Here’s…