Are you using an accountant or doing it alone?

using a program or just writing it?

A good accountant can save you much or cost you many.................

QuickBooks. Links info with TurboTax for filing.

We use Quick Books for our accounting which links to our accountants for filing.

Our latest accounting firm must also work for the IRS. They are strict about proving deductions to the extreme!

They have also saved us more money than all of our previous accountants put together.

what kind of things are they making you prove?

Good question Throw Back. I have a wonderful example; Gasoline: We all have the same credit card for gas and only for gas, so we have never saved receipts. So our new accountant says, "You guys use an awful lot of gas and if we ever get called in, how are we going to prove that we only bought gas, without the receipts?"

I couldn't answer her, so now we save gas receipts. We also save receipts for anything else that is a legitimate deduction. ( Like a percentage of our garbage pick-up, natural gas, electricity, snow plowing, etc. )

They have also put us in touch with our first-ever financial consultants who immediately signed all 10 of us up for a 401K. We have also been made properly aware of a lot of things that we were wrong about.

I realize we have to be more concerned about our accounting because we have several employees. Life was definitely easier when I was the only technician. ( But now we have 10 times the laughs )

Man, I never knew why a landscaper could charge $45 bucks an hour to mow lawns. But after trying to start this business on paper. license, fees, taxes, lawyers, bookkeepers, insurance, the list goes on!

You can do most of it yourself and save money up front. The problem is that if you do something wrong you can be fined. Which can cost you more than you initially saved.

Wickerman is correct. We used to keep track of everything and give it to our accountant at the end of the year. ( And we were responsible that the numbers were correct )

I wouldn't think of trying to do that now. I would bet that if you asked most ADC guys that have hired help, most of them would tell you that they made nearly as much money when they were a single entity.

So why do we try to become larger? My son made me do it! And that is probably the best excuse for growing. My family has watched our involvement with this business and has seen that we have made some real friends with many of our customers.

And many of our very wealthy customers are not at all ashamed of introducing us to their friends or family. Does anyone else think that maybe I got off the subject?

yea Paul, but most of us would enjoy being able to give someone a job. It takes alot, but employees eventually will turn a profit. Or allow you to up grade and outsource

Throw Back, sounds like you've got the point perfectly. We don't have employees; We have an extended family.

mileage is one of the biggest red flags to the (please excuse these people because they are idiots)
home office is another red flag

I have been using Quicken Home & Business since 2007 and it has worked great for me. It does a great job with customer data, invoicing by paper or email, estimates/proposals, past due and aging reports, expenses, mileage tracking, asset and non-asset accounts, tax planning and many other things that work great for a sole proprietor. If you are incorporated or have employees I would step up to QuickBooks or something similar.

ATTENTION: Vinke and Mike Kerr just gave you guys the two most important posts about taxes, the IRS, and your business, that you will ever receive. Reread them and take them to heart!

We use QuickBooks. It is great at tracking assets vs sales and expenses as well as quarterly P&L reports for our accounting person.

Paul you cannot keep your posts on the subject!

Ahh, what was the subject again? I'm guessing that you're talking about your beaver post? My point was; I can trap all of the beavers ( Or muskrat, for that matter ) and 3 weeks later they can have a brand new beaver swimming around. New ones can move in any time but more so this time of the year. You did your job properly but the customer doesn't know that so I tell them up front of the possibility. Thanks heavens it doesn't happen very often.

QuickBooks online is the greatest program ever created in my opinion. You can do everything from basic bookkeeping to your payroll and taxes all from one website and you never have to buy an update. They make it so simple all you have to do is click submit and your payroll taxes are filed and your employees are paid. I still submit every thing to my accountant at the end of the year and he is my quality control but its hard to go wrong with QB online. There was an awesome series of articles not long ago in Wildlife Control Tech Magazine on QuickBooks. Good read and I now see they offer a CD class. I have no affiliation, I just like the magazine! Good Luck!

many of you know of my problems with the irs a couple years ago. lets just say saving money on the front end might just cost you on the back end. I now have a book keeper who handles all the bookwork except for billing, which is still handle, and an accountant who handles the taxes. it isn't worth it to try to save a couple hundred bucks per month.

bookkeeper charges me $200 per month and that covers handling the payroll, p and l's, and whatever else she handles, and the tax lady charges a one time fee each year which varies, but it is going down with the bookkeeper. tax time rolls around and the bookkeeper sends the tax lady a computer disk- im out of the mix. tax lady then tells me how much we have to pay and all we do is make the check out and give it to her, she sends it in.

it isn't worth the headache you can only ever fully appreciate when the irs goes through every bank account you have and asks what every deposit is from. how many times can they hear "I have no clue" before they break out laughing? I swear they get a bonus for making you pay in more "just in case!"

I've been staying out of this discussion but since articles from WCT magazine have been mentioned, I thought I'd "quickly" chime in.

As many of the subscribers and workshop attendees know, my wife is a practicing CPA with her Masters in Tax. She is also a QuickBooks Diamond adviser and works with a lot of companies from sole proprietors to C corporations on how to setup and use QuickBooks. Currently, she is still working on taxes (tax season really runs from 1 Jan - 30 Jun for most CPA's) but said she would do an article on the differences between Quicken, Quicken Home & Small Business, and QuickBooks for the July/August issue.

In regard to the training DVD, unfortunately we had an issue in production with corrupt and lost files, so we don't have any of them made yet. We're hoping to get everything around in July so we can get it out there, but that involves reshooting the DVD and fitting it into her schedule.

Concerning the question and some answers posted, it will depend on how big of a company you are and what information you need to keep track of. If you have limited clients and sales, "shoe box" or manual accounting practices are more than acceptable. Just make sure you do your invoices in duplicates and save all your receipts so you can claim them as expenses at tax time. Of course, if you're doing this method of accounting, it may cost more to have your taxes done by a professional as it takes them more time than just running several reports and taking the information they need from there.

Now, if you are doing a decent amount of work you'll probably find it easier to go with some sort of accounting software. One of the biggest differences between the different programs out there is reporting capabilities. As a business, you should be able to print a detailed A/R report, Customer contact list, Balance Sheet, and Profit & Loss report at a minimum. These are standard general reports that not only help you in running a business, but also have the information most lenders require.

What's the best program out there for a business? I'll let Natalie field that question. For me, I want nothing to do what-so-ever with on-line anything. The reason is quite simple, if you can't access your data it does you no good. When the data is local, you can access it whenever you want; however, when you store data on-line you must first have a valid connection and then the site must be working. Data corruption can occur through bad connections and security of information can be a question, specially with today's credit card penalty fees when card information is stolen. Yes, if you have a program on your business computer you must be present or have someone at the office to be able to access it, but you if that is an issue you can also load it onto a portable computer and have it with you constantly.

Now for a small company with 50 customers, on-line access may not be an issue but it can quickly turn into one for a medium sized (say up to a 2,500 customers over the years) to large company (over 2,500 customers). Based on connection speed, a larger company will have to wait longer for reports and data searches plus there is a larger chance of data corruption and hacking as it is used more frequently. Hacker's are constantly grabbing chunks of data off communication systems which puts user of this technology at more risk. In comparison, the odds of having a hacker access your business computer and steal information is very unlikely due to multiple issues.

As long as the owner understands the risks they are putting themselves and their customers at, I have no problem with their business decision to use on-line accounting. My issue is for those that don't understand what can happen.

Regarding hiring a CPA, I agree that it is always money well spent. My first CPA (and no it wasn't my wife) cost $150 to do the corporation taxes and help us structure QuickBooks. Today, that rate may be a little bit higher, but I know if a business can't afford to set aside $250 - $500 a year from jobs for a tax professional there is a problem from the word go. Turbo Tax and other tax software may sound good, but if you heard all of the problems I get to hear about yearly you'd realize that not only are there a lot of bugs present, there is no responsibility by the makers to pay the fines and fees due to their usage clause. True, they may go to the IRS concerning your return, but they aren't going to go through your receipts justifying why you classified them like you did. All they are going to say is that the data wasn't entered correctly and that since you signed the forms they are not responsible for bad data.

What everyone seems to forget is that if you are a business, then you need to act like a business. We're in business because we offer a unique skill set that people need and want. To try and do everything yourself is just like joking/complaining about the individuals and business that try to do wildlife control on their own. Sometimes they get it right, but mainly they just make matters worse.