Dataset Viewer
id
stringlengths 1
5
| query
stringlengths 14
158
| positives
listlengths 1
23
| negatives
listlengths 4
20
|
|---|---|---|---|
0
|
What is considered a business expense on a business trip?
|
[
{
"id": "18850",
"score": 0.7595993280410767,
"text": "The IRS Guidance pertaining to the subject. In general the best I can say is your business expense may be deductible. But it depends on the circumstances and what it is you want to deduct. Travel Taxpayers who travel away from home on business may deduct related expenses, including the cost of reaching their destination, the cost of lodging and meals and other ordinary and necessary expenses. Taxpayers are considered “traveling away from home” if their duties require them to be away from home substantially longer than an ordinary day’s work and they need to sleep or rest to meet the demands of their work. The actual cost of meals and incidental expenses may be deducted or the taxpayer may use a standard meal allowance and reduced record keeping requirements. Regardless of the method used, meal deductions are generally limited to 50 percent as stated earlier. Only actual costs for lodging may be claimed as an expense and receipts must be kept for documentation. Expenses must be reasonable and appropriate; deductions for extravagant expenses are not allowable. More information is available in Publication 463, Travel, Entertainment, Gift, and Car Expenses. Entertainment Expenses for entertaining clients, customers or employees may be deducted if they are both ordinary and necessary and meet one of the following tests: Directly-related test: The main purpose of the entertainment activity is the conduct of business, business was actually conducted during the activity and the taxpayer had more than a general expectation of getting income or some other specific business benefit at some future time. Associated test: The entertainment was associated with the active conduct of the taxpayer’s trade or business and occurred directly before or after a substantial business discussion. Publication 463 provides more extensive explanation of these tests as well as other limitations and requirements for deducting entertainment expenses. Gifts Taxpayers may deduct some or all of the cost of gifts given in the course of their trade or business. In general, the deduction is limited to $25 for gifts given directly or indirectly to any one person during the tax year. More discussion of the rules and limitations can be found in Publication 463. If your LLC reimburses you for expenses outside of this guidance it should be treated as Income for tax purposes. Edit for Meal Expenses: Amount of standard meal allowance. The standard meal allowance is the federal M&IE rate. For travel in 2010, the rate for most small localities in the United States is $46 a day. Source IRS P463 Alternately you could reimburse at a per diem rate"
}
] |
[
{
"id": "562777",
"score": 0.7200203537940979,
"text": "There is no law that requires you to have a separate bank account for your business, or to pay all expenses from a business bank account. It is a GOOD IDEA to have a separate bank account and pay all business expenses from that account and all personal expenses from your personal account, because that makes sorting out what is what much simpler, both in case of an audit and for your own accounting. Whether a particular expenditure is a deductible business expense has nothing to do with what account you pay it from. If you pay advertising expenses for your business from your personal account, that's still (almost certainly) a deductible business expense. If you buy groceries from your business account, that's almost certainly not a deductible business expense. In your case, there are all kinds of rules about when and how much travel is deductible.",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "328853",
"score": 0.7161737084388733,
"text": "Its best you start this venture as a Business entity. Whatever the customer pays you is your income. Whatever you pay to the hotel will be your expenses. Apart from this there will be other expenses. So essentially difference between your income and expense will be the profit of the entity and tax will be on the profit. If you do not want to start an Business entity and pay as an individual then please add the country tag, depending on the country there may different ways to account for the funds.",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "421301",
"score": 0.7137573957443237,
"text": "\"Worksheets/ Documentation: (From my experience filing my business deductions through several tax preparers.) Keep all your calculations, but only submit the calculations and worksheets requested by the tax form. Most travel deductions are just a category total. If the IRS wants more info, it will ask for it. Information from the book Home Business Tax Deductions (from Nolo) (2012): Traveling with kids: In chapter 9 (\"\"Leaving Town: Business Travel\"\"), in the section \"\"Taking People With You\"\", it specifically discusses your situation. Paraphrasing, it says that you can deduct the amount any eligible expenses would have cost you if you were traveling without your kids. So, you can deduct the cost the smaller hotel room that you and your wife would have normally rented if you were alone. How your side trips affect your business deductions: According to the book, since you spent 50% or more of your time on business activities while traveling in the U.S.: Deducting meals shared with your kids: You can deduct meals as either entertainment or travel expenses. I would recommend you buy one of Nolo's books on deductions, as it goes into much more detail than I do here.\"",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "351169",
"score": 0.7110323309898376,
"text": "I think you can. I went to Mexico for business and the company paid for it, so if you are self employed you should be able to expense it.",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "540395",
"score": 0.706842303276062,
"text": "Alright, IRS Publication 463: Travel, Entertainment, Gift, and Car Expenses Business and personal use. If you use your car for both business and personal purposes, you must divide your expenses between business and personal use. You can divide your expense based on the miles driven for each purpose. Example. You are a sales representative for a clothing firm and drive your car 20,000 miles during the year: 12,000 miles for business and 8,000 miles for personal use. You can claim only 60% (12,000 ÷ 20,000) of the cost of operating your car as a business expense Obviously nothing helpful in the code. So I would use option 1, weight the maintenance-related mileage by the proportion of business use. Although if you use your car for business a lot (and perhaps have a spouse with a car), an argument could be made for 3. So I would consider my odds of being audited (even lower this year due to IRS budget cuts) and choose 1 or 3. And of course never throw anything away until you're room temperature.",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "447231",
"score": 0.704039990901947,
"text": "You don't say what country you live in. If it's the U.S., the IRS has very specific rules for business use of a car. See, for starters at least, http://www.irs.gov/publications/p463/ch04.html. The gist of it is: If you use the car 100% for business purposes, you NEVER use it to drive to the grocery store or to your friend's house, etc, then it is a deductible business expense. If you use a car party for business use and partly for personal use, than you can deduct the portion of the expense of the car that is for business use, but not the portion that is for personal use. So basically, if you use the car 75% for business purposes and 25% for personal use, you can deduct 75% of the cost and expenses. You can calculate the business use by, (a) Keeping careful records of how much you spent on gas, oil, repairs, etc, tracking the percentage of business use versus percentage of personal use, and then multiplying the cost by the percentage business use and that is the amount you can deduct; or (b) Use the standard mileage allowance, so many cents per mile, which changes every year. Note that the fact that you paid for the car from a business account has absolutely nothing to do with it. (If it did, then everyone could create a small business, open a business account, pay all their bills from there, and all their personal expenses would magically become business expenses.) Just by the way: If you are going to try to stretch the rules on your taxes, business use of a car or personal computer or expenses for a home office are the worst place to do it. The IRS knows that cars and computers are things that can easily be used for either personal or business purposes and so they keep a special eye out on these.",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "528838",
"score": 0.7038944959640503,
"text": "No, you cannot deduct it. There's no business substance in such a trip, it is your vacation, and as such cannot be claimed as an expense against the rental income. You may be able to deduct the coffee you buy for the meeting with the property manager while there, but there's no way you can justify a 7-10 days vacation with your whole family as an expense to maintain the rental property. Since you will only have less than 2 weeks personal use, you won't need to prorate expenses, so you have that at least.",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "104464",
"score": 0.7008495926856995,
"text": "\"Disclaimer: My answer is based on US tax law, but I assume Australian situation would be similar. The IRS would not be likely to believe your statement that \"\"I wouldn't have gone to the country if it wasn't for the conference.\"\" A two-week vacation, with a two-day conference in there, certainly looks like you threw in the conference in order to deduct vacation expenses. At the very least, you would need a good reason why this conference is necessary to your business. If you can give that reason, it would then depend on the specifics of Australian law. The vacation is clearly not just incidental to the trip. The registration for the conference is always claimable as a business expense.\"",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "327002",
"score": 0.7005072832107544,
"text": "\"To be deductible, a business expense must be both ordinary and necessary. An ordinary expense is one that is common and accepted in your trade or business. A necessary expense is one that is helpful and appropriate for your trade or business. An expense does not have to be indispensable to be considered necessary. (IRS, Deducting Business Expenses) It seems to me you'd have a hard time convincing an auditor that this is the case. Since business don't commonly own cars for the sole purpose of housing $25 computers, you'd have trouble with the \"\"ordinary\"\" test. And since there are lots of other ways to house a computer other than a car, \"\"necessary\"\" seems problematic also.\"",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "47260",
"score": 0.700340747833252,
"text": "Typically you can only claim as business deductions those expenses which strictly relate to your business. In some cases, if you have a dedicated home office in your house, you can specify that expenses related to this space (furniture, etc.) are business expenses because it is a dedicated space. For example, I know of someone in sports broadcasting who claimed several TVs as a business expense, but these are for a room in his house that he uses only for watching games related to his work responsibilities, and never for entertaining, having friends over, etc. I think it will be difficult for you to count any portion of this type of installation as a business expense as it would relate to both your business as well as your residence. If you intend to try to get this deducted, I would strongly recommend consulting a CPA or tax attorney first. I think it will be difficult to prove that the only benefit is to your LLC if your electricity bills/credits are co-mingled with those for your residence. Best of luck!",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "55200",
"score": 0.6994158029556274,
"text": "As I understand it... Generally housing can't be considered a business expense unless taken at your employer's explicit direction, for the good of the business rather than the employee. Temporary assignment far enough from you home office that commuting or occasional hotel nights are impractical, maybe. In other words, if they wouldn't be (at least theoretically) willing to let you put it on an expense account, you probably can't claim it here.",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "192843",
"score": 0.6990472078323364,
"text": "\"Reimbursements for business expenses are generally not taxable, but the commute from home to the job and back is not considered business travel and if they're paying for that it is taxable income. I don't think carpooling changes that, but I am not a tax lawyer or accountant. The rest of your questions seem to be company policy issues. There is no \"\"should\"\" here. You aren't required to pick up the other guys, but he isn't required to reimburse those miles (or employ you) so think carefully about your priorities before pushing back. Never invoke what thou canst not banish.\"",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "513362",
"score": 0.6982941627502441,
"text": "Yes, the business can count that as an expense but you will need to count that as income because a computer = money.",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "397608",
"score": 0.6978572607040405,
"text": "I contacted Stephen Fishman, J.D., the author of Home Business Tax Deductions, to let him know that this question was missing from his book. He was kind enough to send a reply. My original phrasing of the question: If your car is used for both business and personal use, and you deduct via the actual expense method, do trips to the mechanic, gas station, and auto parts store to service or repair the car count as business miles, personal miles, or part-business-part-personal miles? What about driving the newly-purchased car home from the dealership? And his response: Good question. I can find nothing about this in IRS publication or elsewhere. However, common sense would tell us that the cost of driving to make car repairs should be deductible. If you use your car for business, it is a business expense, just like transporting any other piece of business equipment for repairs is a business expense. This should be so whether you use the standard mileage rate or actual expense method. You should probably reduce the amount of your deduction by the percentage of personal use of the car during the year. The same goes for driving a car home from the dealer.",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "446984",
"score": 0.6972466111183167,
"text": "The relevant IRS publication is pub 463. Note that there are various conditions and exceptions, but it all starts with business necessity. Is it necessary for you to work from the UK? If you're working from the UK because you wanted to take a vacation, but still have to work, and would do the same work without being in the UK - then you cannot deduct travel expenses. It sounds to me like this is the case here.",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "437877",
"score": 0.6949076056480408,
"text": "\"There is no simple rule like \"\"you can/can't spend more/less than $X per person.\"\" Instead there is a reasonableness test. There is such a thing as an audit of just your travel and entertainment expenses - I know because I've had one for my Ontario corporation. I've deducted company Christmas parties, and going-away dinners for departing employees, without incident. (You know, I presume, about only deducting half of certain expenses?) If the reason for the entertainment is to acquire or keep either employees or clients, there shouldn't be a problem. Things are slightly trickier with very small companies. Microsoft can send an entire team to Hawaii, with their families, as a reward at the end of a tough project, and deduct it. You probably can't send yourself as a similar reward. If your party is strictly for your neighbours, personal friends, and close family, with no clients, potential clients, employees, potential employees, suppliers, or potential suppliers in attendance, then no, don't deduct it. If you imagine yourself telling an auditor why you threw the party and why the business funded it, you'll know whether it's ok to do it or not.\"",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "571711",
"score": 0.6936389803886414,
"text": "I'm not an expert, but here's my $0.02. Deductions for business expenses are subject to the 2% rule. In other words, you can only deduct that which exceeds 2% of your AGI (Adjusted Gross Income). For example, say you have an AGI of $50,000, and you buy a laptop that costs $800. You won't get a write-off from that, because 2% of $50,000 is $1,000, and you can only deduct business-related expenses in excess of that $1,000. If you have an AGI of $50,000 and buy a $2,000 laptop, you can deduct a maximum of $1,000 ($2,000 minus 2% of $50,000 is $2,000 - $1,000 = $1,000). Additionally, you can write off the laptop only to the extent that you use it for business. So in other words, if you have an AGI of $50,000 and buy that $2,000 laptop, but only use it 50% for business, you can only write off $500. Theoretically, they can ask for verification of the business use of your laptop. A log or a diary would be what I would provide, but I'm not an IRS agent.",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "354716",
"score": 0.6916749477386475,
"text": "Credit card fees on a credit card used for personal expenses are not tax deductible. Credit card fees on a business credit card are deductible on schedule C (or whatever form you're using to report business income and expenses). If you are using the same card for both business and personal ... well, for starters, this is a very bad idea, because it creates exactly the question you're asking. If that's what you're doing, stop, and get separate business and personal cards. If you have separate business and personal cards -- and use the business card only for legitimate business expenses -- then the answer is easy: You can claim a schedule C deduction for any service charges on the business card, and you cannot claim any deduction for any charges on the personal card. In general, though, if you have an expense that is partly business and partly personal, you are supposed to figure out what percentage is business, and that is deductible. In an admittedly brief search, I couldn't find anything specifically about credit cards, but I did find this similar idea on the IRS web site: Generally, you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses. However, if you have an expense for something that is used partly for business and partly for personal purposes, divide the total cost between the business and personal parts. You can deduct the business part. For example, if you borrow money and use 70% of it for business and the other 30% for a family vacation, you can deduct 70% of the interest as a business expense. The remaining 30% is personal interest and is not deductible. Refer to chapter 4 of Publication 535, Business Expenses, for information on deducting interest and the allocation rules. (https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/deducting-business-expenses) So, PROBABLY, you could add up all the charges you made on the card, figure out how much was for business and how much for personal, calculate the business percentage, and then deduct this percentage of the service fees. If the amount involved is not trivial, you might want to talk to an accountant or a lawyer.",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "378484",
"score": 0.690318763256073,
"text": "To quote the answer you linked to: Perhaps the simplest way to think about this is you can only deduct an expense that you actually incur. In other words, the expense should show up on a bank or CC statement. So, if your business purchased the $1000 gift card for $800, you should see a $800 charge appearing on a business CC or bank statement. You would therefore be able to deduct the $800, but not the full $1000 of items that you purchase with it. Side Notes:",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "362069",
"score": 0.688619077205658,
"text": "\"The short answer is yes you can, but you have to make sure you do it correctly. If you are employed by a tech company that does contract work at a separate location and you don't get reimbursed by your employer for travel expenses, you can claim the mileage between your home and location B as a business expense, but there's a catch - you have to subtract the mileage between your home and location A (your employer). So if it's 20 miles from your house to your employer (location A), and 30 miles from your house to the business you're contracting at (location B), you can only claim 10 miles each way (so 20 miles total). Obviously if the distance to location B is closer than your employer (location A), you're out of luck. You will have to itemize to take this deduction, by filling out a Schedule A for itemized deductions and Form 2106 to calculate how much of a deduction for travel expenses you can take. Google \"\"should i itemize\"\", if you're unsure whether to take the Standard Deduction or Itemize. Sources:\"",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
4
|
Business Expense - Car Insurance Deductible For Accident That Occurred During a Business Trip
|
[
{
"id": "196463",
"score": 0.7190271019935608,
"text": "As a general rule, you must choose between a mileage deduction or an actual expenses deduction. The idea is that the mileage deduction is supposed to cover all costs of using the car. Exceptions include parking fees and tolls, which can be deducted separately under either method. You explicitly cannot deduct insurance costs if you claim a mileage deduction. Separately, you probably won't be able to deduct the deductible for your car as a casualty loss. You first subtract $100 from the deductible and then divide it by your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) from your tax return. If your deductible is over 10% of your AGI, you can deduct it. Note that even with a $1500 deductible, you won't be able to deduct anything if you made more than $14,000 for the year. For most people, the insurance deductible just isn't large enough relative to income to be tax deductible. Source"
}
] |
[
{
"id": "40257",
"score": 0.6829391717910767,
"text": "\"The government thought of that a long time ago, and has any loophole there plugged. Like if you set up a company to buy a car and then allow you to use it ... You can use the car for company business, like driving to a customer's office to make a sales call or delivery, and the cost of the car is then tax deductible. But the company must either prohibit personal use of the car, or keep a log of personal versus business use and the personal use becomes taxable income to you. So at best you'd get to deduct an expense here and then you'd have to add it back there for a net change in taxable income of zero. In general the IRS is very careful about personal use of business property and makes it tough to get away with a free ride. I'm sure there are people who lie about it and get away with it because they're never audited, but even if that causes you no ethical qualms, it's very risky. I don't doubt that there are people with very smart lawyers who have found loopholes in the rules. But it's not as simple as, \"\"I call myself a business and now all my personal expenses become tax deductible business expenses.\"\" If you could do that, everybody would do it and no one would pay taxes. Which might be a good thing, but the IRS doesn't see it that way.\"",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "417981",
"score": 0.6829352974891663,
"text": "\"While the question is very localized, I'll answer about the general principle. My main question is with how far away it is (over 1000 miles), how do I quantify the travel expenses? Generally, \"\"necessary and ordinary\"\" expenses are deductible. This is true for business and also true for rentals. But what is necessary and what is ordinary? Is it ordinary that a landlord will manage the property 1000 miles away by himself on a daily basis? Is it ordinary for people to drive 1000 miles every week? I'd say \"\"no\"\" to both. I'd say it would be cheaper for you to hire a local property manager, thus the travel expense would not be necessary. I would say it would be cheaper to fly (although I don't know if its true to the specific situation of the OP, but as I said - its too localized to deal with) rather than drive from Texas to Colorado. If the OP thinks that driving a thousand miles is indeed ordinary and necessary he'll have to justify it to the IRS examiner, as I'm sure it will be examined. 2 trips to the property a year will be a nearly 100% write-off (2000 miles, hotels, etc). From what I understood (and that is what I've been told by my CPA), IRS generally allows 1 (one) trip per year per property. If there's an exceptional situation - be prepared to justify it. Also, keep all the receipts (like gas, hotel, etc.... If you claim mileage but in reality you took a flight - you'll get hit hard by the IRS when audited). Also while I'm up there am I allowed to mix business with pleasure? You cannot deduct personal (\"\"pleasure\"\") expenses, at all. If the trip is mainly business, but you go out at the evening instead of staying at the hotel - that's fine. But if the trip is \"\"business\"\" trip where you spend a couple of hours at your property and then go around having fun for two days - the whole trip may be disallowed. If there's a reasonable portion dedicated to your business/rental, and the rest is pleasure - you'll have to split some of the costs and only deduct the portion attributed to the business activities. You'll have to analyze your specific situation, and see where it falls. Don't stretch the limits too much, it will cost you more on the long run after all the audits and penalties. Can I also write off all travel involved in the purchase of the property? Although, again, the \"\"necessary and ordinary\"\" justification of such a trip is arguable, lets assume it is necessary and ordinary and generally justified. It is reasonable to expect you to go and see the property with your own eyes before the closing (IMHO, of course, I'm not an authority). Such an expense can be either business or investment expense. If its a business expense - its deductible on schedule C. If its an investment expense (if you do buy the property), its added to the cost of the property (capitalized). I'm not a tax adviser or a tax professional, and this is not a tax advice. This answer was not written or intended to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of avoiding any tax related penalties that may be imposed on you or any other person under the Internal Revenue Code. You should seek a professional consultation with a CPA/Attorney(tax) licensed in your State(s) or a Federally licensed Enrolled Agent (EA).\"",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "194308",
"score": 0.6818512678146362,
"text": "Well, if you were a business, and your food and rent and travel expenses were business expenses, and you paid out less money than you earned, you *would* get a refund. If you can prove that an expense is tax deductible, then that's just what it is. For businesses, a net operating loss is tax deductible.",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "97719",
"score": 0.6802712678909302,
"text": "\"Disclaimer: This should go without saying, but this answer is definitely an opinion. (I'm pretty sure my current accountant would agree with this answer, and I'm also pretty sure that one of my past accountants would disagree.) When I started my own small business over 10 years ago I asked this very same question for pretty much every purchase I made that would be used by both the business and me personally. I was young(er) and naive then and I just assumed everything was deductible until my accountant could prove otherwise. At some point you need to come up with some rules of thumb to help make sense of it, or else you'll drive yourself and your accountant bonkers. Here is one of the rules I like to use in this scenario: If you never would have made the purchase for personal use, and if you must purchase it for business use, and if using it for personal use does not increase the expense to the business, it can be fully deducted by the business even if you sometimes use it personally too. Here are some example implementations of this rule: Note about partial expenses: I didn't mention partial deductions above because I don't feel it applies when the criteria of my \"\"rule of thumb\"\" is met. Note that the IRS states: Personal versus Business Expenses Generally, you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses. However, if you have an expense for something that is used partly for business and partly for personal purposes, divide the total cost between the business and personal parts. You can deduct the business part. At first read that makes it sound like some of my examples above would need to be split into partial calulations, however, I think the key distinction is that you would never have made the purchase for personal use, and that the cost to the business does not increase because of allowing personal use. Partial deductions come into play when you have a shared car, or office, or something where the business cost is increased due to shared use. In general, I try to avoid anything that would be a partial expense, though I do allow my business to reimburse me for mileage when I lend it my personal car for business use.\"",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "434846",
"score": 0.6802667379379272,
"text": "\"When I have a question about my income taxes, the first place I look is generally the Giant Book of Income Tax Information, Publication 17 (officially called \"\"Your Federal Income Tax\"\"). This looks to be covered in Chapter 26 on \"\"Car Expenses and Other Employee Business Expenses\"\". It's possible that there's something in there that applies to you if you need to temporarily commute to a place that isn't your normal workplace for a legitimate business reason or other business-related travel. But for your normal commute from your home to your normal workplace it has this to say: Commuting expenses. You cannot deduct the costs of taking a bus, trolley, subway, or taxi, or of driving a car between your home and your main or regular place of work. These costs are personal commuting expenses. You cannot deduct commuting expenses no matter how far your home is from your regular place of work. You cannot deduct commuting expenses even if you work during the commuting trip.\"",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "202645",
"score": 0.6797001957893372,
"text": "For stocks, bonds, ETF funds and so on - Taxed only on realised gain and losses are deductible from the gain and not from company's income. Corporate tax is calculated only after all expenses have been deducted. Not the other way around. Real estate expenses can be deducted because of repairs and maintenance. In general all expenses related to the operation of the business can be deducted. But you cannot use expenses as willy nilly, as you assume. You cannot deduct your subscription to Playboy as an expense. Doing it is illegal and if caught, the tours to church will increase exponentially. VAT is only paid if you claim VAT on your invoices. Your situation seems quite complicated. I would suggest, get an accountant pronto. There are nuances in your situation, which an accountant only can understand and help.",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "383628",
"score": 0.6788522601127625,
"text": "You may not have considered this, and it will depend on your local laws, but if someone causes you damage, you can sue them for the damages. In your case, two drivers forced you to be involved in an accident, which made your premiums go up, which is a real damage for which they might be responsible.",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "354716",
"score": 0.6785402894020081,
"text": "Credit card fees on a credit card used for personal expenses are not tax deductible. Credit card fees on a business credit card are deductible on schedule C (or whatever form you're using to report business income and expenses). If you are using the same card for both business and personal ... well, for starters, this is a very bad idea, because it creates exactly the question you're asking. If that's what you're doing, stop, and get separate business and personal cards. If you have separate business and personal cards -- and use the business card only for legitimate business expenses -- then the answer is easy: You can claim a schedule C deduction for any service charges on the business card, and you cannot claim any deduction for any charges on the personal card. In general, though, if you have an expense that is partly business and partly personal, you are supposed to figure out what percentage is business, and that is deductible. In an admittedly brief search, I couldn't find anything specifically about credit cards, but I did find this similar idea on the IRS web site: Generally, you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses. However, if you have an expense for something that is used partly for business and partly for personal purposes, divide the total cost between the business and personal parts. You can deduct the business part. For example, if you borrow money and use 70% of it for business and the other 30% for a family vacation, you can deduct 70% of the interest as a business expense. The remaining 30% is personal interest and is not deductible. Refer to chapter 4 of Publication 535, Business Expenses, for information on deducting interest and the allocation rules. (https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/deducting-business-expenses) So, PROBABLY, you could add up all the charges you made on the card, figure out how much was for business and how much for personal, calculate the business percentage, and then deduct this percentage of the service fees. If the amount involved is not trivial, you might want to talk to an accountant or a lawyer.",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "255969",
"score": 0.6758981347084045,
"text": "\"But you aren't driving between your two jobs, you're driving for your job. The better analogy would be \"\"If I didn't buy commercial insurance, but was hiring myself out to do deliveried then my personal insurance better cover me if I hit someone between deliveries\"\" It doesn't work that way. There is a reason commercial insurance costs a lot more - when your job is to drive, your risk profile increases significantly. There are specific clauses in personal insurance that they aren't going to cover you if something happens while you are using your car for commercial purposes.\"",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "509218",
"score": 0.6750746965408325,
"text": "\"While COBRA premiums are not eligible to be a \"\"business\"\" expense they can be a medical expense for personal deduction purposes. If you're itemizing your deductions you may be able to deduct that way. However, you will only be able to deduct the portion of the premium that exceeds 10% of your AGI. Are you a full time employee now or are you a 1099 contractor? Do you have access to your employers health plan?\"",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "201954",
"score": 0.6745578050613403,
"text": "If it's a legitimate cost of doing business, it's as deductible as any other cost of doing business. (Reminder: be careful about the distinctions between employee and contractor; the IRS gets annoyed if you don't handle this correctly.)",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "531442",
"score": 0.6741170883178711,
"text": "\"According to this post on TurboTax forums, you could deduct it as an \"\"Unreimbursed Employee\"\" expense. This would seem consistent with the IRS Guidelines on such deductions: An expense is ordinary if it is common and accepted in your trade, business, or profession. An expense is necessary if it is appropriate and helpful to your business. An expense does not have to be required to be considered necessary. Office rent is not listed explicitly among the examples of deductible unreimbursed employee expenses, but this doesn't mean it's not allowed. Of course you should check with a tax professional if you want to be sure.\"",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "421301",
"score": 0.6737032532691956,
"text": "\"Worksheets/ Documentation: (From my experience filing my business deductions through several tax preparers.) Keep all your calculations, but only submit the calculations and worksheets requested by the tax form. Most travel deductions are just a category total. If the IRS wants more info, it will ask for it. Information from the book Home Business Tax Deductions (from Nolo) (2012): Traveling with kids: In chapter 9 (\"\"Leaving Town: Business Travel\"\"), in the section \"\"Taking People With You\"\", it specifically discusses your situation. Paraphrasing, it says that you can deduct the amount any eligible expenses would have cost you if you were traveling without your kids. So, you can deduct the cost the smaller hotel room that you and your wife would have normally rented if you were alone. How your side trips affect your business deductions: According to the book, since you spent 50% or more of your time on business activities while traveling in the U.S.: Deducting meals shared with your kids: You can deduct meals as either entertainment or travel expenses. I would recommend you buy one of Nolo's books on deductions, as it goes into much more detail than I do here.\"",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "192843",
"score": 0.6736151576042175,
"text": "\"Reimbursements for business expenses are generally not taxable, but the commute from home to the job and back is not considered business travel and if they're paying for that it is taxable income. I don't think carpooling changes that, but I am not a tax lawyer or accountant. The rest of your questions seem to be company policy issues. There is no \"\"should\"\" here. You aren't required to pick up the other guys, but he isn't required to reimburse those miles (or employ you) so think carefully about your priorities before pushing back. Never invoke what thou canst not banish.\"",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "236122",
"score": 0.6726968884468079,
"text": "The answer on the Canadian Government's website is pretty clear: Most employees cannot claim employment expenses. You cannot deduct the cost of travel to and from work, or other expenses, such as most tools and clothing. However, that is most likely related to a personal vehicle. There is a deduction related to Public Transportation: You can claim cost of monthly public transit passes or passes of longer duration such as an annual pass for travel within Canada on public transit for 2016. The second sleeping residence is hard to justify as the individual is choosing to work in this town and this individual is choosing to spent the night there - it is not currently a work requirement. As always, please consult a certified tax professional in your country for any final determinations on personal (and corporate) tax laws and filings.",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "147837",
"score": 0.6720904111862183,
"text": "\"One way to look at insurance is that it replaces an unpredictable expenses with a predictable fees. That is, you pay a set monthly amount (\"\"premium\"\") instead of the sudden costs associated with a collision or other covered event. Insurance works as a business, which means they intend to make a substantial profit for providing that service. They put a lot of effort in to measuring probabilities, and carefully set the premiums to get make a steady profit*. The odds are in their favor. You have to ask yourself: if X happened tomorrow, how would I feel about the financial impact? Also, how much will it cost me to buy insurance to cover X? If you have a lot of savings, plenty of available credit, a bright financial future, and you take the bus to work anyway, then totaling your car may not be a big deal, money wise. Skip the insurance. If you have no savings, plenty of debt, little prospects for that improving, and you depend on your car to get to work just so you can pay what you already owe, then totaling your car would probably be a big problem for you. Stick with insurance. There is a middle ground. You can adjust your deductible. Raise it as high as you can comfortably handle. You cover the small stuff out of pocket, and save the insurance for the big ticket items. *Insurance companies also invest the money they take as premiums, until they pay out a claim. That's not relevant to this discussion, though.\"",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "104464",
"score": 0.6702097058296204,
"text": "\"Disclaimer: My answer is based on US tax law, but I assume Australian situation would be similar. The IRS would not be likely to believe your statement that \"\"I wouldn't have gone to the country if it wasn't for the conference.\"\" A two-week vacation, with a two-day conference in there, certainly looks like you threw in the conference in order to deduct vacation expenses. At the very least, you would need a good reason why this conference is necessary to your business. If you can give that reason, it would then depend on the specifics of Australian law. The vacation is clearly not just incidental to the trip. The registration for the conference is always claimable as a business expense.\"",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "47260",
"score": 0.669135332107544,
"text": "Typically you can only claim as business deductions those expenses which strictly relate to your business. In some cases, if you have a dedicated home office in your house, you can specify that expenses related to this space (furniture, etc.) are business expenses because it is a dedicated space. For example, I know of someone in sports broadcasting who claimed several TVs as a business expense, but these are for a room in his house that he uses only for watching games related to his work responsibilities, and never for entertaining, having friends over, etc. I think it will be difficult for you to count any portion of this type of installation as a business expense as it would relate to both your business as well as your residence. If you intend to try to get this deducted, I would strongly recommend consulting a CPA or tax attorney first. I think it will be difficult to prove that the only benefit is to your LLC if your electricity bills/credits are co-mingled with those for your residence. Best of luck!",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "446984",
"score": 0.6688699722290039,
"text": "The relevant IRS publication is pub 463. Note that there are various conditions and exceptions, but it all starts with business necessity. Is it necessary for you to work from the UK? If you're working from the UK because you wanted to take a vacation, but still have to work, and would do the same work without being in the UK - then you cannot deduct travel expenses. It sounds to me like this is the case here.",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "391619",
"score": 0.6675308346748352,
"text": "It would be unusual but it is possible that the expenses could be very high compared to your income. The IRS in pub 529 explains the deduction. You can deduct only unreimbursed employee expenses that are: Paid or incurred during your tax year, For carrying on your trade or business of being an employee, and Ordinary and necessary. An expense is ordinary if it is common and accepted in your trade, business, or profession. An expense is necessary if it is appropriate and helpful to your business. An expense doesn't have to be required to be considered necessary. The next part lists examples. I have cut the list down to highlight ones that could be large. You may be able to deduct the following items as unreimbursed employee expenses. Damages paid to a former employer for breach of an employment contract. Job search expenses in your present occupation. Legal fees related to your job. Licenses and regulatory fees. Malpractice insurance premiums. Research expenses of a college professor. Rural mail carriers' vehicle expenses. Tools and supplies used in your work. Work clothes and uniforms if required and not suitable for everyday use. Work-related education. If the term of employment was only part of the year, one or more of the these could dwarf your income for the year. Before deducting something that large be sure you can document it. I believe the IRS computers would flag the return and I wouldn't be surprised if they ask for additional proof.",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
5
|
Starting a new online business
|
[
{
"id": "69306",
"score": 0.661268413066864,
"text": "Most US states have rules that go something like this: You will almost certainly have to pay some registration fees, as noted above. Depending on how you organize, you may or may not need to file a separate tax return for the business. (If you're sole proprietor for tax purposes, then you file on Schedule C on your personal Form 1040.) Whether or not you pay taxes depends on whether you have net income. It's possible that some losses might also be deductible. (Note that you may have to file a return even if you don't have net income - Filing and needing to pay are not the same since your return may indicate no tax due.) In addition, at the state level, you may have to pay additional fees or taxes beyond income tax depending on what you sell and how you sell it. (Sales tax, for example, might come into play as might franchise taxes.) You'll need to check your own state law for that. As always, it could be wise to get professional tax and accounting advice that's tailored to your situation and your state. This is just an outline of some things that you'll need to consider."
}
] |
[
{
"id": "593671",
"score": 0.6281862258911133,
"text": "It seems too simple, but at the same time I feel that I'm over thinking/complicating things. My biggest fear is being sued or something. I feel like business ownership involves exposing yourself. It's like you're playing in the big leagues and every crooked person or competing business is out to get you. I'm not an expert on business law but I feel like that's something you largely acquire from business ownership and at the same time is something that you need to have an extremely firm grasp on or you'll get eaten alive. If I am over-complicating things and being overly cautious, what stops others from starting up small businesses? My second fear is getting busted for breaking some unknown law. In any case, I don't want to loose all of my hard-earned cash to anything accept a bad business plan.",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "265397",
"score": 0.6281777024269104,
"text": "\"Get some professional accounting help. You're going to have to pay for everything out of the fee you charge: taxes, retirement, health care, etc. You'll be required to pay quarterly. I don't think you should base your fee on what \"\"this\"\" company will pay as a full-time employee, but what you can expect in your area. They're saving a lot of money not going through an established employment firm and essentially, making you create your own. There are costs to setting up and maintaining a company. They have less risk hiring you because there are no unemployment consequences for letting you go. Once you're hired, they'll probably put you on salary, so you can forget about making more money if you work over 40 hrs. IMHO - there have to be better jobs in your area than this one.\"",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "231814",
"score": 0.6280394792556763,
"text": "It looks like your best option is to go with an online broker. There are many available. Some of them won't let you open an account online as a foreign national but will allow you to open one through the mail. See more about that http://finance.zacks.com/can-nonus-citizen-trade-us-stocks-9654.html Also keep in mind that you will need to pay taxes on any capital gains made through selling http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p519.pdf",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "299147",
"score": 0.6279084086418152,
"text": "I really like your mindset about this. One strategy I'm going to implement with my job site, without giving too much away, is treating a job Seeker profile and a job provider very similarly and creating a hub for both. It also treats job postings like more of a commodity, and just focuses on other things that I'll get into in the company develops more.",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "32057",
"score": 0.6276856660842896,
"text": "You need to first visit the website of whatever state you're looking to rent the property in and you're going to want to form the LLC in that particular state. Find the Department of Licensing link and inquire about forming a standard LLC to register as the owner of the property and you should easily see how much it costs. If the LLC has no income history, it would be difficult for the bank to allow this without requiring you to personally guarantee the loan. The obvious benefit of protecting yourself with the LLC is that you protect any other personal assets you have in your name. Your liability would stop at the loan. The LLC would file its own taxes and be able to record the income against the losses (i.e. interest payments and other operating expenses.). This is can be beneficial depening on your current tax situation. I would definitely recommend the use of a tax accountant at that point. You need to be sure you can really afford this property in the worst case scenario and think about market leasing assumption, property taxes, maintenance and management (especially if you've moved to another state.)",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "320092",
"score": 0.6274010539054871,
"text": "Drop shipping is the term your looking for. Stay away from anything overseas, drop-shipping from anywhere other than where your primary market is located can be a nightmare. Research the company your going to use pretty heavily. Try to talk with someone on the phone and ask them questions. Ask them about pricing, billing terms, shipping procedures, returns/exchanges and things of that sort. Remember, even if your not physically handling the merchandise you are still responsible for the business. It doesn't need to be complicated but it does need to done responsibly. It is a business after all!",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "166977",
"score": 0.6272890567779541,
"text": "If you sell through an intermediate who sets up the shop for you, odds are they collect and pay the sales tax for you. My experience is with publishing books through Amazon, where they definitely handle this for you. If you can find a retailer that will handle the tax implications, that might be a good reason to use them. It looks like Etsy uses a different model where you yourself are responsible for the sales tax, which requires you to register with your state (looks like this is the information for New York) and pay the taxes yourself on a regular basis; see this link for a simple guide. If you're doing this, you'll need to keep track of how much tax you owe from your sales each month, quarter, or year (depending on the state laws). You can usually be a sole proprietor, which is the easiest business structure to set up; if you want to limit your legal liability, or work with a partner, you may want to look into other forms of business structure, but for most craftspeople a sole proprietorship is fine to start out with. If you do a sole proprietorship, you can probably file the income on a 1040 Schedule C when you do your personal taxes each year.",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "451207",
"score": 0.627181351184845,
"text": "What about web-hosting fees? Cost of Internet service? Cost of computer equipment to do the work? Amortized cost of development? Time for support calls/email? Phone service used for sales? Advertising/marketing expenses? Look hard--I bet there are some costs.",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "390922",
"score": 0.6270374655723572,
"text": "My general rule of thumb with start-ups is don't quit your day job until you can afford to quit your day job. If you were a single man, or your wife also could provide income for the family, then you would have more flexibility but if you are the single income provider I suggest a more cautious route. It may be frustrating to deal with the drudgery of work, but if you really want to see that start up I would suggest getting started to work on it with what you can while working at your other job, until you have enough money saved and enough work done that you can fully launch the start-up full time. It will be a lot of work, (so would a start-up) but it is less risky, especially considering your family situation. If you really hate what you are doing, I would suggest looking for other opportunities in your field of work. Maybe there is something that you have overlooked, and don't hesitate to apply for jobs you are not sure if you are qualified for-- as long as it doesn't involve time away from your current job an application is fairly painless and the worst case is you keep doing what you are still doing.",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "226646",
"score": 0.6269677877426147,
"text": "Most startup community would say don't even bother to secure it unless yours is never done before. If you really done a lot of research and no one has done it before. Maybe you're one of the lucky few in the world with some new idea. Some investors get turned off when you make them sign NDA, especially if you're a first time entrepreneur. But chances are you're probably not. Instead focus on validating the idea and get market traction.",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "246547",
"score": 0.6269268989562988,
"text": "As far as the spam mail goes, I own a rental (in Connecticut) and live in Massachusetts, I get very little mail related to this property. I view this as a non-compelling reason. Your other reasons pick up quick in value. The protection from the rest of your assets is helpful, and the one con for most is the inability to get a loan with such a structure, but in your case, a cash purchase is mentioned. I don't know what the fees are to start an LLC, but overall, I believe the pros outweigh the cons. Yes, your Pro 4 looks good, an ongoing business with a track record will help the next purchase.",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "519906",
"score": 0.6268670558929443,
"text": "I agree. I'd like to acquire as many assets as possible before making it official. Since we are currently in Ohio, which I think means that assets and debts are not combined. Once I get this one going, I want to start another one here, if I have the time to do it.",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "58939",
"score": 0.6268130540847778,
"text": "The general advice seems to be to sell online. But my issue here is that, a large amount of stock would likely come from Etsy creators - Why would a customer choose my online store to buy an item when they could buy the exact same item directly from the creator for £x cheaper?",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "403877",
"score": 0.6265957355499268,
"text": "You should not open a company unless and until you want to continue operating your company for the longer term. If it is only for a year so so, refrain from opening a company. I am an IT contractor and operate through a limited company. Believe me it isn't that difficult to operate through a limited company. If you are afraid of doing your books, get an accountant and he will do it for you. Should not cost you more than a £1000 - 1500 or so. Regarding what you can claim as an expense, it depends on how you can confirm that the expenses you incurred are for the company. Your accountant can help you out on that. If you claim false expenses and are caught, you have to forgo a lot to the HMRC. Google is the best option, there are loads of sites which can help you on that.",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "251780",
"score": 0.6265239715576172,
"text": "\"When you have nothing and you need to build new, this is the best situation, but you need to partner with the Customer Support Manager, since it all come down to process management and reporting needs. First of all, what are you in the company, do you work in Customer Service, IT or just an office worker who randomly got picked do it? Secondly, do you have any budget? Do you have to code the whole thing, or can you licenses a platform or go open-source? Thirdly, what do \"\"they\"\" want from the system? Do they want to track sales leads, sales, budget, customer service issues, do they want to track trucks and payloads? Are there any business measurements, they want, like NPS, CSAT, TAT, AHT. Fourth: Are they willing to changed their working processes? If not, then all you really need is a system, where you can look up information and tie it to a account. Source: I do this for a living\"",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "207766",
"score": 0.6264991760253906,
"text": "The importance of social proofing to any business both online and offline cannot be over emphasized. However, this post have just elaborated it all and i think even a newbie will be able to comprehend the benefit of social awareness after going through this article.",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "165503",
"score": 0.626401424407959,
"text": "Just keep in mind that on Upwork, you basically have to be the cheapest person to get most of the gigs. It's great to get your feet wet, but I would strongly encourage you to use it to build a portfolio up and then start reaching out to people in your network to see if anyone needs your services.",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "72984",
"score": 0.6262978911399841,
"text": "What you need to do is register as a sole trader. This will automatically register you for self assessment so you don't have to do that separately. For a simple business like you describe that's it. Completing your self assessment will take care of all your income tax and national insurance obligations (although as mentioned in your previous question there shouldn't be any NI to pay if you're only making £600 or so a year).",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "534333",
"score": 0.626087486743927,
"text": "\"The notion that you can put product on the web and sit back and watch the money roll in is a myth, plain and simple. If you put content on the web and expect people to pay money for your products (t-shirts, etc), you have to do the work to get your stuff seen by people, and preferably the right kind of people who will buy your stuff. That means you need to know your market and provide something that they are eager to pay for. This doesn't necessarily mean buying advertising to direct traffic to your site - there are plenty of no-cost ways to bring people to your web site, but instead of costing $$ the cost is in effort and time that you have to put into it. Also keep in mind that the more participants you have in your production and fulfillment pipeline, the less you will make off every sale. Hands-off production services like Zazzle or Cafe Press do everything for you, all you have to do is provide the artwork. However, they also take all the income and pay you a rather piddling percentage of sales. You can get a larger percentage of sales if you do more of the work yourself - like handmade items sold on Etsy. But then, you're doing work. Maybe you'll get $1 for each T-Shirt you sell. If you just upload your artwork to the production service and type in some product description text into their web sales catalog, how many sales will you make in the first month? Most likely somewhere between zero and two. Why should anyone buy your shirt over the tens of thousands of other designs carried by the same production service? It's your responsibility to tell people about your stuff and send them to the site to buy it. And that means it's not a \"\"passive\"\" income. For truly passive income, invest in bank CD's, treasury bonds, or in stocks that pay dividends. The only problem with that is you have to have money to make money this way. :/\"",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "287824",
"score": 0.6259419322013855,
"text": "you may pay less (and sometimes less) to your mouse clicks, and will be able to get guests quick having the bank. If you want to buy cheap targeted traffic for your business, then you can go with buy cheap targeted traffic - http://buysitestraffic.com",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
6
|
“Business day” and “due date” for bills
|
[
{
"id": "560251",
"score": 0.7532988786697388,
"text": "I don't believe Saturday is a business day either. When I deposit a check at a bank's drive-in after 4pm Friday, the receipt tells me it will credit as if I deposited on Monday. If a business' computer doesn't adjust their billing to have a weekday due date, they are supposed to accept the payment on the next business day, else, as you discovered, a Sunday due date is really the prior Friday. In which case they may be running afoul of the rules that require X number of days from the time they mail a bill to the time it's due. The flip side to all of this, is to pick and choose your battles in life. Just pay the bill 2 days early. The interest on a few hundred dollars is a few cents per week. You save that by not using a stamp, just charge it on their site on the Friday. Keep in mind, you can be right, but their computer still dings you. So you call and spend your valuable time when ever the due date is over a weekend, getting an agent to reverse the late fee. The cost of 'right' is wasting ten minutes, which is worth far more than just avoiding the issue altogether. But - if you are in the US (you didn't give your country), we have regulations for everything. HR 627, aka The CARD act of 2009, offers - ‘‘(2) WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY DUE DATES.—If the payment due date for a credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan is a day on which the creditor does not receive or accept payments by mail (including weekends and holidays), the creditor may not treat a payment received on the next business day as late for any purpose.’’. So, if you really want to pursue this, you have the power of our illustrious congress on your side."
},
{
"id": "188530",
"score": 0.7200562357902527,
"text": "You definitely have an argument for getting them to reverse the late fee, especially if it hasn't happened very often. (If you are late every month they may be less likely to forgive.) As for why this happens, it's not actually about business days, but instead it's based on when they know that you paid. In general, there are 2 ways for a company to mark a bill as paid: Late Fees: Some systems automatically assign late fees at the start of the day after the due date if money has not been received. In your case, if your bill was due on the 24th, the late fee was probably assessed at midnight of the 25th, and the payment arrived after that during the day of the 25th. You may have been able to initiate the payment on the company's website at 11:59pm on the 24th and not have received a late fee (or whatever their cutoff time is). Suggestion: as a rule of thumb, for utility bills whose due date and amount can vary slightly from month to month, you're usually better off setting up your payments on the company website to pull from your bank account, instead of setting up your bank account to push the payment to the company. This will ensure that you always get the bill paid on time and for the correct amount. If you still would rather push the payment from your bank account, then consider setting up the payment to arrive about 5 days early, to account for holidays and weekends."
},
{
"id": "564488",
"score": 0.7321335077285767,
"text": "It's likely that your bill always shows the 24th as the due date. Their system is programmed to maintain that consistency regardless of the day of the week that falls on. When the 24th isn't a business day it is good to error on the side of caution and use the business day prior. It would have accepted using their system with a CC payment on the 24th because that goes through their automated system. I would hazard a guess that because your payment was submitted through your bank and arrived on the 23rd it wasn't credited because a live person would have needed to be there to do it and their live people probably don't work weekends. I do much of my bill paying online and have found it easiest to just build a couple days of fluff into the schedule to avoid problems like this. That said, if you call them and explain the situation it is likely that they will credit the late charge back to you."
}
] |
[
{
"id": "108734",
"score": 0.6965306997299194,
"text": "\"We have a local bank that changed to a bill pay service. The money is held as \"\"processing\"\" when the check is supposed to be cut and shows as cleared on the date the check is supposed to be received. Because our business checking is with the same bank, we discovered recently that the although the check shows cleared from our account, the recipient has not received the paper check yet - and may not for 2-3 days. We discovered this because the payroll checks we write this way (to ourselves) never arrive on the due date but clear the business account. It appears to be a new way for banks to ride the \"\"float\"\" and draw interest on the money. It happens with every check processed through the bill pay system and not with electronic transfers.\"",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "143368",
"score": 0.6952111124992371,
"text": "\"There is not one right way. It depends on the level of detail that you need. One way would be: Create the following accounts: When you pay the phone bill: When you are paid with the reimbursement: That is, when you pay the phone bill, you must debit BOTH phone expense to record the expense, and also reimbursements due to record the fact that someone now owes you money. If it's useful you could add another layer of complexity: When you receive the bill you have a liability, and when you pay it you discharge that liability. Whether that's worth keeping track of depends. I never do for month-to-month bills. Afterthought: I see another poster says that your method is incorrect because a reimbursement is not salary. Technically true, though that problem could be fixed by renaming the account to something like \"\"income from employer\"\". The more serious problem I see is that you are reversing the phone expense when you are reimbursed. So at the end of the year you will show total phone expense as $0. This is clearly not correct -- you did have phone expenses, they were just reimbursed. You really are treating the expense account as an asset account -- \"\"phone expenses due to be reimbursed by employer\"\".\"",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "302209",
"score": 0.6950076818466187,
"text": "One's paycheck typically has a YTD (year to date) number that will end on the latest check of the year. I am paid bi-weekly, and my first 2012 check was for work 12/25 - 1/7. So, for my own balance sheet, brokerage statements and stock valuations end 12/31, but my pay ended 12/24. And then a new sheet starts.",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "254431",
"score": 0.6916214227676392,
"text": "You can do this through a journal entry in Quickbooks. It can all be entered as one entry, there's no need to do separate ones for each bill. The journal entry should debit Accounts Payable and credit your equity account. In the line for Accounts Payable, make sure to choose your name in the 'Name' column. This, in effect, enters a credit to your account, which will offset the bills that were shown there previously. The last step is to apply those credits to the bills. Even though they offset each other, your name would still show up in any Payables reports and in the Pay Bills window. To do this, open the Pay Bills window and select one of the bills owed to you. There should be an option to choose 'Apply Credits' or something similar (depends on which version of Quickbooks you are running). Choose that option, and apply credits in the amount of the bill, so that it zeroes out. Do the same for all of the other bills. Once they are all checked off, click the button to Pay Bills. This won't actually 'pay' anything, but will instead just apply the credits to the bills as indicated.",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "500813",
"score": 0.6842026710510254,
"text": "In the US there is no set date. If all goes well there are multiple dates of importance. If it doesn't go well the budget process also may include continuing resolutions, shutdowns, and sequestrations.",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "44593",
"score": 0.6798847913742065,
"text": "Looking at your dates, I think I see a pattern. It appears that your statement closing date is always 17 business days before the last business day of the month. For example, if you start at May 31 and start counting backwards, skipping Saturdays, Sundays, and May 30 (Memorial Day), you'll see that May 5 is 17 business days before May 31. I cannot explain why Bank of America would do this. If you ask them, let us know what they say. If it bothers you, find another bank. I do most of my banking (checking, savings, etc.) with a local credit union. Their statements end on the last day of the month, every month without fail. (Very nice, in my opinion.) I have two credit cards with nationally known banks, and although those statements end in the middle of the month, they are consistently on the same date every month. (One of them is on the 13th; the other date I can't recall right now.) You are right, a computer does the work, and your statement date should be able to fall on a weekend without trouble. Even when these were assembled by hand, the statement date could still be on a weekend, and they just wouldn't write it up until the following Monday. You should be able to find another bank or credit union that does this.",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "257841",
"score": 0.6796833276748657,
"text": "Using the bank's bill pay always seemed like a hassle to me. There are lots of mistakes to be made by me that can result in late payments and not too many benefits other than some convenience, and being able to pay bills online for accounts that require paper payment. (Although the banking systems often screw up those payments) Plus, there is usually a fee associated with bill pay, at least to some extent. I generally use the websites of my credit cards or other entities to pay bills. Then again, maybe I'm a bit of a weirdo here... I don't see mailing a check 3 days ahead of the due date as a particular hassle.",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "23276",
"score": 0.6792817115783691,
"text": "I agree with mbhunter's suggestion of labeling your columns, 'income' and 'expenses'. However, to answer your question, money coming in (a paycheque, for example) is credited to your account. Money going out (a utility bill, for example) is debited from your account. There's no real 'why'... this is simply the definition of the words.",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "522358",
"score": 0.6789397597312927,
"text": "Personally, I have a little checkbook program that I use to keep track of my spending and balance. Like you -- and I presume like most people -- I have certain recurring bills: the mortgage, insurance payments, car payment, etc. I simply enter these into the checkbook program about a month before the bill is due. Then I can run a transaction list that shows the date, amount, and remaining balance after each transaction. So if I want to know how much money I really have available to spend, I just look for the last transaction before my next payday, and see what the balance will be on that day. Personally, I always keep a certain amount of pad in my account so if I made a mistake and entered an incorrect amount for a check, or forgot to enter one completely, I don't overdraw the account. (I like to keep $1000 in such padding but that's way more than really necessary, it's very rare that I make a mistake of more than $100.) In my case, I don't enter electric bills or heating bills because I don't know the amount until I get the bill, and the amounts fall well within my padding, and for just two bills I can factor them in in my head. BTW I wrote this program myself but I'm sure there are similar products on the market. I used to use a spreadsheet and that worked pretty well. (Mainly I wrote the program because I have a tiny side business that I have to keep tax records for even though it makes almost no money.) You could in principle do it on paper, but the catch to that is that when you write payments on your paper ledger in advance of actually writing the check, you will often be writing down payments out of order, and so it becomes difficult to see what your balance is or was or will be on any given date. But a computer system can easily accept transactions out of order and then sort them and re-do the balance calculations in a fraction of a second.",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "31603",
"score": 0.6783155798912048,
"text": "The balance is the amount due.",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "29397",
"score": 0.6776466369628906,
"text": "\"But I have been having a little difficulty to include the expenditure in my monthly budget as the billing cycle is from the 16th to 15th of the next month and my income comes in at the end of the month. Many companies will let you change the statement date if you want, so one way to do this would be to request your bank to have statements due at the end of the month or first of month. You can call and ask, this might resolve your problem entirely. How can I efficiently add the credit card expenditure to my monthly budget? We do this using YNAB, which then means our monthly budget is separate from our actual bank accounts. When we spend, we enter the transaction into YNAB and it's \"\"spent.\"\" Additionally, we just pay whatever our credit card balance is a day before the end of the month so it is at $0 when we do our budget discussion at the end of each month.\"",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "589505",
"score": 0.67697674036026,
"text": "When you submit for reimbursement, the cash you get should be FIFO (first in, first out) and a large bill should empty out 2011 first, automatically tapping 12 for remaining amount owed. I doubt you need to do anything.",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "156162",
"score": 0.6767333149909973,
"text": "They call you because that is their business rules. They want their money, so their system calls you starting on the 5th. Now you have to decide what you should do to stop this. The most obvious is to move the payment date to before the 5th. Yes that does put you at risk if the tenant is late. But since it is only one of the 4 properties you own, it shouldn't be that big of a risk.",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "300962",
"score": 0.674829363822937,
"text": "sorry, things got busy. active calendar management. Are you talking about having a dedicated receptionist manage say an exchange calendar? taking calls, making an appointment on your calendar and then saving the event and setting reminders? that kind of thing? outgoing calls to confirm appointments sounds interesting, but currently we only want to deal with inbound, process then transfer.",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "112728",
"score": 0.6742792725563049,
"text": "Any accounting software should be able to handle this. When you invoice them, set the invoice date to the date of the event. Then receive a partial payment against that invoice. This will cause your accounting software to display the service income in the correct period as well. So if you sent them invoice for August 7, 2014 event on May 5th, 2014 and they gave you $500 due, you would see this Income in August ($500 on Cash basis, $1000 on Accrual basis. When you received the other $500 in August, you would see $1000 for both methods). You would not see any income in May, when you created the invoice. This is better for revenue matching with the correct period. When you send them same invoice (say 30 days before the event), Set the software to show payments already received (it seems that most online accounting software will do this by default). Here is an example in Freshbooks. Here is an example in Xero: Seems they both display information on when you can expect payment on the their respective dashboards. In the Desktop version of Quickbooks (which I use a lot), it will not show the balance of the customer by default on an invoice. You will have to modify the invoice template. There are more details on that here. In Desktop version of Quickbooks, you can look at Cash Flow Forecast report to see the expected amount coming in. I hope that helps and good luck.",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "527231",
"score": 0.6741176247596741,
"text": "I suspect that the payments were originally due near the end of each quarter (March 15, June 15, September 15, and December 15) but then the December payment was extended to January 15 to allow for end-of-year totals to be calculated, and then the March payment was extended to April 15 to coincide with Income Tax Return filing.",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "74688",
"score": 0.6732869744300842,
"text": "\"A.1 and B.1 are properly balanced, but \"\"Business Expense\"\" is an expense, not an asset. The T entries should be timestamped. The time should be equal to the time on the credit card receipts. This will make audit and balancing easier. A or B can be used, but if the the business is to be reimbursed for personal expenses, the accounts should be renamed to reflect that fact. More explicit account names could be \"\"Business expense - stationary\"\" and \"\"Personal expense - lunch\"\" or even better \"\"Personal expense - cammil - lunch\"\". With a consistent format, the account names can be computer parsed for higher resolution and organization, but when tallying these high resolution accounts, debits & credits should always be used. When it comes time to collect from employees, only accounts with \"\"Personal expense\"\" need be referenced. When it comes time to collect from \"\"cammil\"\", only net accounts of \"\"Personal expense - cammil\"\" need be referenced. An example of higher resolution, to determine what \"\"cammil\"\" owes, would be to copy the main books, reverse any account beginning with \"\"Personal expense - cammil\"\", and then take the balance. Using the entries in the question as an example, here's the account to determine \"\"cammil\"\"'s balance: Now, after all such balancing entries are performed, the net credit \"\"Personal expense - cammil\"\" is what \"\"cammil\"\" owes to the business. The scheme for account names should be from left to right, general to specific.\"",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "338701",
"score": 0.6725656986236572,
"text": "I'm not familiar with Gnucash, but I can discuss double-entry bookkeeping in general. I think the typical solution to something like this is to create an Asset account for what this other person owes you. This represents the money that he owes you. It's an Accounts Receivable. Method 1: Do you have/need separate accounts for each company that you are paying for this person? Do you need to record where the money is going? If not, then all you need is: When you pay a bill, you credit (subtract from) Checking and debit (add to) Friend Account. When he pays you, you credit (subtract from) Friend Account and debit (add to) Checking. That is, when you pay a bill for your friend you are turning one asset, cash, into a different kind of asset, receivable. When he pays you, you are doing the reverse. There's no need to create a new account each time you pay a bill. Just keep a rolling balance on this My Friend account. It's like a credit card: you don't get a new card each time you make a purchase, you just add to the balance. When you make a payment, you subtract from the balance. Method 2: If you need to record where the money is going, then you'd have to create accounts for each of the companies that you pay bills to. These would be Expense accounts. Then you'd need to create two accounts for your friend: An Asset account for the money he owes you, and an Income account for the stream of money coming in. So when you pay a bill, you'd credit Checking, debit My Friend Owes Me, credit the company expense account, and debit the Money from My Friend income account. When he repays you, you'd credit My Friend Owes Me and debit Checking. You don't change the income or expense accounts. Method 3: You could enter bills when they're received as a liability and then eliminate the liability when you pay them. This is probably more work than you want to go to.",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "416523",
"score": 0.6719056963920593,
"text": "\"I wrote a little program one time to try to do this. I think I wrote it in Python or something. The idea was to have a list of \"\"projected expenses\"\" where each one would have things like the amount, the date of the next transaction, the frequency of the transaction, and so on. The program would then simulate time, determining when the next transaction would be, updating balances, and so on. You can actually do a very similar thing with a spreadsheet where you basically have a list of expenses that you manually paste in for each month in advance. Simply keep a running balance of each row, and make sure you don't forget any transactions that should be happening. This works great for fixed expenses, or expenses that you know how much they are going to be for the next month. If you don't know, you can estimate, for instance you can make an educated guess at how much your electric bill will be the next month (if you haven't gotten the bill yet) and you can estimate how much you will spend on fuel based on reviewing previous months and some idea of whether your usage will differ in the next month. For variable expenses I would always err on the side of a larger amount than I expected to spend. It isn't going to be possible to budget to the exact penny unless you lead a very simple life, but the extra you allocate is important to cushion unexpected and unavoidable overruns. Once you have this done for expenses against your bank account, you can see what your \"\"low water mark\"\" is for the month, or whatever time period you project out to. If this is above your minimum, then you can see how much you can safely allocate to, e.g. paying off debt. Throwing a credit card into the mix can make things a bit more predictable in the current month, especially for unpredictable amounts, but it is a bit more complicated as now you have a second account that you have to track that has to get deducted from your first account when it becomes due in the following month. I am assuming a typical card where you have something like a 25 day grace period to pay without interest along with up to 30 days after the expense before the grace period starts, depending on the relationship between your cut-off date and when the actual expense occurs.\"",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "318491",
"score": 0.6717624068260193,
"text": "\"In the US, you'd run the risk of being accused of fraud if this weren't set up properly. It would only be proper if your wife could show that she were involved, acting as your agent, bookkeeper, etc. Even so, to suggest that your time is billed at one rate but you are only paid a tiny fraction of that is still a high risk alert. I believe the expression \"\"if it quacks like a duck...\"\" is pretty universal. If not, I'll edit in a clarification. note -I know OP is in UK, but I imagine tax collection is pretty similar in this regard.\"",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
7
|
New business owner - How do taxes work for the business vs individual?
|
[
{
"id": "411063",
"score": 0.7072799205780029,
"text": "Through your question and then clarification through the comments, it looks like you have a U.S. LLC with at least two members. If you did not elect some other tax treatment, your LLC will be treated as a partnership by the IRS. The partnership should file a tax return on Form 1065. Then each partner will get a Schedule K-1 from the partnership, which the partner should use to include their respective shares of the partnership income and expenses on their personal Forms 1040. You can also elect to be taxed as an S-Corp or a C-Corp instead of a partnership, but that requires you to file a form explicitly making such election. If you go S-Corp, then you will file a different form for the company, but the procedure is roughly the same - Income gets passed through to the owners via a Schedule K-1. If you go C-Corp, then the owners will pay no tax on their own Form 1040, but the C-Corp itself will pay income tax. As far as whether you should try to spend the money as business expense to avoid paying extra tax - That's highly dependent on your specific situation. I'd think you'd want to get tailored advice for that."
}
] |
[
{
"id": "65095",
"score": 0.6718419790267944,
"text": "As an individual freelancer, you would need to maintain a book of accounts. This should show all the income you are getting, and should also list all the payments incurred. This can not only include the payments to other professionals, but also any hardware purchased, phone bills, any travel and entertainment bills directly related to the service you are offering. Once you arrive at a net profit figure, you would need to file this as your income. Consult a tax professional and he can help with how to keep the records of income and expenses. i.e. You would need to create invoices for payments, use checks or online transfers for most payments, segregate the accounts, one account used for this professional stuff, and another for your personal stuff, etc. In a normal course the Income Tax Department does not ask for these records, however whenever your tax returns get scrutinized on a random basis, they would ask for all the relevant documentations.",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "541682",
"score": 0.6717067360877991,
"text": "If you are paid by foreigners then it is quite possible they don't file anything with the IRS. All of this income you are required to report as business income on schedule C. There are opportunities on schedule C to deduct expenses like your health insurance, travel, telephone calls, capital expenses like a new computer, etc... You will be charged both the employees and employers share of social security/medicare, around ~17% or so, and that will be added onto your 1040. You may still need a local business license to do the work locally, and may require a home business permit in some cities. In some places, cities subscribe to data services based on your IRS tax return.... and will find out a year or two later that someone is running an unlicensed business. This could result in a fine, or perhaps just a nice letter from the city attorneys office that it would be a good time to get the right licenses. Generally, tax treaties exist to avoid or limit double taxation. For instance, if you travel to Norway to give a report and are paid during this time, the treaty would explain whether that is taxable in Norway. You can usually get a credit for taxes paid to foreign countries against your US taxes, which helps avoid paying double taxes in the USA. If you were to go live in Norway for more than a year, the first $80,000/year or so is completely wiped off your US income. This does NOT apply if you live in the USA and are paid from Norway. If you have a bank account overseas with more than $10,000 of value in it at any time during the year, you owe the US Government a FinCEN Form 114 (FBAR). This is pretty important, there are some large fines for not doing it. It could occur if you needed an account to get paid in Norway and then send the money here... If the Norwegian company wires the money to you from their account or sends a check in US$, and you don't have a foreign bank account, then this would not apply.",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "352760",
"score": 0.6717026233673096,
"text": "There are two methods of doing this Pulling out the money and paying the penalty if any, and going on your way. Having the Roth IRA own the business, and being an employee. If you go with the second choice, you should read more about it on this question.",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "401832",
"score": 0.6716132760047913,
"text": "It actually depends on the services provided. If you're renting through AirBnB, you're likely to provide much more services to the tenants than a traditional rental. It may raise it to a level when it is no longer a passive activity. See here, for starters: Providing substantial services. If you provide substantial services that are primarily for your tenant's convenience, such as regular cleaning, changing linen, or maid service, you report your rental income and expenses on Schedule C (Form 1040), Profit or Loss From Business, or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040), Net Profit From Business. Use Form 1065, U.S. Return of Partnership Income, if your rental activity is a partnership (including a partnership with your spouse unless it is a qualified joint venture). Substantial services do not include the furnishing of heat and light, cleaning of public areas, trash collection, etc. For information, see Publication 334, Tax Guide for Small Business. Also, you may have to pay self-employment tax on your rental income using Schedule SE (Form 1040), Self-Employment Tax. For a discussion of “substantial services,” see Real Estate Rents in Publication 334, chapter 5",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "515233",
"score": 0.671588659286499,
"text": "\"In the United States, with an S-Corp, you pay yourself a salary from company earnings. That portion is taxed at an individual rate. The rest of the company earnings are taxed as a corporation, which often have great tax benefits. If you are making over $80K/year, the difference can be substantial. A con is that there is more paperwork and you have to create a \"\"board\"\" of advisors.\"",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "160313",
"score": 0.6709689497947693,
"text": "First, the SSN isn't an issue. She will need to apply for an ITIN together with tax filing, in order to file taxes as Married Filing Jointly anyway. I think you (or both of you in the joint case) probably qualify for the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, if you've been outside the US for almost the whole year, in which cases both of you should have all of your income excluded anyway, so I'm not sure why you're getting that one is better. As for Self-Employment Tax, I suspect that she doesn't have to pay it in either case, because there is a sentence in your linked page for Nonresident Spouse Treated as a Resident that says However, you may still be treated as a nonresident alien for the purpose of withholding Social Security and Medicare tax. and since Self-Employment Tax is just Social Security and Medicare tax in another form, she shouldn't have to pay it if treated as resident, if she didn't have to pay it as nonresident. From the law, I believe Nonresident Spouse Treated as a Resident is described in IRC 6013(g), which says the person is treated as a resident for the purposes of chapters 1 and 24, but self-employment tax is from chapter 2, so I don't think self-employment tax is affected by this election.",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "381753",
"score": 0.6708824634552002,
"text": "Disclaimer: I am not an attorney, and I have not 100% researched the law. Take any advise from an online forum with a grain of salt. Please consult an attorney, tax specialist, or the IRS directly for any concrete answers. AFAIK there isn't anything that would prevent you from starting a business. Simply owing back taxes shouldn't make a difference on how you make money, whether that is working for yourself or someone else. All the IRS is concerned about at this point is that you still owe them. When going through the process of forming an LLC a couple of years back, I don't recall any personal tax information being brought up except when we were discussing possible loan options. Regarding loan options, one important issue you may come into is if the IRS has filed a lien against you: A federal tax lien is the government’s legal claim against your property when you neglect or fail to pay a tax debt. The lien protects the government’s interest in all your property, including real estate, personal property and financial assets. A lien will exist on your credit report for 7 years after it is released: The IRS releases your lien within 30 days after you have paid your tax debt. With a lien, it will be very difficult to get a loan or other financing for your small business. If this ends up being the case, you can try to get a discharge or subordination on specific property that would allow lenders a claim on your property ahead of the IRS. Otherwise, you may find yourself relying solely on what money you currently have. A big point is the IRS's threshold on filing a lien is $10,000: The Fresh Start Initiative increased the IRS Notice of Federal Tax Lien filing threshold from $5,000 to $10,000; however, Notices of Federal Tax Liens may still be filed on amounts less than $10,000 when circumstances warrant. Since you currently owe ~$8,000 over the past 3 years, it is possible that adding another year in back taxes will cause the IRS to file a lien if they have not yet already done so. So it may be something to keep an eye on if you do plan on taking out a loan for your business.",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "480512",
"score": 0.6706569194793701,
"text": "IRS Publication 529 is the go-to document. Without being a tax professional, I'd say if the dues and subscriptions help you in the running of your business, then they're deductible. You're on your own if you take my advice (or don't). ;)",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "389516",
"score": 0.6706277132034302,
"text": "An LLC is a pass-through entity in the USA, so profits and losses flow through to the individual's taxes. Thus an LLC has a separate TIN but the pass-through property greatly simplifies tax filings, as compared to the complicated filings required by C-corps.",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "369577",
"score": 0.6706056594848633,
"text": "If this is something you plan to continue doing it would make sense to create it as it's own business entity and then to get non-profit status eg: 501c3. Otherwise I'm pretty sure you have to think of it as YOU receiving the money as a sole proprietor - and file a couple more tax forms at the end of the year. I think it's a Schedule C. So essentially if you bring in $10,000, then you spend that $10,000 as legit business expenses for your venture your schedule C would show no profit and wouldn't pay taxes on it. BUT, you do have to file that form. Operating this way could have legal implications should something happen and you get sued. Having the proper business entity setup could help in that situation.",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "300460",
"score": 0.6705337762832642,
"text": "\"I'm not 100% certain on boats, since they aren't typically sold for a gain, but the tax base of an asset is typically the cost of the asset plus the cost of any improvements, so your $15,000 gain looks right (check with a CPA to be certain, though, if you can). Your \"\"cost basis\"\" would be $50,000 + $25,000 = $75,000, and your net gain would be $90,000 - $75,000 = $15,000. The result is the same, but the arithmetic is organized a little differently. I am fairly confident you cannot include your time in the \"\"cost of improvements\"\". If you incorporated and \"\"paid yourself\"\" for the time, then the payment would be considered income (and taxed), if it was even allowed. Depending on your tax bracket that may be a WORSE option for you. You can look at it this way - you only pay the tax on the $15k gain versus paying someone else $15k to do the labor.\"",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "313397",
"score": 0.6705222725868225,
"text": "Get answers from your equivalent of the IRS, or a local lawyer or accountant who specializes in taxes. Any other answer you get here would be anectdotal at best. Never good to rely on legal or medical advice from internet strangers.",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "377547",
"score": 0.6704255938529968,
"text": "\"As a minor you certainly can pay tax, the government wants its cut from you just like everyone else :-) However you do get the personal allowance like everyone else, so you won't have to pay income tax until your net income reaches £10,800 (that's the figure for the tax year from April 2015 to April 2016, it'll probably change in future years). Once you're 16, you will also have to pay national insurance, which is basically another tax, at a lower threshold. The current rates are £2.80/week if you are making £5,965 a year or more, and also 9% on any income above £8,060 (up to £42,385). Your \"\"net income\"\" or \"\"profits\"\" are the income you receive minus the expenses you have to support that income. Note that the expenses must be entirely for the \"\"business\"\", they can't be for personal things. The most important thing to do immediately is to start keeping accurate records. Keep a list of the income you receive and also the expenses you pay for hardware etc. Make sure you keep receipts (perhaps just electronic ones) for the expenses so you can prove they existed later. Keep track of that net income as the year goes on and if it starts collecting at the rate you'd have to pay tax and national insurance, then make sure you also put aside enough money to pay for those when the bill comes. There's some good general advice on the Government's website here: https://www.gov.uk/working-for-yourself/what-you-need-to-do In short, as well as keeping records, you should register with the tax office, HMRC, as a \"\"sole trader\"\". This should be something that anyone can do whatever their age, but it's worth calling them up as soon as you can to check and find out if there are any other issues. They'll probably want you to send in tax returns containing the details of your income and expenses. If you're making enough money it may be worth paying an accountant to do this for you.\"",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "210889",
"score": 0.6704121828079224,
"text": "Another person, not a shareholder or director, will be treated as when a bank loans you money. You are loaning out money and you are sort of getting interest income out of it or some other benefit, which needs to be put down in you company's annual return. Full source on the HMRC website. But for a shareholder or director is different matter. Check the HMRC source for sure and check with your accountant, if you have one. If you owe your company money You or your company may have to pay tax if you take a director’s loan. Your personal and company tax responsibilities depend on how the loan is settled. You also need to check if you have extra tax responsibilities if: If the loan was more than £10,000 (£5,000 in 2013-14) If you’re a shareholder and director and you owe your company more than £10,000 (£5,000 in 2013 to 2014) at any time in the year, your company must: You must report the loan on your personal Self Assessment tax return. You may have to pay tax on the loan at the official rate of interest. If you paid interest below the official rate If you’re a shareholder and director, your company must: You must report the interest on your personal Self Assessment tax return. You may have to pay tax on the difference between the official rate and the rate you paid.",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "419319",
"score": 0.6701555848121643,
"text": "My understanding (I am not a lawyer or tax expert) is that you are not allowed to work for free, but you can pay yourself minimum wage for the hours worked. There are probably National Insurance implications as well but I don't know. The main thing is, though, that if HMRC think that you've set up this system as a tax avoidance scheme then they're allowed to tax you as though all the income had been yours in the first place. If you are considering such a setup I would strongly advise you to hire a qualified small business accountant who will be familiar with the rules and will be able to advise you on what is and is not possible / sensible. Falling outside the rules (even inadvertently) leaves you liable to a lot of hassle and potentially fines etc.",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "120649",
"score": 0.6701547503471375,
"text": "The company will have to pay 20% tax on its profits. Doesn't matter how these profits are earned. Profits = Income minus all money you spend to get the income. However, you can't just take the profits out of the company. The company can pay you a salary, on which income tax, national insurance, and employer's national insurance have to be paid at the usual rate. The company can pay you a dividend, on which tax has to be paid. And the company can pay money into the director's pension fund, which is tax free. Since the amount of company revenue can be of interest, I'd be curious myself what the revenue of such a company would be. And if the company makes losses, I'm sure HMRC won't allow you to get any tax advantages from such losses.",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "257303",
"score": 0.6701151132583618,
"text": "\"You will need to see a tax expert. Your edited question includes the line For the short term, we will be \"\"renting\"\" it to my wife's grandmother at a deep discount. According to the instructions for schedule E If you rented out a dwelling unit that you also used for personal purposes during the year, you may not be able to deduct all the expenses for the rental part. “Dwelling unit” (unit) means a house, apartment, condominium, or similar property. For each property listed on line 1a, report the number of days in the year each property was rented at fair rental value and the number of days of personal use. A day of personal use is any day, or part of a day, that the unit was used by: I have no idea how this will work for Schedule C.\"",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "564453",
"score": 0.6700435876846313,
"text": "It will depend on how much you expect to earn this way, and whether you expect the company to become profitable soon. Has the company just not made a profit yet, or has it actually made a significant loss that your invoices would just be offsetting? If you're earning over £10,000 per year then invoicing through the company is preferable. Above that level, you'd be taking money from the company as dividends after paying 20% corporation tax with no other tax to pay on your personal tax return. As a sole trader you'd be paying 20% income tax and 9% NI. (Note however that the company can only pay dividends from profits, which is a problem if there are significant losses to offset.) Below £10,000, there's little difference. Through the company, you can take a salary of £7956 per year without paying any income tax or NI. With the new £2000 discount on employers' NI you could then take salary up to £10,000 and just pay 12% employee's NI. As a sole trader, you pay 9% Class 4 NI over £7956 and a fixed £143 per year for Class 2 NI. Paying 9% rather than 12% saves you £60, but then you add the £143. In practice the company would work out more expensive at this level because you'll probably want to pay an accountant to deal with the payroll for you. Having the company repay your £2000 from the invoices doesn't really save any tax if the company will become profitable in the future. You don't pay any tax now since the money you receive isn't income, and the company doesn't pay any tax if the extra £2000 of revenue doesn't put it back in profit. However, if the company is profitable next year then it will have an extra £2000 of profit that would otherwise have been offset against this year's loss, and you do end up paying 20% corporation tax on the £2000. You could still have the company repay the loan in order to delay the tax liability, but it's not really tax free money. Loaning additional money to the company has no tax benefit, you just give the company £1000 and get your original £1000 back later. You pay no tax and neither does the company, but it was your money in the first place.",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "258439",
"score": 0.6699747443199158,
"text": "My experience (two purchases, Ontario, Canada) is that the property taxes are paid by whomever is the owner on the date the tax bill comes due. The bill might be due before the owners even decide to sell. However: A part of the closing process is a Statement of Adjustments, in which various costs that span the tenure of two owners are split on a per-diem basis. In your case, there would have been a charge against you of 2/365 of the tax bill on this statement at the time of closing (if you hadn't paid any 2014 taxes) The statement also includes things like flat-rate water bills, monthly cable bills, security system monitoring... All paid by one owner or the other, but split fairly on a per diem basis at the time of closing...",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "121393",
"score": 0.6699633002281189,
"text": "\"I work in the legal services industry, selling these products for a competitor of theirs who shall remain nameless. The LLC filing itself in most cases is a simple fill in the blank form. You can likely file yourself either online or through the mail, depending on the state. Only a handful require an original document. You can apply for the EIN for free on the IRS website and usually have it within a few minutes. If you already have someone assisting with your annual LLC taxes you wouldn't need their services for that either. If their compliance kit involves any business licensing research, it may be worthwhile - but you can also order those services a la carte from vendors like LLX and BusinessLicenses.com. What you're really paying for is the registered agent service - the address for public record with the state so they know where to send any service of process - and you're paying for the convenience of a \"\"one stop shop\"\" instead of handling all the legwork yourself.\"",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
9
|
Hobby vs. Business
|
[
{
"id": "509122",
"score": 0.6842485070228577,
"text": "Miscellaneous income -- same category used for hobbies."
},
{
"id": "184698",
"score": null,
"text": "\"You can list it as other income reported on line 21 of form 1040. In TurboTax, enter at: - Federal Taxes tab (Personal in Home & Business) - Wages & Income -“I’ll choose what I work on” Button Scroll down to: -Less Common Income -Misc Income, 1099-A, 1099-C. -The next screen will give you several choices. Choose \"\"Other reportable Income\"\". You will reach a screen where you can type a description of the income and the amount. Type in the amount of income and categorize as Tutoring.\""
}
] |
[
{
"id": "76120",
"score": 0.649917721748352,
"text": "Well first problem is usually that you are trying to do too much, you end up micro managing, once a company becomes large enough this is impossible to keep doing at the same level. If you find that you don't have enough time maybe it's time to either hire someone new, or promote/transfer someone. You need to trust and give freedom to your employees to do their job in their own way which may or may not be better than yours. (Communicate with each at intervals.) A lot of business owners struggle with this because it costs them money, and that is wrong it's cost your company money which is a separate entity than you. A piece of property that makes you less money than the week before is still making you money you are not losing money. So get that out of your head, it's not your money until you take it out of the business until then that money including profits are the property of the business (this is how the law see it by the way.) Marginally an understaffed store will make a larger percentage of profits from revenue, a well staffed store will make more actual profits from more actual revenue because it can handle the business coming into the store better, which in turns should lead to more business. On a particular day you may see more money in profit from an understaffed store, someone calls out let's say, but trust me when I say that will not continue for very long. On of the biggest challenges new business owners face is they are fugal, as in they don't spend the money they need to. This means buying new equipment, and hiring and giving raises and promotions, so you can handle new business as well. Let say you are making T-Shirts, or really adding new designs to pre-made plain shirts, you can only press one at a time which for a while is enough, but eventually you are going to need another press so you can do 2 at a time, but a lot business owners will somehow expect an employee to produce more with what he has, now orders aren't being filed and you are in a panic and possibly angry but guess what you are angry at the employee not the fact you were to stupid to realize that he needs 2 presses to do the job correctly that's your own fault and you're blind to it, because you feel as if you are working twice as hard than them because of the problem you created! And let's say the problem is different now the press isn't getting hot enough and it take 20% per shirt to get it to stay on correctly and you decide to never fix it, then a light goes out then blank then blank and suddenly you realize finally all of this needs to be replaced at the same time. I've seen things like this happen, in new and old businesses things work fine for the first 5 years then normal maintenance is forgotten, have a depreciation fund ready so it doesn't feel like you are spending any money, that's what that fund is for and you put into it from the beginning, need a $2k equipment, ohh I have $4k saved for this already, it was money intended to be spent on this. But of course some of this is going to depend on the type of business you are running! And since you have provided us no details I can't give an answer for you because all businesses are different, but I feel that these things, refusing to give freedom and authority to other employees, and refusing to spend money when needed are the biggest pitfalls most business owners fall into.",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "452683",
"score": 0.6498680114746094,
"text": "I don't know. I like his attitude. Why not try weird stuff? I went to a Star Trek convention just for fun to see what it was like. Not my thing but I loved the experience. Same with a convention for restaurant supplies. Travel whenever I can and try to stay in the weird hotels. I'd probably try this service too, just to say I did.",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "573677",
"score": 0.6498247981071472,
"text": "Quite often the local university has decent gym facilities with super-competitive rates, even if you are not a student there, and you can usually join for a single term and pay by cash. They lack some of the fancier things and might be not as shiny, but I want my membership fees to pay for equipment, not interior design.",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "525292",
"score": 0.6497852206230164,
"text": "You are absolutely correct, incorporation and the fiduciary responsibility that comes with it almost always leads to a sacrifice in product quality and long-term business principles. I always think of the difference between McDonalds and In-n-Out hamburgers as examples of where each road leads.",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "315083",
"score": 0.6495679020881653,
"text": "Yea that's all fine and dandy if you have the resources to afford not having a reliable income while you take the risk of being entrepreneurial. One of my good friends just sold his company to yelp for $9mil. Good for him, I wish him the best. But it's easy to justify taking the risk of starting your own company if your parents are worth $200mil and bought you a $3mil house. In that situation, you aren't actually taking a risk.",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "121744",
"score": 0.6495062112808228,
"text": "Dude, pitch deck is a hygiene factor. You need it. They're really hard to do right. It's hard to get the op to 'sell' without the deck in the first place. You might not get meetings. Yes, if you have the connections and massive energy then you 'can' hustle through... but you need to follow the rules of the game if you want to win. Front's deck is one of the best. I've the largest public collection online (~90). It's easily the most common one I recommend to people (yes, it can be better). Linkedin with Reid's commentary is of course the most informative. Do you know what the search volume is on pitch decks? Mine get literally millions of views a year according to slideshare and I've never marketed them. Founders want to see these decks",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "56747",
"score": 0.649398148059845,
"text": "If youre fifteen... Id actually recommend starting with some economics, just to understand the business decision making process. Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto is excellent. An online course from anywhere would be cool too. Then, case studies are excellent as well. It depends on what you want to use ths for. Sales? Yeah, how to win friends and influence people, totally. A macro scale understanding, take the route I took.",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "385929",
"score": 0.6492617726325989,
"text": "An expense is an expense. You can deduct your lease payment subject to some limitations, but you don't make out by having more expenses. Higher expenses mean lower profit. Is leasing better than owning? It depends on the car you'd buy. If your business doesn't benefit from flashiness of your car, then buying a quality used car (a few years old at most) would probably be a wiser decision financially. I'd think hard about whether you really need an up-to-date car.",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "97018",
"score": 0.6491967439651489,
"text": "Theres loads of information on the costs of regulation to smaller businesses and larger corporations and the adverse affects its had on their ability to either go public or stay private. We learned boat loads about it this past year in my undergraduate course so I'm sure you could find quite a bit.",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "5058",
"score": 0.6490894556045532,
"text": "The most important thing, IMO is to love the business itself. Love what you are doing. Some people in a family business have aptitudes/attitudes better suited for somewhere else, they are just there because they want to help the family. That is a noble mindset but it may translate into sub-par work because you are not doing what you love. So love it, or at least like it a lot.",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "377537",
"score": 0.6490829586982727,
"text": "Well I was trying to describe it very generally because I think if other people heard the idea especially on an business thread the idea would be taken easily. And the idea came to me about a month ago and I guess I didn't explain well but I was wondering what kind of homework I need to research. My intention was for people to give me an idea of where to start. I've already started to write out a business plan I just didn't know if there were places to go to find people to invest into it or not. And I'm totally fine with criticism and what not but the way he came out was actually humorous to me, to call someone's idea bad when you don't know what it is is just silly. Snapchat seemed like a stupid idea in my opinion. Why would I only want to see someone's picture for 10 seconds and it goes away forever? But hey that turned into gold. So you never know what can be successful and not these days and how are you supposed to find out without taking the risks and going for it. So I guess a specific question is, if I write a business plan, what is my next step, who do I show it to?",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "32503",
"score": 0.6488229632377625,
"text": "\"My company makes books. It is a start-up going through hard times right now. It is too soon to say if we are ultimately going to be successful, so we might not be the best example of triumph following adversity. We certainly can fulfill the \"\"hard times\"\" part, though. Let me know if I can be of any help.\"",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "484437",
"score": 0.6487665772438049,
"text": "My personal experience tells me that nearly 100% of people who approach you have their own interests in mind. Things you searched yourself will be more beneficial.",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "573789",
"score": 0.6486003398895264,
"text": "Just because you think it is healthy to get away from the computer and physically go to a bookstore does not make it good business. By that rationale, you should be paying all of your bills at the post office with a stamp.",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "474962",
"score": 0.6485956907272339,
"text": "I'm hearing that I should maybe wait and see how things go at first as it is only a very small operation. But if I moved into a side of the trade where I require staff, vehicles, and the likes then I would need to registed as a limited company.",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "370976",
"score": 0.648565411567688,
"text": "Everything in life is a combination of luck and skill. Startups are no different. The risks are higher and most sensible people know and understand that. You know why we worship the successes? Because against all odds, those startups stood up to your salaried buddies who work for faceless large corporations and have tons of people and kicked their asses. At some point, they deserve it. You see startups as gambling, others see it as betting on yourself. Especially founding or joining an early stage startup. It's also taking on huge responsibility. In a mega-corp your failures and shortcomings will be covered and almost certainly won't tank the company. Your creativity probably won't flourish and their is an incentive to do just well enough. Why should you work your ass off for a company that you're not invested in other than a paycheck? Startups aren't for everyone. Hell, startups probably aren't for most people. But there are some people, those select few, who simply can't imagine not working for themselves, creating things, tinkering, trying to change the world. It's not even gambling to them, it's a way of life.",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "280099",
"score": 0.6483824849128723,
"text": "Well said. To put it shortly I think both can be a viable source of some side income when proper risk management is in place. It is likely not going to work when you are trading/betting with money that is important to you. Paper trade/bet until you find a viable strategy. Then use proper bankroll management and some expendable income to pick up some extra bucks on the side. Sports betting is nice because the initial investment is much lower than day trading.",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "351405",
"score": 0.6483240723609924,
"text": "\"Online courses in one resource, although I've always found reading targeted books to be far more effective when it comes to business. My best advice on starting companies is learn how to think like those who have started the craziest/biggest/best companies. I've always gotten far more out of reading Steve Jobs' biography, Sam Walton's autobiography, John Rockefeller's biography \"\"Titan\"\", Warren Buffett's biography \"\"Snowball\"\", Howard Schulz's books on starbucks, etc. than just about any business course I've taken. These also far surpass your 'start a business with these steps' books. Although you do need to read some of those too. I'd encourage picking out a few business heroes and learning from them. Elon Musk is mine today. Check out his life story. For more targeted skills, such as learning accounting or management skills, amazon is pretty easy to navigate. **tl;dr: Learn to think like the greats before learning the skills you need**\"",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "466460",
"score": 0.648186981678009,
"text": "**Have a business plan.** Even if this is just a piece of paper that you and your friend scratched on, you want a document that describes what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. Also have some note of how profits will be shared (most likely, this will be 50/50 but write it down!) **Plan ahead and have some cash onhand.** Not every one of your expenses will be something you will know about in advance. Plan your expenses so that you have money to cover them, but also have an emergency fund (you can build this with the profits you get in the beginning) in case your rake breaks and you don't have a backup. Also, if you use your emergency fund, REPLACE IT. **Trust each other and communicate.** All businesses should run on trust. You and your friend should trust that the other person is going to work hard and put in the work. If you don't trust that he will show up on time, the burden falls to you and you will need to work harder. If you're having problems with him, trust that you'll be able to approach him (be tactful and respectful though) and work it out. **Have fun.** Ultimately, starting a business like this should be fun. Yes, the work may seem like a drag, but if you and your friend are able to have fun while working you'll enjoy it more and it won't seem so bad. Also, don't be afraid to spend your profits on yourselves. I'm not saying blow every dollar you make, but going to dinner or going to see a movie together with your hard earned profits from that day's work can make it all worth it. These are just some ideas that I came up with at my desk at work. If you have any other questions, feel free to PM me. I'm happy to help out. Good luck!",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "278629",
"score": 0.6481479406356812,
"text": "Question (which you need to ask yourself): How well are your friends paid for their work? What would happen if you just took your money and bought a garage, and hired two car mechanics? How would that be different from what you are doing? The money that you put into the company, is that paid in capital, or is it a loan to the company that will be repaid?",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
11
|
Personal checks instead of business ones
|
[
{
"id": "596427",
"score": 0.7653040289878845,
"text": "I'll assume you are asking about a check for some kind of work or service that you provided them, that they hired your company to do. No large business will do that. In their records they have a contract with your company to provide services. If they write you a personal check it won't match with the contract, and when the auditors see that they will scream blue murder. Whoever wrote the check will have to prove that you are legitimately the same thing as the company (that doesn't mean taking your word for it). They may also have to show they weren't conspiring with you to commit tax fraud ( that wasn't your intention of course, was it?) ."
}
] |
[
{
"id": "181187",
"score": 0.7265689373016357,
"text": "They sure can. They are two different legal entities, so why not? You can even write a check to yourself, and then deposit it back into your own account. (Not very useful, but you can). The tax implications are a very different question, as this might constitute taking money out of the company. Edit: In some countries, when the business hires someone to work for them, it is forbidden by law to do that, unless he/she is explicitly allowed to do it in his contract. The business owner himself however, can always 'allow' himself to do that.",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "229546",
"score": 0.7222591638565063,
"text": "\"Legally, a check just needs to have a certain list of things (be an instruction to one's bank to pay a specific amount of money to bearer or to a specific entity, have a date, have a signature, etc.) There are anecdotes around of a guy depositing a junk mail check and it accidentally qualifying as a real check (which he turned into a live show), or of writing a check on a door, cow, or \"\"the shirt off your back\"\". What kind of checks your bank will process is technically up to them. Generally, if you get your blank checks printed up by any reputable firm, they'll have similar information in similar places, as well as the MICR line (the account and routing number in magnetic ink on the bottom) to allow for bank to process the checks with automated equipment. As long as it's a standard size, has the MICR line, and has the information that a check needs, your bank is likely to be fine with it. So, there are some standards, but details like where exactly the name of the bank is, or what font is used, or the like, are up to whoever is printing the check. For details on what standards your bank requires in order to process your checks, you'd have to check with your bank directly. Though, it wouldn't surprise me if they just directed you to their preferred check printer provider, as they know that they accept their check format fine. Though as I said, any reputable check printer makes sure that they meet the standards to get processed by banks without trouble. Unless you're a business that's going to be writing a lot of checks and pay a lot of fees for the privilege, a bank is not likely to want to make exceptions for you for your own custom-printed octagonal checks written in ancient Vulcan.\"",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "431637",
"score": 0.7219842076301575,
"text": "US Bank just introduced this feature, but they want $.50 per deposit! No way man. Schwab has an Android App I have used a dozen times. Very easy and pretty consistent. It worked on folded checks, pictures on a reflective background (kitchen table top), big company issued checks and of course personal checks. Very positive feeling from this app and the ability to deposit.",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "188167",
"score": 0.7209585309028625,
"text": "\"Do not use a shared bank account. One of you can cash/deposit the check in your personal account and then either pay the others in the group cash or write them a check. You open yourself up to many, many problems sharing a bank account and/or money. Treat it like a business as far as income goes, but I would not recommend any type of formal business, LLC, partnership, sole proprietorship, etc. For federal taxes, you just keep track of how much \"\"you\"\" personally are paid and report that at the end of the year as income, most likely on a 1040EZ 1040SE, along with any other income you have.\"",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "224377",
"score": 0.7205337882041931,
"text": "In a nutshell, throwing your taxable income in the trash does not remove it from your taxable income; you still have to report in your tax filing, and pay taxes as needed. Especially as you could at any time request your employer to write you a replacement check. I would expect them to start charging a fee for reprinting if you really annoy them by doing it dozens of times. If you want to avoid taxes on it, donate it to a deductible 501(c)3 organization; then it becomes neutral to your taxes.",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "438975",
"score": 0.7201874852180481,
"text": "Goddady.com will gladly accept payment from your personal account. They don't really care, as long as you approve the charge, whose name the account is in. I'm not sure PayPal even check the names on the invoice and the account to match, they just want you to login. However, depending on your local laws, you may be required to have a separate business account. In the US, for example, corporations must have their own accounts. For other entities with limited liability (like LLC or LLP) it is advised to have a separate account to avoid piercing corporate veil. Also, if your business name is not your personal name - clients may want to verify that the checks/transfers are deposited under your business name. In some countries checks written out to X cannot be endorsed by X to be transferred to Y. That may affect your decision as well. You'll have to get a proper legal advice valid in your jurisdiction to know the answer to your question.",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "346537",
"score": 0.7201076149940491,
"text": "Deposit check and send a personal check (resulting in tax and IRS reporting issues) That's a bad idea, unless maybe the check you're receiving is a certified bank draft. Suppose the insurance company are crooks and the check is fraudulent. It could take weeks or months for some investigation to catch up to that, long after your own personal check was cashed by the pharmacy. The bank will then put you on hook for the 20 grand by reversing the check, even though the funds had been deposited into your account. Do not put yourself into the position of a money handler; you don't have the cash base, insurance, government protection and whatever else that a bank has. And, of course, you're being a free money handler if you do that. (You're not even compensated for postage, time and whatnot). If you're handling money between two parties, you should collect a percentage, or else refuse. That percentage has to be in proportion to the risk, since cashing a check for someone carries a risk similar to (and is effectively a form of) making a loan.",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "802",
"score": 0.7196232080459595,
"text": "It probably doesn't matter since your credit and your checking are at the same institution, but I don't like to let my credit auto draft my checking. I always do it the other way around (and keep them at different places) I feel like there is more control when my money is gone that way.",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "192726",
"score": 0.7184244990348816,
"text": "\"Basically, yes. Don't use your business account for personal spending because it may invalidate your limited liability protection. Transfer a chunk of money to your personal account, write it down in your books as \"\"distribution\"\" (or something similar), and use it in whatever way you want from your personal account. The IRS doesn't care per se, but mixing personal and business expenses will cause troubles if you're audited because you'll have problems distinguishing one from another. You should be using some accounting software to make sure you track your expenses and distributions correctly. It will make it easier for you to prepare reports for yourself and your tax preparer, and also track distributions and expenses. I suggest GnuCash, I find it highly effective for a small business with not so many transactions (if you have a lot of transactions, then maybe QuickBooks would be more appropriate).\"",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "389953",
"score": 0.7178848385810852,
"text": "I have seen this happen with IRS checks, the bank told me that the IRS imposes the requirement. Otherwise, though, I have frequently deposited checks made out to my wife into a joint checking account without her signature, they have never cared one bit.",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "191925",
"score": 0.7176311612129211,
"text": "Several things to do: Change your bank. $2 for a check? Why?? When shopping for a new bank: ask for a free checking account. College students can get free checking in almost any bank. At least the first box of checks will be free, which will give you enough checks for the next several years (I'm still not half done with the box I got from WaMu 5 years ago). Check out your neighborhood credit union. Most of them have free checking and free checks for students as well. If still no luck - check online check printing services, they'll send you a box for less than $25, that's for sure. Walmart for example (1 box - $7). Also, you can use banks' bill-pay service for any check you write, if you know the address of the person, the amount and the sum a couple of days ahead of time. That should cover rent, and probably most of your other checks.",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "285317",
"score": 0.7174670100212097,
"text": "I have no choice but to write a few checks a month. That's the only way the recipient will allow me to pay them. It's annoying af but I have no alternative. I suspect that's the same for many people. It's not us who wants to retain checks, it's stupid corporations and government agencies who will only accept checks or who charge extra for paying with a debit or credit card.",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "494783",
"score": 0.7174420952796936,
"text": "Typically your paychecks are direct deposited into your bank account and you receive a paycheck stub telling you how much of your money went where (taxes, insurance, 401k, etc.). Most people use debit or credit cards for purchases. I personally only use checks to transfer money to another person (family, friend, etc.) than a business. And even then, there's PayPal.",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "297965",
"score": 0.7173794507980347,
"text": "\"Some benefits of having a business checking account (versus a personal checking account) are: The first 3 should be pretty easy to determine if they are important to you. #4 is a little more abstract, though I see you have an LLC taxed as a sole proprietorship, and so I'm guessing protecting your personal assets may have been one of the driving reasons you formed the LLC in the first place. If so, \"\"following through\"\" with the business account is advised.\"",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "252097",
"score": 0.7170022130012512,
"text": "\"If you wish to lend them the money, make the check payable to the order of \"\"loan\"\", not directly to your son or daughter.\"",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "524034",
"score": 0.7169567942619324,
"text": "If it were me, I would get a new checking account at potentially a new bank, but certainly with a new account number. As Nathan said, there is no need for you to cross her name off the check, but potentially, she could use those checks, or have new checks printed to use. Having her name on the check makes it seem like she is a legitimate signer on the account. In the end you can fight and possibly win with your bank that they should not have accepted a check signed by her as payment, but why bother? Also you will potentially alienate any merchant that accepts a check by her. It is a total mess that can be relatively easily solved with very little money ($25-$40 for check reprinting) proactively. Close the account, shred any existing checks, and move on. Heck you can actually make money by doing this and receiving a bonus. Check Nerd Wallet for current bank promotions.",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "473274",
"score": 0.7169300317764282,
"text": "No, most check deposits are processed that way. Banks transmit the pictures of the checks between themselves, and allow business customers to deposit scans for quite some time now. I see no reason for you to be concerned of a check being in a dusty drawer, it's been deposited, cannot be deposited again. If you're concerned of forgery - well, nothing new there.",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "272807",
"score": 0.7165055274963379,
"text": "While you can print that on the check, it isn't considered legally binding. If you are concerned about a check not being deposited in a timely manner, consider purchasing a cashier's check instead. This doesn't solve the problem per se, but it transfers responsibility of tracking that check from you to the bank.",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "502283",
"score": 0.7164689898490906,
"text": "\"They are basically asking for the name of the legal entity that they should write on the check. You, as a person, are a legal entity, and so you can have them pay you directly, by name. This is in effect a \"\"sole proprietorship\"\" arrangement and it is the situation of most independent contractors; you're working for yourself, and you get all the money, but you also have all the responsibility. You can also set up a legal alias, or a \"\"Doing Business As\"\" (DBA) name. The only thing that changes versus using your own name is... well... that you aren't using your own name, to be honest. You pay some trivial fee for the paperwork to the county clerk or other office of record, and you're now not only John Doe, you're \"\"Zolani Enterprises\"\", and your business checks can be written out to that name and the bank (who will want a copy of the DBA paperwork to file when you set the name up as a payable entity on the account) will cash them for you. An LLC, since it was mentioned, is a \"\"Limited Liability Company\"\". It is a legal entity, incorporeal, that is your \"\"avatar\"\" in the business world. It, not you, is the entity that primarily faces anyone else in that world. You become, for legal purposes, an agent of that company, authorized to make decisions on its behalf. You can do all the same things, make all the same money, but if things go pear-shaped, the company is the one liable, not you. Sounds great, right? Well, there's a downside, and that's taxes and the increased complexity thereof. Depending on the exact structure of the company, the IRS will treat the LLC either as a corporation, a partnership, or as a \"\"disregarded entity\"\". Most one-man LLCs are typically \"\"disregarded\"\", meaning that for tax purposes, all the money the company makes is treated as if it were made by you as a sole proprietor, as in the above cases (and with the associated increased FICA and lack of tax deductions that an \"\"employee\"\" would get). Nothing can be \"\"retained\"\" by the company, because as far as the IRS is concerned it doesn't exist, so whether the money from the profits of the company actually made it into your personal checking account or not, it has to be reported by you on the Schedule C. You can elect, if you wish, to have the LLC treated as a corporation; this allows the corporation to retain earnings (and thus to \"\"own\"\" liquid assets like cash, as opposed to only fixed assets like land, cars etc). It also allows you to be an \"\"employee\"\" of your own company, and pay yourself a true \"\"salary\"\", with all the applicable tax rules including pre-tax healthcare, employer-paid FICA, etc. However, the downside here is that some money is subject to double taxation; any monies \"\"retained\"\" by the company, or paid out to members as \"\"dividends\"\", is \"\"profit\"\" of the company for which the company is taxed at the corporate rate. Then, the money from that dividend you receive from the company is taxed again at the capital gains rate on your own 1040 return. This also means that you have to file taxes twice; once for the corporation, once for you as the individual. You can't, of course, have it both ways with an LLC; you can't pay yourself a true \"\"salary\"\" and get the associated tax breaks, then receive leftover profits as a \"\"distribution\"\" and avoid double taxation. It takes multiple \"\"members\"\" (owners) to have the LLC treated like a partnership, and there are specific types of LLCs set up to handle investments, where some of what I've said above doesn't apply. I won't get into that because the question inferred a single-owner situation, but the tax rules in these additional situations are again different.\"",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "151514",
"score": 0.716442883014679,
"text": "You can't cash the check silly. How can you go off on a rant when you can't even tell the difference between a real check and a promotional tool. If you don't want to call in an get info throw it away....simple. This thread made me laugh. Thanks for that. Good day.",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
12
|
Does U.S. tax code call for small business owners to count business purchases as personal income?
|
[
{
"id": "192516",
"score": 0.7557467222213745,
"text": "\"I am going to keep things very simple and explain the common-sense reason why the accountant is right: Also, my sister in law owns a small restaurant, where they claim their accountant informed them of the same thing, where a portion of their business purchases had to be counted as taxable personal income. In this case, they said their actual income for the year (through their paychecks) was around 40-50K, but because of this detail, their taxable income came out to be around 180K, causing them to owe a huge amount of tax (30K ish). Consider them and a similarly situated couple that didn't make these purchases. Your sister in law is better off in that she has the benefit of these purchases (increasing the value of her business and her expected future income), but she's worse off because she got less pay. Presumably, she thought this was a fair trade, otherwise she wouldn't have made those purchases. So why should she pay any less in taxes? There's no reason making fair trades should reduce anyone's tax burden. Now, as the items she purchased lose value, that will be a business loss called \"\"depreciation\"\". That will be deductible. But the purchases themselves are not, and the income that generated the money to make those purchases is taxable. Generally speaking, business gains are taxable, regardless of what you do with the money (whether you pay yourself, invest it, leave it in the business, or whatever). Generally speaking, only business losses or expenses are deductible. A purchase is an even exchange of income for valuable property -- even exchanges are not deductions because the gain of the thing purchased already fairly compensates you for the cost. You don't specify the exact tax status of the business, but there are really only two types of possibilities. It can be separately taxed as a corporation or it can be treated essentially as if it didn't exist. In the former case, corporate income tax would be due on the revenue that was used to pay for the purchases. There would be no personal income tax due. But it's very unlikely this situation applies as it means all profits taken out of the business are taxed twice and so small businesses are rarely organized this way. In the latter case, which is almost certainly the one that applies, business income is treated as self-employment income. In this case, the income that paid for the purchases is taxable, self-employment income. Since a purchase is not a deductible expense, there is no deduction to offset this income. So, again, the key points are: How much she paid herself doesn't matter. Business income is taxable regardless of what you do with it. When a business pays an expense, it has a loss that is deductible against profits. But when a business makes a purchase, it has neither a gain nor a loss. If a restaurant buys a new stove, it trades some money for a stove, presumably a fair trade. It has had no profit and no loss, so this transaction has no immediate effect on the taxes. (There are some exceptions, but presumably the accountant determined that those don't apply.) When the property of a business loses value, that is usually a deductible loss. So over time, a newly-purchased stove will lose value. That is a loss that is deductible. The important thing to understand is that as far as the IRS is concerned, whether you pay yourself the money or not doesn't matter, business income is taxable and only business losses or expenses are deductible. Investments or purchases of capital assets are neither losses nor expenses. There are ways you can opt to have the business taxed separately so only what you pay yourself shows up on your personal taxes. But unless the business is losing money or needs to hold large profits against future expenses, this is generally a worse deal because money you take out of the business is taxed twice -- once as business income and again as personal income. Update: Does the business eventually, over the course of the depreciation schedule, end up getting all of the original $2,000 tax burden back? Possibly. Ultimately, the entire cost of the item is deductible. That won't necessarily translate into getting the taxes back. But that's really not the right way to think about it. The tax burden was on the income earned. Upon immediate replacement, hypothetically with the exact same model, same cost, same 'value', isn't it correct that the \"\"value\"\" of the business only went up by the amount the original item had depreciated? Yes. If you dispose of or sell a capital asset, you will have a gain or loss based on the difference between your remaining basis in the asset and whatever you got for the asset. Wouldn't the tax burden then only be $400? Approximately, yes. The disposal of the original asset would cause a loss of the difference between your remaining basis in the asset and what you got for it (which might be zero). The new asset would then begin depreciating. You are making things a bit more difficult to understand though by focusing on the amount of taxes due rather than the amount of taxable gain or loss you have. They don't always correlate directly (because tax rates can vary).\""
},
{
"id": "338700",
"score": 0.7655667662620544,
"text": "It sounds like something is getting lost in translation here. A business owner should not have to pay personal income tax on business expenses, with the caveat that they are truly business expenses. Here's an example where what you described could happen: Suppose a business has $200K in revenue, and $150K in legitimate business expenses (wages and owner salaries, taxes, services, products/goods, etc.) The profit for this example business is $50K. Depending on how the business is structured (sole proprietor, llc, s-corp, etc), the business owner(s) may have to pay personal income tax on the $50K in profit. If the owner then decided to have the business purchase a new vehicle solely for personal use with, say, $25K of that profit, then the owner may think he could avoid paying income tax on $25K of the $50K. However, this would not be considered a legitimate business expense, and therefore would have to be reclassified as personal income and would be taxed as if the $25K was paid to the owner. If the vehicle truly was used for legitimate business purposes then the business expenses would end up being $175K, with $25K left as profit which is taxable to the owners. Note: this is an oversimplification as it's oftentimes the case that vehicles are partially used for business instead of all or nothing. In fact, large items such as vehicles are typically depreciated so the full purchase price could not be deducted in a single year. If many of the purchases are depreciated items instead of deductions, then this could explain why it appears that the business expenses are being taxed. It's not a tax on the expense, but on the income that hasn't been reduced by expenses, since only a portion of the big ticket item can be treated as an expense in a single year."
},
{
"id": "158738",
"score": 0.7311459183692932,
"text": "Expenses are where the catch is found. Not all expenditures are considered expenses for tax purposes. Good CPAs make a comfortable living untangling this sort of thing. Advice for both of your family members' businesses...consult with a CPA before making big purchases. They may need to adjust the way they buy, or the timing of it, or simply to set aside capital to pay the taxes for the profit used to purchase those items. CPA can help find the best path. That 10k in unallocated income can be used to redecorate your office, but there's still 3k in taxes due on it. Bottom Line: Can't label business income as profit until the taxes have been paid."
}
] |
[
{
"id": "112793",
"score": 0.7126777768135071,
"text": "In many cases yes. In the case of an employer handing employees a credit card to use, that is clearly income if the card is used for something other than a business expense. Generally speaking, if you're receiving something with a significant value without strings attached, it is likely taxable. Google no doubt has an army of tax attorneys, so perhaps they are able to exploit loopholes of some sort.",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "462184",
"score": 0.7124838829040527,
"text": "In no ways. Both will be reported to the members on their K1 in the respective categories (or if it is a single member LLC - directly to the individual tax return). The capital gains will flow to your personal Schedule D, and the business loss to your personal Schedule C. On your individual tax return you can deduct up to 3K of capital losses from any other income. Business loss is included in the income if it is active business, for passive businesses (like rental) there are limitations.",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "185626",
"score": 0.7120428085327148,
"text": "If thinking about it like a business you normally only pay taxes on Net income, not gross. So Gross being all the money that comes in. People giving you cash, checks, whatever get deposited into your account. You then pay that out to other people for services, advertisement. At the end of the day what is left would be your 'profit' and you would be expected to pay income tax on that. If you are just an individual and don't have an LLC set up or any business structure you would usually just have an extra page to fill out on your taxes with this info. I think it's a schedule C but not 100%",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "47260",
"score": 0.7115983366966248,
"text": "Typically you can only claim as business deductions those expenses which strictly relate to your business. In some cases, if you have a dedicated home office in your house, you can specify that expenses related to this space (furniture, etc.) are business expenses because it is a dedicated space. For example, I know of someone in sports broadcasting who claimed several TVs as a business expense, but these are for a room in his house that he uses only for watching games related to his work responsibilities, and never for entertaining, having friends over, etc. I think it will be difficult for you to count any portion of this type of installation as a business expense as it would relate to both your business as well as your residence. If you intend to try to get this deducted, I would strongly recommend consulting a CPA or tax attorney first. I think it will be difficult to prove that the only benefit is to your LLC if your electricity bills/credits are co-mingled with those for your residence. Best of luck!",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "166977",
"score": 0.7109034657478333,
"text": "If you sell through an intermediate who sets up the shop for you, odds are they collect and pay the sales tax for you. My experience is with publishing books through Amazon, where they definitely handle this for you. If you can find a retailer that will handle the tax implications, that might be a good reason to use them. It looks like Etsy uses a different model where you yourself are responsible for the sales tax, which requires you to register with your state (looks like this is the information for New York) and pay the taxes yourself on a regular basis; see this link for a simple guide. If you're doing this, you'll need to keep track of how much tax you owe from your sales each month, quarter, or year (depending on the state laws). You can usually be a sole proprietor, which is the easiest business structure to set up; if you want to limit your legal liability, or work with a partner, you may want to look into other forms of business structure, but for most craftspeople a sole proprietorship is fine to start out with. If you do a sole proprietorship, you can probably file the income on a 1040 Schedule C when you do your personal taxes each year.",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "307779",
"score": 0.7106534242630005,
"text": "It looks like fair-market value when you receive your virtual currency is counted as income. And you're also subject to self-employment tax on that income. Here's an FAQ from the IRS: Q-8: Does a taxpayer who “mines” virtual currency (for example, uses computer resources to validate Bitcoin transactions and maintain the public Bitcoin transaction ledger) realize gross income upon receipt of the virtual currency resulting from those activities? A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully “mines” virtual currency, the fair market value of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. See Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, for more information on taxable income.Q-9: Is an individual who “mines” virtual currency as a trade or business subject to self-employment tax on the income derived from those activities? A-9: If a taxpayer’s “mining” of virtual currency constitutes a trade or business, and the “mining” activity is not undertaken by the taxpayer as an employee, the net earnings from self-employment (generally, gross income derived from carrying on a trade or business less allowable deductions) resulting from those activities constitute selfemployment income and are subject to the self-employment tax. See Chapter 10 of Publication 334, Tax Guide for Small Business, for more information on selfemployment tax and Publication 535, Business Expenses, for more information on determining whether expenses are from a business activity carried on to make a profit. You'd of course be able to offset that income with the expense of mining the virtual currency, depreciation of dedicated mining equipment, electricity, not sure what else. Edit: Here's a good resource on filing taxes with Bitcoin: Filling in the 1040 Income from Bitcoins and all crypto-currencies is declared as either capital gains income or ordinary income, for example from mining. Income Ordinary income will be declared on either your 1040 (line 21 - Other Income) for an individual, or within your Schedule C, if you are self-employed or have sole-proprietor business. Capital Gains Capital gains income, or losses, are declared on Schedule D. Since there are no reported 1099 forms from Bitcoin exchanges, you will need to include your totals with Box C checked for short-term gains, and with Box F checked for long-term gains. Interesting notes from that article, your first example could actually be trickier than expected if you started mining before there was a Monero to USD exchange. Also, there can also be capital gains implications from using your virtual currency to buy goods, which sounds like a pain to keep track of.",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "536849",
"score": 0.7103473544120789,
"text": "\"I've done various side work over the years -- computer consulting, writing, and I briefly had a video game company -- so I've gone through most of this. Disclaimer: I have never been audited, which may mean that everything I put on my tax forms looked plausible to the IRS and so is probably at least generally right, but it also means that the IRS has never put their stamp of approval on my tax forms. So that said ... 1: You do not need to form an LLC to be able to claim business expenses. Whether you have any expenses or not, you will have to complete a schedule C. On this form are places for expenses in various categories. Note that the categories are the most common type of expenses, there's an \"\"other\"\" space if you have something different. If you have any property that is used both for the business and also for personal use, you must calculate a business use percentage. For example if you bought a new printer and 60% of the time you use it for the business and 40% of the time you use it for personal stuff, then 60% of the cost is tax deductible. In general the IRS expects you to calculate the percentage based on amount of time used for business versus personal, though you are allowed to use other allocation formulas. Like for a printer I think you'd get away with number of pages printed for each. But if the business use is not 100%, you must keep records to justify the percentage. You can't just say, \"\"Oh, I think business use must have been about 3/4 of the time.\"\" You have to have a log where you write down every time you use it and whether it was business or personal. Also, the IRS is very suspicious of business use of cars and computers, because these are things that are readily used for personal purposes. If you own a copper mine and you buy a mine-boring machine, odds are you aren't going to take that home to dig shafts in your backyard. But a computer can easily be used to play video games or send emails to friends and relatives and lots of things that have nothing to do with a business. So if you're going to claim a computer or a car, be prepared to justify it. You can claim office use of your home if you have one or more rooms or designated parts of a room that are used \"\"regularly and exclusively\"\" for business purposes. That is, if you turn the family room into an office, you can claim home office expenses. But if, like me, you sit on the couch to work but at other times you sit on the couch to watch TV, then the space is not used \"\"exclusively\"\" for business purposes. Also, the IRS is very suspicious of home office deductions. I've never tried to claim it. It's legal, just make sure you have all your ducks in a row if you claim it. Skip 2 for the moment. 3: Yes, you must pay taxes on your business income. If you have not created an LLC or a corporation, then your business income is added to your wage income to calculate your taxes. That is, if you made, say, $50,000 salary working for somebody else and $10,000 on your side business, then your total income is $60,000 and that's what you pay taxes on. The total amount you pay in income taxes will be the same regardless of whether 90% came from salary and 10% from the side business or the other way around. The rates are the same, it's just one total number. If the withholding on your regular paycheck is not enough to cover the total taxes that you will have to pay, then you are required by law to pay estimated taxes quarterly to make up the difference. If you don't, you will be required to pay penalties, so you don't want to skip on this. Basically you are supposed to be withholding from yourself and sending this in to the government. It's POSSIBLE that this won't be an issue. If you're used to getting a big refund, and the refund is more than what the tax on your side business will come to, then you might end up still getting a refund, just a smaller one. But you don't want to guess about this. Get the tax forms and figure out the numbers. I think -- and please don't rely on this, check on it -- that the law says that you don't pay a penalty if the total tax that was withheld from your paycheck plus the amount you paid in estimated payments is more than the tax you owed last year. So like lets say that this year -- just to make up some numbers -- your employer withheld $4,000 from your paychecks. At the end of the year you did your taxes and they came to $3,000, so you got a $1,000 refund. This year your employer again withholds $4,000 and you paid $0 in estimated payments. Your total tax on your salary plus your side business comes to $4,500. You owe $500, but you won't have to pay a penalty, because the $4,000 withheld is more than the $3,000 that you owed last year. But if next year you again don't make estimated payment, so you again have $4,000 withheld plus $0 estimated and then you owe $5,000 in taxes, you will have to pay a penalty, because your withholding was less than what you owed last year. To you had paid $500 in estimated payments, you'd be okay. You'd still owe $500, but you wouldn't owe a penalty, because your total payments were more than the previous year's liability. Clear as mud? Don't forget that you probably will also owe state income tax. If you have a local income tax, you'll owe that too. Scott-McP mentioned self-employment tax. You'll owe that, too. Note that self-employment tax is different from income tax. Self employment tax is just social security tax on self-employed people. You're probably used to seeing the 7-whatever-percent it is these days withheld from your paycheck. That's really only half your social security tax, the other half is not shown on your pay stub because it is not subtracted from your salary. If you're self-employed, you have to pay both halves, or about 15%. You file a form SE with your income taxes to declare it. 4: If you pay your quarterly estimated taxes, well the point of \"\"estimated\"\" taxes is that it's supposed to be close to the amount that you will actually owe next April 15. So if you get it at least close, then you shouldn't owe a lot of money in April. (I usually try to arrange my taxes so that I get a modest refund -- don't loan the government a lot of money, but don't owe anything April 15 either.) Once you take care of any business expenses and taxes, what you do with the rest of the money is up to you, right? Though if you're unsure of how to spend it, let me know and I'll send you the address of my kids' colleges and you can donate it to their tuition fund. I think this would be a very worthy and productive use of your money. :-) Back to #2. I just recently acquired a financial advisor. I can't say what a good process for finding one is. This guy is someone who goes to my church and who hijacked me after Bible study one day to make his sales pitch. But I did talk to him about his fees, and what he told me was this: If I have enough money in an investment account, then he gets a commission from the investment company for bringing the business to them, and that's the total compensation he gets from me. That commission comes out of the management fees they charge, and those management fees are in the same ballpark as the fees I was paying for private investment accounts, so basically he is not costing me anything. He's getting his money from the kickbacks. He said that if I had not had enough accumulated assets, he would have had to charge me an hourly fee. I didn't ask how much that was. Whew, hadn't meant to write such a long answer!\"",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "208989",
"score": 0.7096715569496155,
"text": "\"It's not possible to determine whether you can \"\"expect a refund\"\" or whether you are claiming the right number of exemptions from the information given. If your wife were not working and you did not do independent contracting, then the answer would be much simpler. However, in this case, we must also factor in how much your contracting brings in (since you must pay income tax on that, as well as Medicare and, probably, Social Security), whether you are filing jointly or separately, and your wife's income from her business. There are also other factors such as whether you'll be claiming certain child care expenses, and certain tax credits which may phase out depending on your income. If you can accurately estimate your total household income for the year, and separate that into income from wages, contracting, and your wife's business, as well as your expenses for things like state and local income and property taxes, then you can make a very reasonable estimate about your total tax burden (including the self-employment taxes on your non-wage income) and then determine whether you are having enough tax withheld from your paycheck. Some people may find that they should have additional tax withheld to compensate for these expenses (see IRS W-4 Line #6).\"",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "540634",
"score": 0.7096298933029175,
"text": "IRS has it spelled out Business or Hobby?",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "177946",
"score": 0.7096224427223206,
"text": "\"I think the \"\"right\"\" way to approach this is for your personal books and your business's books to be completely separate. You would need to really think of them as separate things, such that rather than being disappointed that there's no \"\"cross transactions\"\" between files, you think of it as \"\"In my personal account I invested in a new business like any other investment\"\" with a transfer from your personal account to a Stock or other investment account in your company, and \"\"This business received some additional capital\"\" which one handles with a transfer (probably from Equity) to its checking account or the like. Yes, you don't get the built-in checks that you entered the same dollar amount in each, but (1) you need to reconcile your books against reality anyway occasionally, so errors should get caught, and (2) the transactions really are separate things from each entity's perspective. The main way to \"\"hack it\"\" would be to have separate top-level placeholder accounts for the business's Equity, Income, Expenses, and Assets/Liabilities. That is, your top-level accounts would be \"\"Personal Equity\"\", \"\"Business Equity\"\", \"\"Personal Income\"\", \"\"Business Income\"\", and so on. You can combine Assets and Liabilities within a single top-level account if you want, which may help you with that \"\"outlook of my business value\"\" you're looking for. (In fact, in my personal books, I have in the \"\"Current Assets\"\" account both normal things like my Checking account, but also my credit cards, because once I spend the money on my credit card I want to think of the money as being gone, since it is. Obviously this isn't \"\"standard accounting\"\" in any way, but it works well for what I use it for.) You could also just have within each \"\"normal\"\" top-level placeholder account, a placeholder account for both \"\"Personal\"\" and \"\"My Business\"\", to at least have a consistent structure. Depending on how your business is getting taxed in your jurisdiction, this may even be closer to how your taxing authorities treat things (if, for instance, the business income all goes on your personal tax return, but on a separate form). Regardless of how you set up the accounts, you can then create reports and filter them to include just that set of business accounts. I can see how just looking at the account list and transaction registers can be useful for many things, but the reporting does let you look at everything you need and handles much better when you want to look through a filter to just part of your financial picture. Once you set up the reporting (and you can report on lists of account balances, as well as transaction lists, and lots of other things), you can save them as Custom Reports, and then open them up whenever you want. You can even just leave a report tab (or several) open, and switch to it (refreshing it if needed) just like you might switch to the main Account List tab. I suspect once you got it set up and tried it for a while you'd find it quite satisfactory.\"",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "59317",
"score": 0.7089001536369324,
"text": "This depends on the nature of the income. Please consult a professional CPA for specific advise.",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "577703",
"score": 0.7080234885215759,
"text": "No, it will show on the LLC tax return (form 1065), in the capital accounts (schedules K-1, L and M-2), attributed to your partner.",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "350839",
"score": 0.7078747749328613,
"text": "A computer is a special case because the IRS thinks that you might be using it for personal applications. You may need to keep a log, or be able to state that you also have another computer for non-business use. That said, if your schedule C shows a small profit then you don't need to itemize expenses, just state the total.",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "445548",
"score": 0.7066878080368042,
"text": "\"Income is income... it depends how it's structured.. personal or corporate.. but still you need to pay taxes... if you get audited, the tax man could look at your bank statements and ask, \"\"where is this money coming from\"\"\"",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "381151",
"score": 0.7063124179840088,
"text": "Chris, since you own your own company, nobody can stop you from charging your personal expenses to your business account. IRS is not a huge fan of mixing business and personal expenses and this practice might indicate to them that you are not treating your business seriously, and it should classify your business as a hobby. IRS defines deductible business expense as being both: ordinary AND necessary. Meditation is not an ordinary expense (other S-corps do not incur such expense.) It is not a necessary expense either. Therefore, you cannot deduct this expense. http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Deducting-Business-Expenses",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "178697",
"score": 0.7061655521392822,
"text": "\"This seems to depend on what kind of corporation you have set up. If you're set up as a sole proprietor, then the Solo 401k contributions, whether employee or employer, will be deducted from your gross income. Thus they don't reduce it. If you're set up as an S-Corp, then the employer contributions, similar to large employer contributions, will be deducted from wages, and won't show up in Box 1 on your W-2, so they would reduce your gross income. (Note, employee contributions also would go away from Box 1, but would still be in Box 3 and 5 for FICA/payroll tax purposes). This is nicely discussed in detail here. The IRS page that discusses this in more (harder to understand) detail is here. Separately, I think a discussion of \"\"Gross Income\"\" is merited, as it has a special definition for sole proprietorships. The IRS defines it in publication 501 as: Gross income. Gross income is all income you receive in the form of money, goods, property, and services that is not exempt from tax. If you are married and live with your spouse in a community property state, half of any income defined by state law as community income may be considered yours. For a list of community property states, see Community property states under Married Filing Separately, later. Self-employed persons. If you are self-employed in a business that provides services (where products are not a factor), your gross income from that business is the gross receipts. If you are self-employed in a business involving manufacturing, merchandising, or mining, your gross income from that business is the total sales minus the cost of goods sold. In either case, you must add any income from investments and from incidental or outside operations or sources. So I think that regardless of 401(k) contributions, your gross income is your gross receipts (if you're a contractor, it's probably the total listed on your 1099(s)).\"",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "397920",
"score": 0.7058888673782349,
"text": "I heard that a C-Corp being a one person shop (no other employees but the owner) can pay for the full amount 100% of personal rent if the residence is being used as a home office. Sure. Especially if you don't mind being audited. Technically, it doesn't matter how the money gets where it goes as long as the income tax filings accurately describe the tax situation. But the IRS hates it when you make personal expenses from a business account, even if you've paid the required personal income tax (because their computers simply aren't smart enough to keep up with that level of chaos). Also, on a non-tax level, commingling of business and personal funds can reduce the effectiveness of your company's liability protection and you could more easily become personally liable if the company goes bankrupt. From what I understand the 30% would be the expense, and the 70% profit distribution. I recommend you just pay yourself and pay the rent from your personal account and claim the allowed deductions properly like everyone else. Why & when it would make sense to do this? Are there any tax benefits? Never, because, no. You would still have to pay personal income tax on your 70% share of the rent (the 30% you may be able to get deductions for but the rules are quite complicated and you should never just estimate). The only way to get money out of a corporation without paying personal income tax is by having a qualified dividend. That's quite complicated - your accounting has to be clear that the money being issued as a qualified dividend came from an economic profit, not from a paper profit resulting from the fact that you worked hard without paying yourself market value.",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "540395",
"score": 0.7057217955589294,
"text": "Alright, IRS Publication 463: Travel, Entertainment, Gift, and Car Expenses Business and personal use. If you use your car for both business and personal purposes, you must divide your expenses between business and personal use. You can divide your expense based on the miles driven for each purpose. Example. You are a sales representative for a clothing firm and drive your car 20,000 miles during the year: 12,000 miles for business and 8,000 miles for personal use. You can claim only 60% (12,000 ÷ 20,000) of the cost of operating your car as a business expense Obviously nothing helpful in the code. So I would use option 1, weight the maintenance-related mileage by the proportion of business use. Although if you use your car for business a lot (and perhaps have a spouse with a car), an argument could be made for 3. So I would consider my odds of being audited (even lower this year due to IRS budget cuts) and choose 1 or 3. And of course never throw anything away until you're room temperature.",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "334603",
"score": 0.7056828141212463,
"text": "\"If you have a single member LLC there is no need to separate expenses in this way since it is simply treated as part of the owner's normal tax returns. This is the way I've been operating. Owner of Single-Member LLC If a single-member LLC does not elect to be treated as a corporation, the LLC is a \"\"disregarded entity,\"\" and the LLC's activities should be reflected on its owner's federal tax return. If the owner is an individual, the activities of the LLC will generally be reflected on: Form 1040 Schedule C, Profit or Loss from Business (Sole Proprietorship) (PDF) Form 1040 Schedule E, Supplemental Income or Loss (PDF) Form 1040 Schedule F, Profit or Loss from Farming (PDF) An individual owner of a single-member LLC that operates a trade or business is subject to the tax on net earnings from self employment in the same manner as a sole proprietorship. If the single-member LLC is owned by a corporation or partnership, the LLC should be reflected on its owner's federal tax return as a division of the corporation or partnership. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/single-member-limited-liability-companies\"",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "507107",
"score": 0.7053336501121521,
"text": "A non-resident alien is only allowed for deductions connected to producing a US-sourced income (See IRC Sec. 873). Thus you can only deduct things that qualify as business expenses, and State taxes on your wages. In addition you can deduct a bunch of stuff explicitly allowed (like tax preparation, charitable contributions, casualty losses, etc) but sales tax is not in that list.",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
13
|
How can I register a UK business without providing a business address?
|
[
{
"id": "503678",
"score": 0.7053155303001404,
"text": "You don't have to provide your personal home address per se. You can provide a legal address where Companies house can send across paper correspondence to. Companies house legally requires an address because directors are liable to their shareholders(even if you are the only shareholder) and to stop them from disappearing just like that with shareholder's money. Moreover your birth date will also be visible on websites which provide comapnies information. You can ask these websites to stop sharing your personal information. Every company must have a registered office within the UK which is the official legal address of the company. It must be a physical address (i.e. not a PO Box without a physical location) as Companies House will use this address to send correspondence to. To incorporate a private limited company you need at least one director, who has to be over 16 years of age. You may also have a secretary, but this is optional. The information you will need to supply for each officer includes: You may also have officers that are companies or firms, and for these you will need to supply the company or firm name, its registered office address, details of the legal form of the company, where it is registered and if applicable its registration number."
}
] |
[
{
"id": "545990",
"score": 0.6697972416877747,
"text": "I have just established a limited company (three directors spread around the UK) and I am in the process of setting up a business account. We will be able to arrange everything over the phone and each of us will have to appear in one of the branches with original documents: passport, bank statement. We are EU citizens and have UK bank accounts for over 5 years. That would probably be a problem for you. But still, you can try to call around and see if you can find a company to help you. You can also setup an account on one of the online currency exchange websites and then provide your customers with the website's bank account details with appropriate reference. You would have to check the legal side of this solution.",
"topk_rank": 0
},
{
"id": "30996",
"score": 0.6678887605667114,
"text": "There are no legal restrictions on doing this. If you're living in the UK, just open an account like any other resident of the UK would.",
"topk_rank": 1
},
{
"id": "549645",
"score": 0.6670496463775635,
"text": "You don't have to register for corporation tax until you start doing business: After you’ve registered your company with Companies House, you’ll need to register it for Corporation Tax. You’ll need to do this within 3 months of starting to do business. Since you haven't needed to do that yet, there also shouldn't be any need to tell HMRC you've stopped trading. So it should just be a question of telling Companies House - I guess it's possible they'll first want you to provide the missing accounts.",
"topk_rank": 2
},
{
"id": "72984",
"score": 0.6640486717224121,
"text": "What you need to do is register as a sole trader. This will automatically register you for self assessment so you don't have to do that separately. For a simple business like you describe that's it. Completing your self assessment will take care of all your income tax and national insurance obligations (although as mentioned in your previous question there shouldn't be any NI to pay if you're only making £600 or so a year).",
"topk_rank": 3
},
{
"id": "194090",
"score": 0.6622394919395447,
"text": "You can find a lot of information at the HRMC website at http://hmrc.gov.uk. If you don't want to work as an employee, you can register as self-employed (basically a one-man band), which is quite simple, you can start your own company, which is more work but can have tax advantages, or you can find umbrella companies which will officially employ you while in reality you are a freelancer and only do your billing through them. Umbrella companies can be anywhere from totally legal to extremely dodgy. If they promise you that you pay only five percent tax on your income through ingenious tricks, that's only until the tax office finds out and they will make you pay. Between self-employed and your own company, the big difference is whether you are actually working independently or not. If you work like an employee (take someone else's orders) and claim you are a company, the tax office doesn't like that. And if you pay very little taxes, they don't like that either. So self-employed is the safer choice but you will pay more taxes, close to what a normal employee would pay. Obviously you will have to pay tax on your income and NHS insurance. Obviously you are required to tell the government (actually HMRC) about your income. Not doing so would be tax evasion and get you into deep trouble when you are caught. I don't think you have to tell them the source of your income, but not telling them might look very suspicious and might get your accounts checked carefully. And unless you design a website for the mafia, why wouldn't you tell them? The bill payer will try to deduct your bill from their profits anyway, so it's no secret. Most important to remember: When you send out a bill and receive payment, you'll have to pay tax on it. When self employed, as a rule of thumb put one third away into a savings account for your tax bill. Don't spend it all or you will find yourself in deep trouble when your taxes need paying. Plus put some more away for times when you can't find work.",
"topk_rank": 4
},
{
"id": "431230",
"score": 0.6579515337944031,
"text": "You don't need a Visa to create or own US property. Your registered agent will be able to take care of most of this, and your new entity will use the registered agent's address where applicable, but you may need your own separate address which can be your office in the UK. If you want privacy then you'll want a separate address, which can also be a PO Box or an address the registered agent also provides. US corporations, especially in Delaware, have a lot more compliance issues than the LLC product. Delaware has a lot more costs for formation and annual reports than most other united states. There are definitely a lot of states to choose from, but more people will have information for Delaware.",
"topk_rank": 5
},
{
"id": "248624",
"score": 0.6573680639266968,
"text": "\"Depending on where you are, you may be able to get away with filing a \"\"Doing Business As\"\" document with your local government, and then having the bank call the county seat to verify this. There is generally a fee for processing/recording/filing the DBA form, of course. But it's useful for more purposes than just this one. (I still need to file a DBA for my hobby work-for-pay, for exactly this reason.)\"",
"topk_rank": 6
},
{
"id": "318266",
"score": 0.6564093828201294,
"text": "It looks like businesses selling services (like software downloads) from outside the EU to the UK have to register for VAT if the amount of such sales goes over the UK VAT registration threshold: [If] the value of the taxable supplies you make is over a specified threshold [then] you must register for VAT So it seems plausible that this business does have some requirement to charge VAT on its sales, but clearly it should have done so at the time of sale, not months later. As you say, UK and EU law require that prices are displayed including relevant taxes. Since this business is in the US, they might be able to claim that those rules don't apply to them. But I'm not aware of even US businesses being able to claim sales tax from a US customer months after originally making a sale, and it goes against all reasonable principles of law if they would be able to do it. So the business should really just accept that they screwed up and they'll now have to take the hit and pay the tax themselves. They can work as if the pre-tax price was $12.99/1.2 = $10.825, leaving $2.165 they need to hand over to HMRC. I don't think there's any legal way they can demand money from you now, and certainly for such a low sum of money there's no practical way they could. I can't find anything definitive one way or the other, but I suppose it's possible that HMRC would consider you the importer under these circumstances and so liable for the VAT yourself. But I don't know of any practial way to actually report this to HMRC or pay them the money, and again given the amount there's no realistic chance they'd want to chase you for it. In your shoes I would either ignore the email, or write back and politely tell them that they should have advertised the cost at the time and you're not willing to pay extra now. And you might want to keep an eye on the card you used to pay them to make sure they don't try to just charge it anyway. EDIT: as pointed out in a comment, the company behind this (or at least one with a very similar problem and wording in their emails!) did end up acknowledging that they can't actually do this and that they'll need to pay the tax out of the money they already collected, as I described above. It seems they didn't contact the people they originally emailed to let them know this, though. There's some more discussion here.",
"topk_rank": 7
},
{
"id": "261856",
"score": 0.6501476764678955,
"text": "Banks has to complete KYC. In case you want to open a bank account, most will ask for proof of address. I also feel it is difficult for bank to encash a cheque payable to a business in your account. Opening a bank account in the name of your business or alternatively obtaining a cheque payable to your personal name seems the only alternatives to me.",
"topk_rank": 8
},
{
"id": "545039",
"score": 0.6499940752983093,
"text": "Firstly, check your visa conditions (if you're not from the EU): http://www.ukcisa.org.uk/Information--Advice/Working/How-many-hours-can-you-work You do need to register for NI, but that's apparently streamlined into registering as self-employed: How to pay N.I contributions when both employed and self-employed? (Realistically, you can almost certainly get away with doing <£50 month in cash-in-hand jobs with no paperwork whatsoever, but in the very unlikely event of being caught it could result in being deported)",
"topk_rank": 9
},
{
"id": "237514",
"score": 0.6499097347259521,
"text": "\"There are very few circumstances where forming an out of state entity is beneficial, but a website is within these circumstances in certain instances. Businesses with no physical operations do not need to care what jurisdiction they are registered in: your home state, a better united state or non-united state. The \"\"limited liability\"\" does it's job. If you are storing inventory or purchasing offices to compliment your online business, you need to register in the state those are located in. An online business is an example of a business with no physical presence. All states want you to register your LLC in the state that you live in, but this is where you need to read that state's laws. What are the consequences of not registering? There might be none, there might be many. In New York, for example, there are no consequences for not registering (and registering in new york - especially the city - is likely the most expensive in the USA). If your LLC needs to represent itself in court, New York provides retroactive foreign registrations and business licenses. So basically, despite saying that you need to pay over $1000 to form your LLC \"\"or else\"\", the reality is that you get the local limited liability protection in courts whenever you actually need it. Check your local state laws, but more times than not it is analogous to asking a barber if you need a haircut, the representative is always going to say \"\"yes, you do\"\" while the law, and associated case law, reveals that you don't. The federal government doesn't care what state your form an LLC or partnership in. Banks don't care what state you form an LLC or partnership in. The United States post office doesn't care. Making an app? The Apple iTunes store doesn't care. So that covers all the applicable authorities you need to consider. Now just go with the cheapest. In the US alone there are 50 states and several territories, all with their own fee structures, so you just have to do your research. Despite conflicting with another answer, Wyoming is still relevant, because it is cheap and has a mature system and laws around business entity formation. http://www.incorp.com has agents in every state, but there are registered agents everywhere, you can even call the Secretary of State in each state for a list of registered agents. Get an employer ID number yourself after the business entity is formed, it takes less than 5 minutes. All of this is also contingent on how your LLC or partnership distributes funds. If your LLC is not acting like a pass through entity to you and your partner,but instead holding its own profits like a corporation, then again none of this matters. You need to form it within the state you live and do foreign registrations in states where it has any physical presence, as it has becomes its own tax person in those states. This is relevant because you said you were trying to do something with a friend.\"",
"topk_rank": 10
},
{
"id": "200023",
"score": 0.6487951278686523,
"text": "If you do business under your name, you don't need to register your business. Your business will be treated as a sole proprietorship. If your revenue exceeds 30,000 (or wish to collect GST for the government) then you will have to register with the CRA for a GST account, but that is free.",
"topk_rank": 11
},
{
"id": "528361",
"score": 0.6478428840637207,
"text": "You will be categorized as self employed. Will I have to register myself as a company or can go on unregistered and work You can register a company or can use an umbrella company or work as a sole trader. Remember as a sole trader you are legally responsible for you company's activities, an if a company sues you for your work he can take compensation from your personal assets. As a company your liability ends with the company, if your company is sued. Your personal assets are outside the purview of the lawsuit, but the court can attach that also but those are rare. This doesn't matter if you use an umbrella company. If you intend to be doing this for a short time(maybe a year or so), go for an umbrella company. Else register a company. will take you 5 minutes to form one. Depending on your earning you might need to register for VAT too. A comprehensive guide for self employed on HMRC. what would i need to be sound in uk and to be fit to work online as a freelancer? The same as above. Will it include paying any tax or paying any insurance Yes you have register for National Insurance(NI), before you can pay yourself a salary. The benefit of a company is you pay yourself a minimum salary, below the limit above which you have to contribute for NI, and take the rest as dividends. And pay no tax on it, till you don't exceed the limits. When the money comes in my account, will i be accountable to government of uk, to tell the source of income? If you are operating through a company, yes you would need to show your income(including source) and expenditure when you do your annual returns. What should i be knowing, like health insurance and things that are necessities in uk for a freelancer ? No health insurance as NHS exists. You can take out health insurance if you don't want to get into queues in NHS.",
"topk_rank": 12
},
{
"id": "192083",
"score": 0.6469986438751221,
"text": "It's not just the US based mailing address for registration or US based credit-card or bank account: even if you had all these, like I do, you will find that these online filing companies do not have the infrastructure to handle non-resident taxes. The reason why the popular online filing companies do not handle non-resident taxes is because: Non-residents require a different set of forms to fill out - usually postfixed NR - like the 1040-NR. These forms have different rules and templates that do not follow the usual resident forms. This would require non-trivial programming done by these vendors All the NR forms have detailed instructions and separate set of non-resident guides that has enough information for a smart person to figure out what needs to be done. For example, check out Publication 519 (2011), U.S. Tax Guide for Aliens. As a result, by reading these most non-residents (or their accountants) seem to figure out how the taxes need to be filed. For the remaining others, the numbers perhaps are not significant enough to justify the non-trivial programming that need to be done by these vendors to incorporate the non-resident forms. This was my understanding when I did research into tax filing software. However, if you or anyone else do end up finding tax filing software that does allow non-resident forms, I wil be extremely happy to learn about them. To answer your question: you need to do it yourself or get it done by someone who knows non-resident taxes. Some people on this forum, including me for gratis, would be glad to check your work once you are done with it as long as you relieve us of any liability.",
"topk_rank": 13
},
{
"id": "42924",
"score": 0.6468200087547302,
"text": "If you mostly do work for businesses/individuals who are VAT registered it's a no-brainer to become VAT registered yourself... Although you will have to charge your customers VAT (and pass this on to HMRC) because they are VAT-registered they will reclaim the amount so it won't actually 'cost' them anything. At the same time, you can reclaim all the VAT you're currently being charged on your business expenditure (business equipment, tickets to business events, business software, accountancy/other business services you pay for, web hosting etc etc etc) However, if most of your clients are not VAT-registered it's not worth you registering. You would have to charge your customers an extra 20% (and they wouldn't be able to claim it back!) and you would have to pass this on to HMRC. Although you could still claim for goods and services you purchase for business use, essentially you'd just be another tax collector for HMRC. That said, at the end of the day it's up to you! VAT returns are quarterly and dead simple. Just keep a spreadsheet with your invoices (output tax) and receipts (input tax) and then do some basic maths to submit the final numbers to HMRC. No accountant required!",
"topk_rank": 14
},
{
"id": "229913",
"score": 0.6465837359428406,
"text": "You havent signed a contract, so you are only an authorised contact so you have nothing to worry about at all. Your credit reference can only be affected if you are a signed party on the contract. I would imagine that they wont remove your details as you may assist them by contacting your emplorer, and effectively chase the debt for them especially if you seem to be family member or a friend of the business owner. How did you find out about the debt, did they phone you? If you really want peace of mind, you could write to them and confirm that you are not authorised to be contacted by phone or in writing regarding the debt, and that you are not in anyway liable for the debt and that your contact details must be put beyond use, and as you are concerned, say that if they take any further action against you such as affect your credit ref etc then you will take them to 'your' local magistrates court to seek compensation. Use strong terms and insist they must do what you ask rather than just say that you would like something done etc. Say that you 'Will' take further action which is generic, and that you 'May' do specific things so that it sounds strong but you haven't have committed to any thing in particular. This would most likely be more than enough to stop further contact.",
"topk_rank": 15
},
{
"id": "364891",
"score": 0.6441793441772461,
"text": "For this type of business a sole tradership would seem appropriate. You might then want to register as a limited company at a later date if you were growing significantly, taking on premises, seeking debt etc, as that would then shield you from liability.",
"topk_rank": 16
},
{
"id": "573498",
"score": 0.6428073048591614,
"text": "You need a proof of address and also they ask you for a letter from employer. But usually you dont need any of that... there are always correct answers to all the questions, but you still need an address where they will send you your papers along with debit card etc. So need to rent a place or have some mail forwarding service would help. Here is what people usually do in London: Go to a branch of lets say Lloyds TSB that is not in the center of London, use some far away branch, Like Morden or so. Say that you arrived a month/week ago and looking for a job.(not laborer) Say that need your account to send money from abroad to support your living during the Job search. hand in your passport and your account will be ready the same day, while you can wait for your card 1week. Your pin number for the card +2/3days Hope that helps.",
"topk_rank": 17
},
{
"id": "21416",
"score": 0.6426330208778381,
"text": "The simplest way to handle this would be to buy money orders, make them out to the charities, and leave your name off them. Money orders don't require you to put your name on them, just the name of whoever they're being paid to. You can mail them with no return address as well if you're sure you have the charity's proper mailing address. This way you can still feel good about giving and leave no trace of who you are for anyone to use for future marketing. I hope this helps. Good luck!",
"topk_rank": 18
},
{
"id": "78486",
"score": 0.6424782276153564,
"text": "Given your clarifying points, it sounds like you are running both businesses as one combined business. As such, you should be able to get just a single HST number and use that. However, let me please urge you to contact a professional accountant and possibly a lawyer, as it is very unusual to be performing these services without a business license, and you may be exposing yourself to civil penalties and placing your personal assets (e.g. your house) at risk. Additionally, it may be beneficial for you to run these as businesses as you can likely write off (more of) your expenses.",
"topk_rank": 19
}
] |
14
|
What are 'business fundamentals'?
| [{"id":"398960","score":0.7842450737953186,"text":"From http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionar(...TRUNCATED) | [{"id":"96910","score":0.6436957120895386,"text":"\"Definition: Fundamental analysis involves analyz(...TRUNCATED) |
End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
README.md exists but content is empty.
- Downloads last month
- 2