This month's Commonsense CPA offers up another primer on a basic but powerful tool in your business's arsenal for hiring and employee retention, and one that's increasingly legally mandated for businesses of all sizes - your retirement plan.

This month’s Commonsense CPA offers up another primer on a basic but powerful tool in your business's arsenal for hiring and employee retention, and one that's increasingly legally mandated for businesses of all sizes - your retirement plan.

This month's Lesson From the Line is a primer on the differences between tips and service charges - especially for those who don’t realize that the two compensation systems are vastly different, by law, or need a reminder of all of the nuances that need to be accounted for.

Harmony Group’s Commonsense CPA explains depreciation and how your business can make use of this very powerful deduction.

As we move into the hottest month of the year, it's a good moment for Lessons From the Line to take a look at the natural ebbs and flows of our industry - we're in a (mostly) blazing DC Summer and your revenue could be trending in the wrong direction. Read on to brush up on the nuances of this industry’s ebbs and flows.

This month’s Commonsense CPA gives an early digest of the Inflation Reduction Act legislation. We’ll be following up with more substantive details as they’re released later this year. This is a repost of Harmony Group’s Commonsense CPA, which you can follow here.

As we gear up for another referendum on the Tipped Minimum Wage (Initiative 82), it’s important to remind our clients of an important law that passed after the last referendum in 2018.

This month we’re discussing credit card fees because the vast majority of customers pay with a credit card and we field many questions from clients about the intentionally inscrutable nature of credit-card processing fees. So let’s start at the beginning, the difference between a credit and debit card.

This month’s Commonsense CPA focuses on an attractive retention tool that is generally underutilized by small businesses: Educational Assistance Programs. You may not be able to beat the entire labor market by expanding your benefits, but I believe that investing in your people will always pay dividends, plus a well designed plan can be easy to administer and adapt to the current economic conditions of your business.

Many of our clients are inundated by offers to take out “loans” and lines of credit from point-of-sale operators, third-party delivery companies, credit card companies and endless boiler room operations besieging our clients with enticing “loan” offers. We’ve put loan in quotation marks in the preceding sentence because what is being offered to clients aren’t actually loans in many cases, they are merchant cash advances.

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” - Milton Friedman

A slew of bad press that can be summed up as: The IRS is understaffed, underfunded, overwhelmed, and they’d like us all to be very patient with them.

We see it all the time. The end of the year comes along and we get a detailed list of what you’ve paid in wages throughout the year. There, front and center, is a W2 being paid to a partner. Let’s take a closer look at this picture.

The IRS has continued to improve its online portals for individual taxpayers, and they're now functionally useful - still far from perfect, but in an anything-is-better-than-nothing kind of way it's a dramatic step up.

Phantom income often arises when using a passthrough entity. Often a problem for LLCs, S Corps, and partnerships, phantom income occurs when the business entity reports a yearly profit, yet the owner or investors in the business do not receive cash reflecting the allocation. The IRS still taxes the full amount of the business’s income, creating tax on unreceived income for business members.

‘Think outside the box’ is ubiquitous advice in al fields. Here’s the catch: very few of us actually do think outside of the box with any regularity. And even if we do manage to think outside of the box, it’s not enough by itself. For a restaurant to be successful, we must master the duality of being able to think both in and out of the box to solve a host of problems.

“It’s not a lie, it’s an adjustment. It’s the rule of three….if a guy tells you how many girls he’s hooked up with, it’s not even close to that. You take that number and divide by three, then you get the real total. So if Kevin’s saying it’s been three girls, it’s more like one. Or none!....The Rule of three, it’s an exact science. Consistent as gravity.” – American Pie