• _______________

    Click to subscribe via email

  • Quality Payroll, Bookkeeping and Tax Services

    At Appletree Business Services, we specialize in working with your small business THROUGHOUT the year, helping you in tax and payroll matters , such as:

    1) Knowing exactly where your small business stands with timely monthly reports and payroll, so there are no tax surprises.

    2) Keeping you out of jail and in full compliance with all the myriad of tax laws, including quarterly estimates for your Federal taxes, New Hampshire Business Profit Tax, Business Enterprise Tax, and/or the Interest/Dividends tax.

    3) Talking with you on a regular basis about your business on issues such as understanding how much sales you need to break-even, whether an individual should be an employee versus a subcontractor, or helping identify when it may be time to buy some new equipment to minimize taxes.

    Learn more by clicking on the links below.

  • —– News Print —- —— Version ——- (Updated Monthly)


  • Archives

We’ve been Selected as one of the top 15 Accounting Blogs!

Posted on May 20, 2013 by CPAsteve

avatar.

How exciting to be mentioned as one of the top 15 Accounting Blogs by Distancelearning.com. “Appletree Business Services is all about helping you optimize your business’s performance. With a mix out-of-the-box analogies and up to date professional advice, this is a must read accounting blog for every small business owner.” As always, we are so glad to know that we’re helping!

Presented by Steven A Feinberg, CPA of Appletree Business Services LLC, a PASBA member accountant, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with more than twenty- five years experience on Federal and New Hampshire issues affecting small business, and specializes in tax, payroll and business planning for his clients throughout the year. Steve is a recognized member-contributor of the book, Six Steps to Small Business Success. For additional information, you are encouraged to email Steve at [email protected] or call (603) 434-2775.

Steven A. Feinberg – www.AppletreeBusiness.com – Get Appletree Blog via Email – Follow CPAsteve on Twitter

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

OMG! Do you really want to work with your wife?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by CPAsteve

office-husband-and-and-wife

Ask questions before going into business with your spouse.

Starting and running a business is rarely a safe or simple process, and doing so with one’s spouse creates an additional layer of complexity. Whether that complexity will have a positive or negative effect depends on several factors.

Here are some of the questions you need to discuss before being certain that going into business with your spouse is a good thing.

  • How well do you work together at home? If you cooperate and collaborate for domestic chores, you’ll probably carry that pattern into your workplace. If you bicker constantly over how to do the laundry or maintain the yard, working together in business might be a risky option. Even if you work well together, some disagreements are inevitable.
  • How do you handle differences of opinion? We all know that at home, she’s always right, but that answer is not always the best way to handle difference where one’s livelihood is at stake. Where there are equal ‘partners’ in a business, consider a mutually trusted 3rd party to resolve differences, such as a business adviser or accountant.
  • Will your business be adequately capitalized? You won’t have an outside salary to fall back on during hard times.
  • Will there be other partners or employees? Each spouse’s role and responsibilities with respect to coworkers and subordinates should be clearly defined. Spouses with drastically different management styles can make life miserable for everyone.
  • Will one of you be supervising the other? You’ll need to concentrate on treating one another with respect, especially when giving or taking constructive criticism. Conversely, continually overlooking your spouse’s mistakes or failings may drag down employee morale or harm your business.
  • Are your strengths complementary or redundant? For example, if you’re a pair of engineers starting an engineering firm, you might leave functions such as marketing and accounting to employees or outside services so you can work together within your area of expertise. If you find your professional decisions tend to clash, consider splitting up your clients or processes and working separately within two divisions.

I also recommend coming up with a simple method of holding each other accountable with some sort of monthly performance monitoring. This can be particularly useful where one spouse is delegated the task of ‘bookkeeper’, but really has little clue about the impact day to day decisions may have on the whole business.

Most of all, good luck, and don’t forget to call for help, if you need it!

Presented by Steven A Feinberg, CPA of Appletree Business Services LLC, a PASBA member accountant, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with more than twenty- five years experience on Federal and New Hampshire issues affecting small business, and specializes in tax, payroll and business planning for his clients throughout the year. Steve is a recognized member-contributor of the book, Six Steps to Small Business Success. For additional information, you are encouraged to email Steve at [email protected] or call (603) 434-2775.

Steven A. Feinberg – www.AppletreeBusiness.com – Get Appletree Blog via Email – Follow CPAsteve on Twitter

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

KPI’s? What’s that?

Posted on March 19, 2013 by CPAsteve

measuring-performance

Everybody’s got ‘books’, but how is your business performing?

I don’t care what the size is. Every small business owner needs to have a measurement tool and be consistently measured against that tool.

And that is where Key Performance Indicators or KPI’s come into play.

It’s one thing to know what your sales are. That’s the easiest measure, but don’t you want to at least go one step up from your competition? How about knowing what your gross profit margin is ( Take your sales minus your direct costs of doing sales and that gives you gross profit. Gross Profit divided by Sales is your gross profit margin)

Every business owner, at a minimum, should know their gross profit margin. Without knowing this, how can you predict, with certainty, how much money you could make if your sales increased by X dollars?

Now let’s get a little more complicated…Do you know what your breakeven sales are? That’s great if you can figure that out for today, but what was it last year at this time? Do you know that?  Great, your breakeven sales went down from last year. Why did that happen? What’s changed in your business? Is this something we can capitalize on going on forward.

If you’re a service business, how many employees do you have? Do you know what your average sales are per employee. or perhaps per  foreman.

Can you see where I’m going with this? Everyone else is  just talking about keeping track of your dollars, not about being able to manipulate those dollars so that a small business owner can be that much more confident about where they are today, and have the certainty about where their business is going tomorrow.

Start measuring your performance today! I’d love the opportunity to talk with you further about helping you figure out your own business financial confidence.

Presented by Steven A Feinberg, CPA of Appletree Business Services LLC, a PASBA member accountant, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with more than twenty- five years experience on Federal and New Hampshire issues affecting small business, and specializes in tax, payroll and business planning for his clients throughout the year. Steve is a recognized member-contributor of the book, Six Steps to Small Business Success. For additional information, you are encouraged to email Steve at [email protected] or call (603) 434-2775.

Steven A. Feinberg – www.AppletreeBusiness.com – Get Appletree Blog via Email – Follow CPAsteve on Twitter

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Taxes and Marijuana, Oh My!

Posted on March 7, 2013 by CPAsteve

Pot economy

CNN recently reported on how the Federal government is cracking down on the California Pot industry.

More and more states are legalizing the use of pot. I’ve even had a few people approach me about what might be involved in setting up a legitimate pot growing business in New Hampshire.

For one, it’s against the law in New Hampshire. But the big problem, if you  go and set yourself up in a ‘legitimate’ state, is that it is still against Federal law.

Let me explain why this is  a problem for taxes.  Some might assume (what’s the big deal) that I’ll just set up my business  and make sure I pay my taxes..Simple enough?

Here’s the problem. Although you are required to report your income from whatever source, you are NOT entitled to take a single dollar of deduction against that income if the business is illegal.

So, if you had a pot growing business with $300,000 of gross sales, and you had $200,000 of expenses associated with it, you would have to pay taxes on the whole $300,000.

…and now you know…

Presented by Steven A Feinberg, CPA of Appletree Business Services LLC, a PASBA member accountant, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with more than twenty- five years experience on Federal and New Hampshire issues affecting small business, and specializes in tax, payroll and business planning for his clients throughout the year. Steve is a recognized member-contributor of the book, Six Steps to Small Business Success. For additional information, you are encouraged to email Steve at [email protected] or call (603) 434-2775.

Steven A. Feinberg – www.AppletreeBusiness.com – Get Appletree Blog via Email – Follow CPAsteve on Twitter

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Help, my Business is falling and it can’t get up!

Posted on February 20, 2013 by CPAsteve

lack-of-business-confidence

Many people simply do not know when they should be

seeking help for their business,

so I’m just going to lay it out:

  1. I am thinking about buying a business.
  2. I’m frustrated about money. I’m not even sure how much I have or whether I can really afford to grow!
  3. I want to understand my business better.
  4. I am thinking about starting a business
  5. I want to hire an employee, but just don’t have a clue.
  6. I need someone to help me know where my business is going.
  7. I’ve got questions,  but my adviser is either not available, or simply not giving me answers that seem right.
  8. I’m tired of not knowing in advance, how much taxes I’m going to owe on April 15.
  9. I feel like I’m always behind on getting my taxes done
  10. I’ve got a bookkeeping system, but still have no idea how I’m doing, or why I never seem to know if I can write a check that will clear.
  11. I’m confused about LLC’s and Corporations and just what is the best way for me to get paid when I own a business in New Hampshire!
  12. I don’ t feel confident about my situation at all.

It’s all about small business confidence. Simple enough?  Give me a call!

Presented by Steven A Feinberg, CPA of Appletree Business Services LLC, a PASBA member accountant, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with more than twenty- five years experience on Federal and New Hampshire issues affecting small business, and specializes in tax, payroll and business planning for his clients throughout the year. Steve is a recognized member-contributor of the book, Six Steps to Small Business Success. For additional information, you are encouraged to email Steve at [email protected] or call (603) 434-2775.

Steven A. Feinberg – www.AppletreeBusiness.com – Get Appletree Blog via Email – Follow CPAsteve on Twitter

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Help, the IRS Padlocked my Doors!

Posted on February 7, 2013 by CPAsteve

Nasty-IRSOftentimes, I’ll meet a new business owner who simply doesn’t respect the power of the IRS.

Typically, the small business owners is just starting out. He or she figures that they don’t really have the money or even the wherewithal to deal with paying their payroll taxes, and so they ‘start’ to get behind.

This can be a routine that starts innocently enough, but then just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Amazingly, you might not even hear from the IRS for many months. You have quarterly obligations, but you may have ignored that as well, so the IRS won’t even know you exist.

Eventually, an employee is going to want a W-2, or somebody files for unemployment, or maybe you got visited by the labor department.

But that’s OK. The IRS is patient. They barely even know who you are, and you figure that’s a problem for another day.

You can do this with about 10 employees and find out that in a year’s time, you owe $50,000.

So now the IRS knows who you are, and they are not very lenient about people who don’t pay payroll taxes. That’s because payroll taxes are  mostly a ‘Trust Tax’, whereby your employees entrusted you to turn their witholdings over to the government.

While you’re in business, the IRS can easily seize money from your bank account, they can even padlock your doors.

Make sure you’re staying on top of your obligations or get out of business.

My clients are confident knowing that as long they do what we tell them, they’ll be fine with the government. We’ll even pay any penalty if the client did what we told them to do.

Are you confident the IRS can’t come after you?

Presented by Steven A Feinberg, CPA of Appletree Business Services LLC, a PASBA member accountant, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with more than twenty- five years experience on Federal and New Hampshire issues affecting small business, and specializes in tax, payroll and business planning for his clients throughout the year. Steve is a recognized member-contributor of the book, Six Steps to Small Business Success. For additional information, you are encouraged to email Steve at [email protected] or call (603) 434-2775.

Steven A. Feinberg – www.AppletreeBusiness.com – Get Appletree Blog via Email – Follow CPAsteve on Twitter

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Ignore the IRS…Your net pay will go down with your first 2013 paycheck whether you like it or not

Posted on December 29, 2012 by CPAsteve

Fiscal-Cliff-and-Yearend-PlanningNow, maybe it’s not the IRS’s ‘fault’, but rather the media’s interpretation, but I can assure you everyone’s net pay in 2013 will be going down.

In response to the Congressional inaction about 2013 income tax rates with respect to the ‘fiscal cliff’, the IRS announced that employers should continue to withhold federal taxes using the 2012 tables, implying that nothing will change.

The IRS actually gets the tables from the US Treasury Department, and until they actually get the 2013 tables from the Treasury, employers should keep using the 2012 tables in 2013.

So, in response to this, the various TV and radio media are reporting that the average middle class taxpayer in the US can rest assured that nothing will be changing in their paycheck. This is NOT true.

The Social Security tax rate deducted from employee’s paychecks was reduced from 6.2% to 4.2% two years ago, and, by law, will end on December 31, 2012. This was referred to as the ‘Payroll Tax Holiday’.

Once ended, the Social Security tax of 6.2% will be restored, giving EVERY taxpayer a 2% reduction in their paycheck in 2013.

Every piece of payroll  software I know, including Quickbooks has already adjusted their tax tables for 2013 to reflect this. In fact, I’ve already had one of my clients call me who uses Quickbooks, wanting to know why all his employee’s net paychecks went down!

The Social Security tax ‘cut’ is not considered part of the Federal Withholding done on an employee paycheck.

Almost every discussion of the ‘Fiscal Cliff’ speculates whether this ‘payroll tax holiday’ will continue or not, but at this writing the law says it will be 6.2% beginning January 1, 2013, so that’s what everyone’s following. This IRS proclamation does not address the social security rate going up. I’m not saying the IRS is totally wrong, but the IRS is giving everyone in the country the wrong impression that the average Joe’s paycheck will be staying the same until Congress and the White House get their act together.

I’ve already been in touch with several media outlets on this, and they’re all trying to understand this mess!

As an employer, are you prepared and confident to advise your employee’s on what’s going on with respect to the ‘fiscal cliff’? Is your adviser keeping you apprised as to how this can be affecting both you and your employees. Does this all seem very frustrating to you, and you wish there were some simple answers.

Call me.

Presented by Steven A Feinberg, CPA of Appletree Business Services LLC, a PASBA member accountant, located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, with more than twenty- five years experience on Federal and New Hampshire issues affecting small business, and specializes in tax, payroll and business planning for his clients throughout the year. Steve is a recognized member-contributor of the book, Six Steps to Small Business Success. For additional information, you are encouraged to email Steve at [email protected] or call (603) 434-2775.

Steven A. Feinberg – www.AppletreeBusiness.com – Get Appletree Blog via Email – Follow CPAsteve on Twitter

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Next Page »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.