Credit cards are available like candy. Get a new one; religiously use it for anything business-related. This helps you default to success: the credit card statement is a record of most business expenses and no non-business expenses; no expenses sneak onto your personal card.
-
-
For really boring reasons, I had to show the State of Missouri (n.b. last set foot in it in 2004) a piece of paper issued in 2004... in 2016. Which I was trivially able to do because hard disk space is cheap and Dropbox / Tarsnap work very, very well.
Show this thread -
A surprisingly useful thing that I've done is wrote a one-pager "What happened this year" for each line of business, for consumption by the accountants. (In my case, heavily sourced from my public end of year review blog posts.) These get more valuable each passing year.
Show this thread -
"What should I do if I get audited?" You email your accountant and say "Hey a low-probability routine event has happened. What should I do about this?"
Show this thread -
I was audited by the State of Hawaii one year, because one of my companies had registered to file a bid with one of their agencies, and then they didn't get a business privilege tax return from us the next year. Responding to the audit took 45 minutes.
Show this thread -
General flavor of the interaction: "How much revenue did you have in Hawaii last year?" *SQL query* $180. "Wait, what. OK, you're done."
Show this thread -
In general, exuding professionalism will make many, many interactions with government (and other bureaucracies) go better for you. You want to be polite, compliant, and armed-to-the-teeth with well-organized records. And, again, this is why you pay your professional advisors.
Show this thread -
Accountants generate immediate ROI at any scale of business larger than a bake sale. My Japanese accountants, for example, caught that I had filed an exemption from consumption tax because all of my sales were exports of software. That was not an optimal filing.
Show this thread -
The optimal filing was to file a consumption tax return, saying that we had $0 of sales subject to consumption tax. And then claim back all the consumption tax our business had paid (on business expenses). Resulting in a tax refund of several times what I paid accountants.
Show this thread -
"Wait you can get radically different results from the same facts with just tiny changes in what you type on your return?" You sound very surprised, hypothetical person who probably has programmed before.
Show this thread -
If you read this far, you might want to check out our guide to business taxes: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-taxes … If you're an Atlas company, we've got a quick survival guide for tax season here:https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/tax-season …
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.