The "ADD" Accountant

Introducing Patrick Payroll

I am always wanting to give my clients more. It’s a curse, really. That being said, I am proud to share with you all the latest addition to the Patrick Accounting family of services, Patrick Payroll. As a local payroll partner, the Patrick Payroll staff will work hand-in-hand with businesses in order to implement a payroll solution that meets any and every unique need. Once in place, businesses will work with a dedicated payroll specialist throughout the payroll process to ensure continuity—reducing errors and saving time and money. We all could save a little time and money these days, right?

As part of the launch of Patrick Payroll, we have updated our advanced online client center within the Patrick Accounting website to include additional information such as new employee or changes to your employee forms, New Hire Packets, and Blank Payroll Forms.

Patrick Payroll will also provide optional services such as Pay-As-You-Go Workers Compensation, Direct Deposit Pay Cards, and Online Access to W-2s and Paystubs. To assist our very valued clients in gaining a well-rounded understanding of the additions, we will be providing a webinar to show-off these brand new features over the coming weeks.

We want to be the single source for your accounting needs, so a strategic move for us to better serve our clients was offering outsourced payroll. We want to provide maximum convenience and the best, most highly advanced technology—all your fingertips, simply and effectively.

What do you want out of your accounting firm?

Update from Gotomeeting-One word "AWESOME"

I received an email this week from gotomeeting that said...hey we have an update and now gotomeeting will integrate with your webcam..so being the geek I am i instantly went to the link for the update, downloaded, installed, and then tested to see if it would work....everything went off without a hitch with the exception that I did not have any web meetings scheduled....this is not uncommon but we do use gotomeeting for impromptu questions about 3-5 times per week so I was just waiting impatiently for the next opportunity to try out the new toy....

Well today, I got my wish...we were fortunate enough to have a web meeting scheduled with one of our tech savvy clients, Valeo Design and Marketing.  We both popped right on, we shared our webcam first, made sure we were good to go and then our clients shared his....presto it was if we had driven the 30 miles to see each other face to face...no traffic, no wasted time for either of us, and we were able to probably accomplish more while together as we both had access to every bit of information we needed.  Technology is pretty cool when it works!  The process could not have been easier.  I am excited about the possibilities of meeting more frequently wiht our clients and also not been chained to my desk either as I can be anywhere there is an internet connection and connect with our clients and office.  Many of you probably already realized we were on a virtual cloud server.  Now this is just one more step in the virtual world we can take....Like I said "AWESOME"

What keeps you up at night?

I recently read an Accounting Today article by Gary Boomer about CPA firm management.  He raised a great point that really got me thinking about my business.  What keeps me up at night?  I have a laundry list of items that keeps me up at night most however are unrelated to my business.  I thought it would be fun to list what keeps me up at night for everyone to see...

• Stupid tv programs like "House", or "NCIS"
• The client that no matter how many times we have asked for something never responds to our requests then asks when their tax return or financials are going to be finished
• A bowl of cereal (nothing better once everyone is asleep)
• The blown call in the 8th inning of a tied game which cost the Sox the game
• The client who complains that they owe a bunch of money with their tax return, but confirm for me that they did not make the estimates we asked them to
• When a client is wanting something we can't provide.
• Having to let a client go because they do not value what we are providing them
• Business cash flow!!!
• Personal cash flow!!!
• Non-productive employees
• My honey do list
• My kids going away to college
• My kids going off to kindergarten

All of this makes me wonder how I sleep at all!  How about you?

CPA Firm Consulting

So I am in the early stages of creating a CPA Firm consulting company.  I feel that although firms have access to an abundance of information a lot them do not know how to implement what they are being shown.  Unfortunately or not I have made a lot of mistakes along the way and have overcome a number of poor decisions that I would like my fellow firm owners to not repeat.  I also have a knack for taking a grain of information and snowballing that into a change that my firm has benefitted from.  I am interested in helping firms implement the change they want.  Some of the areas I am going to concentrate on are firm analytics and practice management, embracing the cloud, and understanding process.  I will keep everyone up to date on the developments.  Currently I am brainstorming over the service package and my deliverables. I also think this can only enhance my own firms processes as it allows me to be further exposed to other bright minds...More to come!

Processes, Processes, Processes...

So now that the Red Sox are hot again and back in first I am ready to start posting again....sorry it took them so long!

At the office this week ( I just got back from a whole week vacation) we are working on documenting our processes and it got me to thinking. Why do we do things the way we do? The process of writing the process has identified a number of steps that if we were to simplify a couple of things internally or when we setup a new client that could save us consider amount of times every month. For us we work with about a 100 clients on a monthly basis. If we could just save 5 minutes per client per month that is 500 minutes....Damn! that is a full day of capacity we could find every month. It could be used for a new client, learning opportunities, training, whatever....even another day off. It made we think about all of our clients. I wonder if our clients are thinking about their processes and how they do things and how they could do things just a little more streamlined. One of the ideas I was thinking of is something we already do...we try to help our clients go paperless. Our whole office is paperless....in the accounting industry that is a truly difficult thing to say...we have tons of paper in our office, but it is short-lived there. We scan and send it back to our clients. Our clients have access to whatever info we have for them 24/7 online today. We can now help them with the process of taking even more of their office processes paperless. How much time could that save them? What would they do with all that new found time....

the add accountant named #8 on top 100 accounting advice blog

Cool note of the day....The ADD accountant was names a top 100 accounting advice column (actually #8) by another blogger.

I will say that this may make me put more accounting stuff up here and less about the Red Sox..... na more sox.....

2010 HIRE ACT....More info to come!

Well along with the much anticipated health insurance "reform" bill that was approved, little was made of last Thursday's new small business incentive called the HIRE act....

Be rest assured we are on top of it and have already scheduled a training seminar this Friday March 26th to learn more ourselves so that we can pass on the information and help with the implementation of how it affects you in your 2010 hiring plans.....

Here are the basics....

Extension of enhanced small business expensing (Section 179). The new law gives a one-year lease on life to enhanced expensing rules, which allow qualifying businesses the option to currently deduct the cost of business machinery and equipment, instead of recovering it via depreciation over a number of years. For tax years beginning in 2010, the maximum amount that a business may expense is $250,000, and the expensing election begins to phase out when a business buys more than $800,000 of expensing-eligible assets. These dollar limits are the same as those that were in effect for 2008 and 2009.

Payroll tax holiday and up-to-$1,000 credit for employers who hire unemployed workers. To help stimulate the hiring of workers by the private sector, the new law exempts any private-sector employer that hires a worker who had been unemployed for at least 60 days from having to pay the employer's 6.2% share of the Social Security payroll tax on that employee for the remainder of 2010. A company could save a maximum of $6,621 if it hired an unemployed worker and paid that worker at least $106,800—the maximum amount of wages subject to Social Security taxes—by the end of the year. As an additional incentive, for any qualifying worker hired under this initiative that the employer keeps on payroll for a continuous 52 weeks, the employer is eligible for an additional non-refundable tax credit of up to $1,000 after the 52-week threshold is reached, to be taken on their 2011 tax return. In order to be eligible, the employee's pay in the second 26-week period must be at least 80% of the pay in the first 26-week period.

Workers hired after the date of introduction of the legislation (Feb. 3, 2010) are eligible for the payroll tax forgiveness and the retention bonus, but only wages paid after the date of the new law's enactment receive the exemption for payroll taxes.

Here are some additional features of the new hiring incentive:

• The tax benefit of the new incentive is immediate. It puts money into a business' cash flow immediately, since the tax is simply not collected in the first place.
• The tax benefit generally applies only to private-sector employment, including nonprofit organizations—public sector jobs are generally not eligible for either benefit. However, employment by a public higher education institution would qualify. 
• There is no minimum weekly number of hours that the new employee must work for the employer to be eligible, and there is no maximum on the dollar amount of payroll taxes per employer that may be forgiven.  
  
• For workers that would otherwise be eligible for the “Work Opportunity Tax Credit,” the employer must select one benefit or the other for 2010—no double dipping.
• An employer can't claim the new tax breaks for hiring family members.
• A worker who replaces another employee who performed the same job for the employer is not eligible for the benefit, unless the prior employee left the job voluntarily or for cause.
• For the hiring to qualify, the new hire must sign an affidavit, under penalties of perjury, stating that he or she has not been employed for more than 40 hours during the 60-day period ending on the date the employment begins.
• The incentive is not biased towards either low-wage or high-wage workers. Under the measure, a business saves 6.2% on both a $40,000 worker and a $90,000 worker.
• The payroll tax holiday does not apply with respect to wages paid during the first calendar quarter of 2010, but the amount by which the Social Security payroll tax would have been reduced under the payroll tax holiday provision during the fist calendar quarter is applied against the tax imposed on the employer for the second calendar quarter of 2010.
• The Act creates a similar new set of rules permitting a payroll tax holiday for railroad retirement tax purposes.
• The credit for retaining qualifying new hires is the lesser of $1,000 or 6.2% of the wages paid by the taxpayer to the retained worker during the 52-consecutive-week period. Thus, the credit for a retained worker will be $1,000 if, disregarding rounding, the retained worker's wages during the 52-consecutive-week period exceed $16,129.03. However, the credit is not available for pay not treated as wages under the Code (e.g., remuneration paid to domestic workers).
  

So as you can see, as always, the government's help comes with lots of catches, caveats, and exceptions!  As we learn more we will share and communicate what it means for you!

Thanks

Matt

Communication....21st century style

With the iphone, netbooks, blackberries, google and every other whatsit there is really no data we can not have at the snap of our fingers.  On a recent trip I had this HUGE lighbulb go off above my head when a client needed a change to a financial statement before providing it on to the bank.  I was driving back from Indianapolis, in the middle of absolutely nowhere when I received the call.  The client needed a changed financial quicker than asap as they were finalizing the paperwork with the bank for a significant capital infusion into their business.  For a microsecond I thought I will be back in Memphis by about 9:00pm and should be able to whip it out within an hour.  But reality soon set in.  I pulled off the side of the road, whipped out my netbook, connected via my wireless aircard, remoted into my office, and made the necessary changes all while sitting on the side of the road, emailed them the financial statement (secured for those pesky online thiefs) and hopped back on the road.  All within about 35 minutes or so...How long ago would this not have even been possible? What does it do to your expectations from your accountant, attorney, banker, that they can or can not do this in today world.  What are your expectations to get your information when you need it?  What are expectations of being able to ask a question and have the ability to look at the same information?  All of these are more than possible, and should be your reality not your wish...

Rootworks-Next Generation CPA Firm

I am really excited about joining this group.  I am hoping it continues the direction that our practice has been heading in since we joined PASBA in April 2008.  RootWorks Leadership Community.  It will touch both of my interests Technology and Firm Management.  Man am I a geek......

Small Business is the Golden Goose: Don't Kill It - Jim Blasingame

I love reading Jim Blasingame.  Here is a great article on small business and the tax consequences on raising the rates for people making more than a theoretical $250K

Small Business is the Golden Goose: Don't Kill It - Jim Blasingame.