Virtual Bookkeeping Services

Employee theft is something that no business owner wants to experience. Unfortunately, the culprit is often a trusted employee who has never complained about working overtime and without vacations. If you notice a combination of the following warning signs, it will be well worth your while to start investigating.

• There is an unusual drop in your profits.
• Your records are disorganized.
• There are unexplained changes in your accounting records.
• There are unusually large or numerous credits to a particular customer.
• An employee works late, on the weekends and refuses to take vacations.
• An employee's standard of living changes to a degree that is inexplicable based on her salary.
• Documents are missing.
• Bank deposits delayed.
• Customers are complaining about having already paid a bill.
• There are too many increases in past due accounts receivable.
• Check amounts are altered.
• Duplicate payments are made.
• Bank reconciliations have too many outstanding checks.
• Too many payments are being made to individuals with the same name or address.
• Vendors' addresses are the same as an employee's address.
• Bank reconciliations are late.
• Accounts receivable and payable don't balance.
• The petty cash fund is disappearing.

Several of our largest clients utilize our service because they know they are protected.  In each of their cases, they had a trusted employee steal from them and they don't want to experience it again. 

Foster Results insures our customers against theft, as well as errors and omissions.  We want our clients to be secure in their business' financial health.

A truck driver who let his girlfriend stay at his house rent-free as long as she kept the books for his business is now suing her for embezzling $50,000.  Sioux Falls resident John S. Townsend, 44, who drives his own truck and operates as Townsend Transport, let 45-year-old Ramona Haase move in with him in September 2007, according to court documents.

The pair had an understanding that Haase would not pay rent but rather perform the bookkeeping duties associated with the business. In March of 2008, Townsend authorized Haase to draw checks on his business account to pay expenses.

When the relationship ended in August, Townsend hired a new bookkeeper who noticed a discrepancy of around $50,000.

The complaint filed last week in Minnehaha County also alleges that Haase failed to provide accurate, timely information to Townsend's accountant, an act that resulted in the late filing of his 2008 tax return.

The civil case asks for monetary damages and charges Haase with fraud, negligence and breach of contract.

No criminal charges have been filed against Haase.

Written by John Hult  October 21, 2009  ArgusLeader.com

At Foster Results, we take every precaution to ensure that your finances are protected.  In addition to extensive background checks for each employee, every bookkeeping client recieves a Certicate of Insurance up to $1 million dollars worth of loss. 

October 14, 2009 by The Wise One 

Business is composed of a set of interrelated systems that ensure the smooth flow of business processes and convert capital to revenue efficiently. It is important for a business owner to consider each component as if it is just the existing system inside the process. Thus, utmost importance and consideration must be given to each process component, which includes the accounting process.

That is why we have tax lawyers. That is why we have public accountants. That is why we have financial managers.

It is because of the accounting process.

It is the measurement and the disclosure of essential financial information that will help public accountants, financial managers, tax authorities, investors, and other decision-makers to effectively allocate their financial resources to each business process, thus maximizing the conversion of a business' working capital to huge revenues.

Accounting involves processes in which important financial information of a particular business is recorded, summarized, evaluated, and interpreted. Furthermore, since money is one of the biggest factors that may affect the existence of a business in a certain market, accounting is given utmost attention and consideration at all times.

In accounting alone, there are several aspects that a business owner must consider. There you have the cost accounting, the cash-basis accounting, financial accounting, internal fund accounting, management accounting, project accounting, and others.

And the list continues to expand.

In other words, you might conclude that accounting is a serious and a critical matter that must be handled by a group of people who have the technical expertise in dealing with the accounting as well as financial issues. Realizing this reality, more and more business organizations hand the accounting aspects of their business process to third-party organizations, or most commonly known as accounting outsourcing.

Accounting outsourcing is considered to be one of the more effective management tools, thus many companies often incorporate outsourcing as one of their strategies in business planning. As a matter of fact, the Outsourcing Institute reported that the concept of a CRO (Chief Resource Officer), a professional outsourcing executive manager, is widely-acceptable in larger corporate organizations.

However, you need not be a large corporation to benefit from accounting outsourcing. Even small and medium-sized enterprises can provide better service and produce high-quality products in a more cost-efficient way if they outsource their non-core business processes. This includes the accounting aspect.

By decreasing the demands on your administrative personnel, you will be able to free them from additional responsibilities and they will be able to support areas directly to your sales, clients, and to the marketing task of your business.

Accounting outsourcing firms can execute your accounting and bookkeeping tasks in all frequencies (monthly, quarterly, and annually) or can supplement your present administrative staff to lessen the responsibility. Here is a summary of the services you can acquire from outsourcing your company's accounting process:

- Preparing cash disbursement checks;
- Preparing input credits and bank deposits;
- Preparing company payroll;
- Preparing tax deposits and bank reconciliation;
- Preparing financial statements;
- Preparing payroll tax returns; and
- Evaluation and review of financial results on different frequencies.

With accounting outsourcing, you will be able to see the benefits of having a cost-efficient business operation. With your accounting process at the hands of outsourcing professionals, you can focus to the core of your business and convert every cent of your working capital into hundreds to thousands of dollars in generated revenues and profits.
Premier solution for outsource graphics, marketing and web services

Source:  http://www.wisdompost.com/2198/outsource-accounting-to-boost-your-bottom-line-5/

Monday, October 12, 2009 
Written by IBJ Staff

- The non-partisan Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute this morning released a new study exploring the ramifications of expanding the state's sales tax to include services.

In its last fiscal year, Indiana raised $5.7 billion from its 7-percent sales tax, which applies to the sales of most tangible goods, with exemptions for items such as prescription drugs, groceries and newspapers.

According to the IFPI study, Indiana could raise as much as another $6.76 billion annually if it extended its sales tax to include all service transactions. Even if Indiana exempted medical and legal services, Indiana could raise almost $4.5 billion from an expanded sales tax, according to IFPI.

Such figures are sure to appeal to legislators in Indiana's General Assembly, who struggled mightily over recession-driven spending cuts this spring. A special session of the Legislature was ultimately necessary to craft a two-year state budget.

Indiana government's economic picture hasn't improved much since then. On Oct. 8, Gov. Mitch Daniels revealed Indiana's revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30 was $254 million less than previously predicted, despite the fact that Indiana's revenue forecast has been repeatedly revised downward.

New revenue could help fill such gaps. But an expansion of Indiana's sales tax has many potential drawbacks, which the IFPI study details.

For starters, Indiana's 7-percent state sales tax is already the highest in the Great Lakes region. Extending it might prompt Indiana residents to seek services elsewhere. Indiana is currently tied with Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Tennessee for the second-highest sales tax in the nation. Only California's 7.25 percent tax is higher.

The IFPI study points out that the effective sales tax rate is actually higher in some regions because of local sales taxes tacked onto state sales taxes. Alabama, for example, has a 4-percent sales-tax rate, but certain localities there have their own 6-percent sales taxes, creating a 10-percent total tax.

Most states, including Indiana, already tax a few services, such as public utilities, hotel-room rentals and stadium admissions, according to IFPI. But only a handful, such as South Dakota, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Mexico, Delaware and Washington, tax more than a handful of services.

Indiana currently ranks 39th among states for the number of services it taxes, taxing 24 of 168 services surveyed by the Federation of Tax Administrators.

The logistics of expanding the sales tax to additional services would be challenging for some businesses. IFPI points out it could be difficult for many businesses to levy such a tax. Businesses that already sell some goods would have an easier time than pure-service providers. For example, a cosmetologist that now collects taxes on the shampoos and conditioners its sells while exempting styling services, would simply have to stop segregating taxable and nontaxable sales.

But other businesses that sell no tangible goods would find they suddenly must establish a relationship with the Indiana Department of Revenue and maintain a whole new type of record. The cost could be significant, IFPI points out, particularly for small businesses.

"Of the major sources of revenue available to the state, broad-based taxation of services is the only one yet to be tapped by the State of Indiana," wrote the IFPI report's author, Earl Ryan. "The revenue possibilities are great, and it would bring a degree of equity to the tax system. At the same time, defining the base would be difficult, both conceptually and politically, and the cost of collecting the tax on the part of both the state and the taxpayers would be significant.

Study: Taxing services could yield state $6.8B Peter Schnitzler   -  pschnitzler@ibj.com 

Many small business owners are so busy with the day-to-day operations of the business that they can’t see the forest for the trees. They are underutilizing information about how the business is doing financially and, hence, are missing opportunities to improve the financial performance of the business.

This financial information is analogous to gauges on an automobile: they tell you how well the underlying business processes are working. They should function as an early warning system of problems requiring remediation or as an affirmation improvement efforts are being successful.

Each business needs to develop indicators specific to its processes, but several are widely used. In this article we are going to share some examples of helpful measures. It is important to note that these metrics are not taken from B-school textbooks, but rather are “best practices” drawn from successful business people.

A typical financial statement is a snapshot in time of what is going on. Graphing trends over time in such areas as sales, gross margin and units produced is analogous to a video, and provide a much clearer picture of whether things are getting better or worse. A second helpful approach – but difficult to format – is to separate fixed and variable expenses. Certain expenses should fluctuate with levels of business activity and others should not. This exercise also will force you to address expenses that should be variable that are, in reality, fixed. Opportunities for improvement come with this epiphany.

Many people utilize certain ratios to help spot trends over several years. These are helpful because it’s hard to keep track of the cumulative impact of the changes made from one year to the next. Ratios such as sales/employee, unit production/ employee and overhead/employee are all helpful long-term benchmarks.

Many small business people let the cost accounting tail wag their pricing dog. They don’t put themselves in the shoes of a customer making a purchasing decision. A product or service ought to be priced to reflect value as perceived in the marketplace. Would someone discern a value difference proportionate to the price difference between your product and the others next to it? What is the competitive price point that will optimize your product’s take off the shelf? Value is a combination of price and quality. Most of the time as consumers, we make trade-offs between these two aspects but our purchasing motivation goes way up and we become raving fans when we get quality at a bargain price. The same is true of your customers.

Once you determine a price point, a projection of the net-before-tax profit of the product should be the basis of evaluating its contribution to the business.

Pricing based upon a mark-up over cost is commonly used because it is easier to determine and accountants are comfortable with it. But it completely misses the perceived competitive value of the product or service in the eyes of the customer. It is helpful – but hard – to develop profitability by customer and profitability by product or service lines. This information is always surprising the first time you do it and usually leads to some different ways of thinking.

Profitability should be calculated at the net-before-tax level to give a true picture of all the costs associated with the product or service line. Some people have difficulty fully allocating expenses but it is doable and follows easily once set up. Formatting information this way can also help reveal if increases or decreases in performance are due to take, costs, or volume.

Putting together these indicators can be time consuming at first but once in place can be easily updated and are invaluable to the health of your small business.
 

From The Collin County Business Press

So what’s new for Quickbooks users in 2010? Intuit says it has streamlined the install process from 15 screens to only six for small businesses with simple accounting needs. You will be able to edit multiple items in the lists of items/customers/vendors at one time in a spreadsheet-style screen, and data can be pasted into those lists from Excel. There are new form templates, and more form customization options, including decorative backgrounds. For more advanced customization, there is integrated access to design services. Quickbooks 2010 users will also have the ability to put their signature on their checks directly within the program without printing them.

Some of the more useful-sounding new features are the additions to the Company Snapshot screen that was introduced in Quickbooks 2009. This screen can now be personalized to display the data most relevant to the user’s particular business. If this works half as well as described it will be a great improvement to what was already one of my favorite features in the 2009 version. This is the most promising sounding of the newly announced features, but also reminds me of iPhone cut-and-paste: something that should have been there from the beginning.

Another promising area of improvement is in the reporting. According to Intuit, it’s been “radically redesigned” to make it easier to find reports. The redesign includes a carousel view, a list view, and a search function, as well as a favorites view to show your most frequently used reports. As a Quickbooks user who gets annoyed by having to wade through a massive library of irrelevant reports to get to the few that I use regularly, the ability to go directly to a favorites list of reports sounds very helpful.

The most common complaint about Quickbooks has long been its heavy-handed marketing of add-on services inside what is already an expensive software package. Unfortunately, most of the new features being advertised for Quickbooks 2010 appear to simply be an extension of Intuit’s philosophy of aggressively generating add-on sales. Popular personal finance management app Mint.com, recently purchased by Intuit, also operates under a business model based on selling add-on services through its software. But there is a major difference between Mint and Quickbooks: Mint is free.

The features that fall under what Intuit calls its “Connected Services Strategy” include:

• Document Management Services: These services allow attaching of documents to transactions, accounts or people in Quickbooks. The documents are stored online and can be accessed remotely and shared with others.
• Check Deposit Services: With Intuit Check Solutions for Quickbooks, users can deposit check payments into their bank account. For companies not already using Quickbooks merchant services, the check service starts at $19.95 per month plus per-transaction fees.
• Marketing Center: Quickbooks’ integrated email marketing service (currently in beta) offers customizable templates for creating email marketing campaigns and then allows for tracking the results of those campaigns through Quickbooks data.
• App Center: Everyone has to have apps these days, and Quickbooks is no exception. The App Center contains about 25 programs in four categories. The apps cover topics from task management to project management to online storage. Most are only peripherally related to the core accounting functions, and all but a few require a monthly subscription (although free trials are available).

Quickbooks Pro 2010 will have a single-user MSRP of $199.99, or $179.99 for an upgrade. Pre-order street price for the full version Quickbooks Accounting Pro on Amazon.com is currently $149.99. Quickbooks Premier 2010 will have a single-user MSRP of $399.99, or $349.99 for upgrade buyers. The pre-order street price on Amazon.com is $249.99 for the full version of that program.

If you bought Quickbooks 2009 in the 60 days before the 2010 product announcement on Sept. 28, you will likely be happy to know about the existence of a little-advertised “migration upgrade” program that provides free upgrades to the 2010 version. To get the upgrade if you qualify, make sure you have your 2009 product’s information and sales receipt and call 888-246-8848. Stay on the line after the menu options to reach customer service.