1548 tagged with "Small Business"
Financial management strategies and tools for small business owners
Personal Guarantees: How They Override Your LLC—and How to Negotiate Them
59% of small businesses with debt sign a personal guarantee, and it overrides your LLC's limited liability. This guide explains unlimited vs. limited guarantees, bad-boy carve-outs, burn-off provisions, SBA's 20% rule, and how to negotiate or get released.
Cash Balance Pension Plans: A Six-Figure Tax Deduction for High-Income Business Owners
A cash balance plan lets a 55-year-old business owner deduct roughly $230,000 a year in retirement contributions — far above the 401(k) ceiling — because a defined benefit pension caps the retirement benefit, not the annual deposit, so limits scale with age rather than income.
Auto Repair Shop Bookkeeping: Flat-Rate Hours, Parts Matrix, Comebacks, Warranty AR, and EPA Fees
Independent auto repair shops earn from labor, parts, sublet work, and environmental fees — each with different margins and bookkeeping rules. This guide builds a chart of accounts that separates flat-rate labor from clock hours, applies a tiered parts markup matrix targeting 55–58% gross profit, tracks comeback expense and warranty receivables aging, codes sublet work cleanly, and records EPA hazmat and shop supply fees as their own revenue and cost lines.
Bowling Center & FEC Bookkeeping: Stored-Value Cards, Deferred Revenue, and ASC 606 Breakage
How bowling centers and family entertainment centers should book stored-value game cards, league buy-ins, party deposits, and ASC 606 breakage — with a working chart of accounts, escheat-law pitfalls, and the operating KPIs lenders and buyers expect.
Daycare and Childcare Center Bookkeeping Under CACFP: Reimbursement Rates, Parent Co-Pays, State Vouchers, and Recordkeeping That Survives an Audit
How daycare operators should structure their books to handle CACFP reimbursements, state subsidy vouchers, and parent co-payments — covering chart of accounts, daily meal count discipline, classroom-level labor allocation, and the recordkeeping that holds up under state audits.
Bookkeeping for Farmers' Market Vendors and CSA Subscriptions: Booth Cash, Deferred Revenue, EBT Tokens, and Schedule F
A practical bookkeeping playbook for direct-to-consumer farms — chart of accounts, CSA deferred revenue across a 20-week season, SNAP/EBT and Double Up Food Bucks token reconciliation, per-market cash workflows, and Schedule F line 25 Section 175 conservation expense treatment.
Jewelry Store Bookkeeping: SKU-Level Costing, Memo Goods, Layaway, and Form 8300
A working playbook for independent jewelers covering per-piece SKU costing, lower-of-cost-or-market write-downs on metal price drops, memo and consignment inventory, ASC 606 repair and custom revenue, layaway deposit liabilities, and Form 8300 cash reporting without triggering structuring allegations.
Marina and Boat Slip Bookkeeping: ASC 606, Form 720, and MACRS Class Lives
A working chart of accounts and revenue-recognition playbook for marinas — straight-line seasonal slip revenue under ASC 606, point-in-time transient dockage, fuel-dock excise tax on Form 720, deposits held as liabilities, and 15-year MACRS treatment for floating docks.
Markup vs. Margin: The Pricing Mistake That Quietly Costs Small Businesses 7 Points of Profit on Every Sale
Markup and margin share a numerator but not a denominator, and the gap can quietly cost a contractor $99,000 a year. A plain-language guide to the conversion math, a target-margin lookup table, and why retailers, contractors, and restaurants keep underpricing jobs.
Bookkeeping for Local and Long-Distance Moving Companies: Carriers, Brokers, Fuel Surcharges, and Driver Settlements
Build a chart of accounts that separates carrier revenue from broker pass-throughs, handles fuel surcharges and packing inventory correctly, and reconciles driver settlements against bills of lading — the bookkeeping discipline that protects margin in local and long-distance moving operations.
Optometry Practice Bookkeeping: Medical vs. Vision Billing, Inventory, and Practice-Value KPIs
Independent optometry practices earn from five distinct profit centers — routine vision plans, medical insurance, frames, lenses, and contact lenses — each with different margins and billing pathways. This guide shows how to build a chart of accounts that separates VSP/EyeMed routine revenue from medical billing, capitalize frame inventory, treat contact lens supplies as deferred revenue under ASC 606, and surface the KPIs (revenue per exam, optical capture rate, normalized EBITDA) that lenders and acquirers ask about.
Pet Boarding, Daycare, and Grooming Bookkeeping: Run-Night Revenue, Add-On Allocation, and Gingr/PetExec Reconciliation
Pet boarding, daycare, and grooming operators run three businesses under one roof — services earned over time, retail earned at sale, and pass-throughs that are never revenue. This guide builds a chart of accounts that separates service lines, recognizes boarding revenue per run-night through a deferred-revenue liability, allocates add-ons to the service that produced them, and reconciles Gingr or PetExec daily summaries to the bank deposit by isolating processor fees, tips payable, deposits, and refunds.