Spring Cleaning Never Throw These Important Papers Away

Spring is a great time to clean out that growing mountain of financial papers and tax documents that clutters your home and office. Here's what you need to keep and what you can throw out without fearing the wrath of the IRS.

Let's start with your "safety zone," the IRS statute of limitations. This limits the number of years during which the IRS can audit your tax returns. Once that period has expired, the IRS is legally prohibited from even asking you questions about those returns.

The concept behind it is that after a period of years, records are lost or misplaced and memory isn't as accurate as we would hope. There's a need for finality. Once the statute of limitations has expired, the IRS can't go after you for additional taxes, but you can't go after the IRS for additional refunds, either.
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The Three-Year Rule

For assessment of additional taxes, the statute of limitation runs generally three years from the date you file your return. If you're looking for an additional refund, the limitations period is generally the later of three years from the date you filed the original return or two years from the date you paid the tax. There are some exceptions:

• If you don't report all your income and the unreported amount is more than 25% of the gross income actually shown on your return, the limitation period is six years.
  
  
• If you've claimed a loss from a worthless security, the limitation period is extended to seven years.
  
  
• If you file a "fraudulent" return, or don't file at all, the limitations period doesn't apply. In fact, the IRS can get you at any time.
  
  
• If you're deciding what records you need or want to keep, you have to ask what your chances are of an audit. A tax audit is an IRS verification of items of income and deductions on your return. So you should keep records to support those items until the statute of limitations runs out.
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Assuming that you've filed on time and paid what you should, you only have to keep your tax records for three years, but some records have to be kept longer than that.
Remember, the three-year rule relates to the information on your tax return. But, some of that information may relate to transactions more than three years old.

Here's a checklist of the documents you should hold on to:

1. Capital gains and losses. Your gain is reduced by your basis - your cost (including all commissions) plus, with mutual funds, any reinvested dividends and capital gains. But you may have bought that stock five years ago and you've been reinvesting those dividends and capital gains over the last decade. And don't forget those stock splits.
   
   You don't ever want to throw these records away until after you sell the securities. And then if you're audited, you'll have to prove those numbers. Therefore, you'll need to keep those records for at least three years after you file the return reporting their sales.
   
   
2. Expenses on your home. Cost records for your house and any improvements should be kept until the home is sold. It's just good practice, even though most homeowners won't face any tax problems. That's because profit of less than $250,000 on your home ($500,000 on a joint return) isn't subject to taxes under tax legislation enacted in 1997.
   
   If the profit is more than $250,000/$500,000, or if you don't qualify for the full gain exclusion, then you're going to need those records for another three years after that return is filed. Most homeowners probably won't face that issue thanks to the 1997 tax law, but of course, it's better to be safe than sorry.
   
   
3. Business records. Business records can become a nightmare. Non-residential real estate is now depreciated over 39 years. You could be audited on the depreciation up to three years after you file the return for the 39th year. That's a long time to hold on to receipts, but you may need to validate those numbers.
   
   
4. Employment, bank, and brokerage statements. Keep all your W-2s, 1099s, brokerage, and bank statements to prove income until three years after you file. And don't even think about dumping checks, receipts, mileage logs, tax diaries, and other documentation that substantiate your expenses.
   
   
5. Tax returns. Keep copies of your tax returns as well. You can't rely on the IRS to actually have a copy of your old returns. As a general rule, you should keep tax records for 6 years. The bottom line is that you've got to keep those records until they can no longer affect your tax return, plus the three-year statute of limitations.
   
   
6. Social Security records. You will need to keep some records for Social Security purposes, so check with the Social Security Administration each year to confirm that your payments have been appropriately credited. If they're wrong, you'll need your W-2 or copies of your Schedule C (if self-employed) to prove the right amount. Don't dispose of those records until after you've validated those contributions.
   
   Contact us by phone or email if you have any questions about what records you need to keep this spring.
   

QuickBooks 2012: New Paths to Better

As it usually does this time of year, Intuit has introduced new versions of its Pro and Premier products. QuickBooks 2012 promises to help you get better organized, save steps, and acquire more in-depth financial insights.

The new Express Start is designed for businesses that want to blast through setup and start entering customers and invoices. You have two other options, though: Advanced Setup is the old EasyStep interview that solicits more details. You can also open an existing file or convert data from Quicken or other accounting software.

Express Start requires minimal input: company name, industry, company type, tax ID, and contact information. After you save your company file, it lets you start adding or importing customers/vendors/employees, products/services, and bank accounts.

Figure 1: Express Start simplifies company setup.

An Activity-Driven Calendar
QuickBooks' Reminders keep you apprised of each day's tasks, but they don't provide any information about the past or future. QuickBooks 2012 solves this problem with its new Calendar. When you enter an appointment, to-do, or key business task (invoices, bills, purchase orders, etc.), it appears in the calendar. You can display a graphical view of the month that tallies activities for each day and lists them below. Daily and weekly views are in list form. And links open the original documents.

Figure 2: The new Calendar displays daily, weekly, and monthly views of your financial transactions.

Save Excel Formatting
Once you've formatted a QuickBooks report in Excel, it's frustrating to have to reformat it each time you run it for different time periods and/or with your ever-changing content. Excel Integration Refresh simplifies this process. You can now export a report to Excel, make formatting changes and save them, and then reapply them later to the same type of report using different date ranges and your updated QuickBooks data. Acceptable alterations include:

• Row and column header font formatting
• New formulas
• Renamed column and row headers, and report titles
• Resized columns
• Inserted columns and rows
• Inserted formula text

You can do this by opening your report in QuickBooks and clicking Update an existing worksheet, or by launching your report in Excel and clicking the QuickBooks tab on the toolbar, then the Update Report button.


Figure 3: This window opens when you click Update Report in Excel.

A New Report Community
There's always room for more report formats. QuickBooks 2012 offers a library of Contributed Reports, variations created either by Intuit or your fellow users. You can select one of these, like Customer Sales By Quantity By Item Detail and instantly populate it with your own data.

You can sort these templates by industry and rating, and view them as a list, in a grid, or in the Report Center's Carousel view.

Centralized Operations
QuickBooks 2012 also saves you time with its new Centers. The Inventory Center works similarly to those available for customers, vendors, and employees. It's a clearinghouse of item records and transactions that can be viewed and sorted. You can also do inventory housekeeping tasks here, like adding items and launching transactions.

The Lead Center helps you carefully track new leads that you either paste in from Excel or enter manually. You can add to-dos and notes to contact records, and convert them into customers.

Upgrading Can Be Tricky
Intuit has included other, smaller time-saving organizational and reporting tools in QuickBooks 2012, like One-Click Transactions, which lets you create related transactions from existing ones (i.e., invoice to credit memo) with one click.

There's nothing especially difficult about using most of QuickBooks 2012's new features. But upgrading and setup are sometimes quirky, and the Excel Integration Refresh tool has a learning curve. We're happy to help you start your company file on the right foot or get acclimated to this latest version.

Selecting Mrs Bookkeeper

Let’s assume that you decided to hire an independent bookkeeper. How should you interview and select such a bookkeeper?

Recruiting in general, whether it is for a bookkeeper or any position, is more of an art than a science, so there is no simple recipe that will ensure that you get the best bookkeeper in the door, but there are criteria that will enable you to mitigate risks. Here’s a short checklist and I’ll cover each item in more details below:

• Professionalism
• QuickBooks knowledge
• Accounting knowledge
• Price
• Availability
• Referencechecks

Professionalism
Why do I start with this criteria? Because it is the single most efficient factor to trim your list of candidates down. If you are reviewing a long list candidates and you test them first on their QuickBooks knowledge, you’ll shrink your list by 50% pretty quickly. If you test them on professionalism first, you’ll shrink the list by 80% right from the get go and you’ll save yourself a lot of time. What do I mean by “professionalism”? That’s the whole package of people skills that the bookkeepers expose to you. How crisp and well written are their emails? How friendly are they on the phone and in-person? How punctual are they to the interview? How well dressed are they? How well do they listen? Did they prepare for the interview by researching your company? A bookkeeper who doesn’t score high on this dimension will cause you problems down the road, because good bookkeeping is not only about the accuracy of the data that you get into QuickBooks. A bookkeeper is a consultant and as such, the bookkeeper needs to know how to adapt to your industry and company, understanding your needs and adapt his/her work to your needs.

QuickBooks knowledge
There is an enormous difference between being knowledgeable in QuickBooks and knowledgeable in accounting. QuickBooks appears simple to use if all you need to do is reconcile bank accounts, but as soon as you start pushing the envelope (job costing, sales tax, inventory management, integration with 3rd party apps, etc…), it’s a whole new ball game. Even if you majored in accounting in college, it won’t help at all. Case in point: most CPAs cannot be called QuickBooks experts. They know how to pull reports out of QuickBooks to prepare your taxes, but the number of CPAs out there who would be able to fix a “broken” QuickBooks file is very small. That’s not their area of expertise.

Accounting knowledge
This one is a no-brainer and you have to test for it. However, you’ll be surprised how few candidates will fail in this dimension, because the accounting knowledge required to keep clean books is actually easy to acquire. This being said, let me stress that this holds true only if all you are looking for is a bookkeeper. If you are expecting your candidate to play a controller or CFO role, it’s a very different story, but then, the job description should not be “bookkeeper”.

Price
Like in any market, you get what you pay for. The lower the cost, the lower the expertise. If you plan on giving your bookkeeper primarily data entry tasks and you will be verifying every detail of his/her work on an on-going basis, you can afford to go lower on the price scale. However, if you expect your bookkeeper to be self-sufficient and you won’t have time to quality control the work, you will be forced to pay more. Keep in mind that the hourly rate is not necessarily a good representation of cost. Jane might charge twice the hourly rate as Joe, but if Jane works twice as fast as Joe and she provides higher quality work, you will end paying Jane less than Joe at the end of the month.

Availability
Supply and demand doesn’t only affect price. It affects availability as well. The better bookkeepers are busier. Make sure that the bookkeeper you hire still has available bandwidth for you and will be able to turn your work around quickly and be responsive to your questions during the week. That’s one of the key differences between independent bookkeepers and firms. When an independent bookkeeper is maxed out, there is no safety valve. You can’t move work around or assign different resources. You just have to wait for your turn.

Check references
Last but not the least, don’t skip on the reference checks. You’re about to give this bookkeeper a lot of sensitive financial information. Better be safe than sorry!

Internal Controls Accounting Principles

The two most common causes of fraud in small businesses are when rogue employees or contractors write checks to themselves or deposit checks to their account instead of the company’s account. Those are very unsophisticated schemes and can easily be detected after the fact, but by the time you detect the fraud, the damage is already done. Very often these individuals go from paycheck to paycheck and spent your money in a hurry. You can’t get the money back. They are broke and you can only “punish” them through termination and prosecution. You get a sense of vindication, but the money is gone.

It is much better to prevent fraud in the first place and for such basic fraud, there are easy tricks. It all starts with what larger companies call “Internal Controls”. Essentially, any financial process that moves money around needs to involve at least 2 individuals checking on each other. When you apply this to a small business, it can be very basic, but still effective.

Guarding your stock of blank checks

Many small business owners feel that as long as they are the ones signing checks, all is safe. Not really. Banks do a very bad job at checking signatures. They can be easily forged. The signature is an effective tool to trace back the source of the fraud once the fraud has been detected, but by then, it’s already too late. The better approach is to control who has access to stocks of blank checks and how these blank checks are handed out.

The safest process is to have your bookkeeper prepare the checks in QuickBooks and mark them as “To be printed”. You, the owner, would then do the actual printing. In this scenario, you’re the only one with access to the stock of blank checks.

If you don’t have time to do the printing, you can delegate the printing to the bookkeeper as well, but you would hand-out only the exact number of blank checks needed and you would keep a log of the check numbers that you handed out. Essentially, avoid at all cost to have the blank check in a self-service mode. Checks need to be in a locked drawer with as few people having access to them as possible.

The panacea is to not have blank checks at all and to use online bill payment with rigorous approval workflows, but these techniques are a little bit more involved in term of setup.

Controlling the deposits

Let your bookkeeper or the individual acting as bookkeeper record the deposits in QuickBooks and prepare the deposit slips, but make sure that it is a different person who goes to the bank to make the deposits. Ideally it should be you, but if you don’t have time, separate the roles of preparing the deposits and making the deposits. Whomever makes the physical deposit needs to bring the deposit slip back and immediately hand it off to the person in charge of QuickBooks. This is of course not bullet proof, because the person making the actual deposit could still swap the accounts, but by enforcing the requirement of handing off the deposit slip on the way back to the office, you send a clear signal that this type of fraud will be caught almost in real time.

There are of course much more sophisticated ways of committing fraud, but by implementing the processes above, you will be preventing the two most basic and common fraud schemes.