Posts by Ben Day

I deal with a lot of house flippers and even rental owners who are doing their math the wrong way. It ends up with them paying less taxes at first, but eventually they pay more than they otherwise would. It also causes more work for them on the bookkeeping side of things!

How much money are you spending on property management software? More importantly, how much time are you spending on your software?

Did you know that you can actually make yourself money through your expenses?

If you’re a business owner, it is very likely that you use an accounting software such as QuickBooks to handle your accounting needs. It is also likely that you, as a business owner, have been handling the bookkeeping of your business on your own rather than outsourcing it to someone else.

It’s every business owner’s favorite time of year—tax season! Business taxes were due back in March, and you might have found yourself in a slight panic (or a major panic) trying to gather everything you needed to file.

It’s a time-honored business saying with unknown origins: What gets measured gets managed. Though no one knows where it came from, it’s a well-known way of explaining a concept you need to know when you’re running your own company. If you don’t track things, you’ll lose track of them. You’ll lose sight of what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis, and you won’t be managing that business.

As someone running a small business, it can be hard for you to stay on top of your accounting, especially if you don’t have training in bookkeeping or accounting methods. Often I’ve dealt with businesses that have very little idea of where their money comes from and where it goes. And you can forget about depreciating assets or anything more complicated than “money comes in, money goes out.”

Automation is a bit of a scary word to many industries. After all, technology has been disrupting industries forever. Think about the seismic shift that ride-sharing services have made in the taxi industry or home-sharing services in the hotel industry. But what about your business’s ledgers?

In my line of work, I often run into people who say, “My tax preparer does my books.” But is that really enough? What a lot of small business owners don’t realize is that ideally you have two sets of books: tax books and management books.

One of the big questions that we get asked all of the time is, “What is the difference between what you do and what a tax preparer does? Why shouldn’t I just hire a tax preparer? Isn’t what you do the same thing?”