Generally, if an employee incurs legitimate business expenses on behalf of the company and pays for those expenses using their own money or a personal credit/charge card, the employee, subject to the company’s policy and its ownership or management’s approval, may submit a company expense report with the proper receipts/backup for reimbursement through the company.

A cash flow projection is another tool to help manage and monitor the financial health of your business and for fiscal year planning and budgeting. In a cash flow projection, you are projecting your potential monthly cash inflows and outflows.

Steady cash flow is vital for any business but even more so if you’re an independent small business. After all, if you don’t have a steady cash flow, you can’t pay bills, employees or even yourself!

Tax season for the 2021 tax year is right around the corner!

Putting together financial projections for your business is a good exercise and tool for business owners to help manage and monitor the financial health of your business as well as for fiscal year business planning and budgeting.

As a business owner, you undoubtedly will need to deal with contracts and agreements.

Year-end bonuses can be a way to show appreciation to your employees for their passion, dedication, and hard work over the course of the year.

Many clients still remit payments by check and that’s certainly fine. With mobile and remote deposit, depositing checks are a lot simpler, easier and much more convenient for businesses. No need to always run to the local bank branch before 5pm to make a deposit.

CPAs and legal counsel provide important guidance, make key recommendations and advise you on pertinent related matters, respectively. However, they do not and cannot make the decisions for you! As a business owner, you are the ultimate decision-maker!

The tone, culture and atmosphere of your business or company starts at the top with YOU, the business owner.

More and more products and services are moving towards subscription-based models. For businesses, it’s important to carefully track and periodically review all your subscription-based products and services to ensure those subscriptions align with your current business needs. There’s no reason to throw money into a black hole!

When purchasing user-replaceable parts, components and consumables for business equipment, it’s ideal to use genuine parts from the manufacturer especially when the equipment is still under warranty and if genuine parts are available.

Leasing computer equipment may be an option if you need to purchase a significant amount of computer equipment but don’t want to invest the funds and incur the costs upfront.

When purchasing computer equipment for your business, there are some decisions to make like desktop vs laptop or Mac vs Windows PC. However, when it comes to cost, you don’t want to buy the least expensive (aka cheapest) computer available nor do you necessarily need to buy the most expensive computer available.

If you have compatible/supported non-live production workstations which you can use to test and evaluate major software updates/upgrades before deploying those updates/upgrades to live production workstations, this would be the ideal way to go.

Deploying critical updates, bug and security fixes/patches can be tricky as you need to weigh the benefits of immediately deploying these updates with the risks of potential incompatibility with existing software and hardware and the potential of these updates creating new or unexpected problems within your environment.

It’s important for software updates/upgrades to be properly tested and evaluated in non-production environments and on non-production workstations, to the extent possible, before being deployed company-wide on live production workstations and in a live production environment.

While you may feel inclined to update/upgrade software as soon as it’s released/available, you’ll want to exercise proper due care especially when updating/upgrading software on live production workstations for your business.