How Can I Find All Available Tax Deductions?
Finding Business Deductions
Preparing the data to give to your CPA is a task that a taxpayer is best suited to perform. Aware of the day-to-day dealings, the business owner alone is the only one who is aware of the full amount and just business expenses incurred during the year.
“Generally speaking, the rules for deducting business expenses are rather simple. First and foremost, the expense must be directly related to the business. For whether you are purchasing office supplies or incurring expenditures for advertising, you should be able to show how a particular expense benefits the business. Secondly, whether you are traveling to see a client or looking to add rental space, you will want to be sure that a cash outlay furthers or promotes the business by enabling it to pursue its ultimate goal of serving its customers.”
— Atlanta CPA, John Dillard CPA
Un-Reimbursed Business Expenses
The more streamlined your business is, the more efficient and thus more profitable it may become. By standardizing routine procedures at a heightened performance level of excellence, business owners have more control, better delegation and the best opportunity to serve clients in the intended and promised manner. Such rules and guidelines apply not only to the production and service aspects of a business but to their administrative functions as well. Regardless of one’s skill level or record keeping ability, it is difficult to recall all business expenditures that one incurs in the day-to-day normal business operations. Thus, it is critical to routinely track and record business expenses as they are incurred. To best do this owner would be prudent to document business mileage and other expenses each and every day as they are incurred. Turning in expense reports at least once a month are also excellent barometers to ensuring that no business expense is missed. For it is impossible at year-end or after a protracted period to recall the variety of expenses incurred for which daily tracking and recording alone will discover.
Frequently Missed Deductions
Generally the most common expenses, which are poorly tracked and therefore missed in preparing one’s internal financials, are travel expenses. Tax law requires business owners who deduct business miles to track their mileage using a by day log to do so. Usually it is best to track these expenses nearest where you record your daily travels. Rather than keeping a separate recording it is usually best to record the business mileage incurred on your day-timer where you track your daily schedule and travels. As you review all of the expenditures that you incur for the year you will want to be sure to pay out of the business all monies that are deemed to be valid expenses of the business. By reviewing payment of expenses at the source, at the time of the expense being incurred and paid is the best opportunity to track valid business expenses.
Often the myriad of business expenses and their documentation will both confuse and perplex as you are trying to properly record the valid expenditures of the business. Accordingly please call us today to set up an appointment to ensure that you are legally deducting all of your business expenses.