What’s gotten small business owners to spend again? Plus, why you should separate your business and personal financial accounts and why sleeping is hurting your business is this week’s round-up!
Around the Entrepreneur Web
Amazon To Give Away Millions in ‘Amazon Coins’ – Have a Kindle Fire? In May Amazon will bring their own currency to the devices allowing you to buy things and send monetary gifts.
Debunking 5 Common Myths About Sleep – Small business owners aren’t known for getting sleep. However, this could be severely hurting your business…and your health.
Small Business Owners – Are You Trashing Your Cash? – Are you spending way too much on bills for your business? Most likely – here’s how to cut them down.
Best Business Results: The 4 Stages of Customer Lifecycle – Does the one-size-fits all model really work for every business?
Small Business News of the Week
Are things looking up for small businesses? According to some surveys, small biz owners expect to increase spending in 2013. Many respondents say they attribute to the proposed increase in spending to business spending done in the past.
One of the biggest areas of spending is advertising, specifically web-based promotions. The costs for this, including registration, maintenance, site creation and even paying contractors to help with the promotion will show to be a big area for small businesses. Surprisingly, larger companies weren’t the biggest spenders, with 70% of companies with 25-49 employees saying they most likely would spend big this year.
While you may be hunkering down right now saving money for your business, it may be time to start throwing some of those funds around. It could be what helps you grow by leaps and bounds in the new year.
Outright Community Speaks
Our users surprise us every day with questions and concerns. Here are some of the latest:
A tutorial on how the rolling calendar works in Outright Free.
Some customers are a little lost on how to upgrade a specific account to Outright Plus. Here’s the best way to do it!
Have more questions or concerns? Stop by our Outright Customer Care forum!
Outright Pro Tip: Separate Your Accounts
A common financial mistake many people make is not separating their personal accounts and business accounts. Just using the account you’re used to dealing with may seem like a good idea in the beginning, but it can quickly turn into a nightmare, particularly when dealing with taxes.
No matter the size of your business, from the tiniest one person operation to a multi-employee LLC, you need to justify everything that’s on your business account. After all, you can’t claim business deductions with purchases that were actually personal expenses. Once they get mixed up, it’s very tough to separate them, especially if you can’t remember what each purchase was.
Luckily, setting up a new account usually doesn’t take that much effort, especially if you go through the bank where you have your personal account. now you can use each account with little thought to how you’re going to remember what it’s all for or if you’ll accidentally try to deduct something personal later. Plus, it makes running monthly business reports much simpler which can lead to faster business growth.
That’s it for this week’s Round-Up! Make sure to check out all the upcoming tax workshops and webinars, including one this Wednesday!
