vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
"Re the business license - in California business licenses are given by the municipal/county governments, so you'll have to check that with your city hall or county office. Re taxes - yes, you'll have to pay taxes, as with any income. Services are considered ""imputed income"", and generally you'd recognize income to the extent they would be paying had they been paying the full price (or the actual cost of services provided, if more). Since this is a hobby and not a for-profit enterprise, your deductions may be limited by the actual income and the 2% AGI threshold. See more here."
"I agree with some of the points of the other answers but why not avoid all the guesswork? I highly recommend you not charge him now. Wait until the end of the year when you have much more information about both of your companies and then you can run the numbers both ways and decide if it would benefit you (collectively). If either of your businesses runs on a cash basis and you decide to invoice, just make sure the check is deposited before Dec 31. Update: If you want to do this for 2016, at least your husband's business would have to be using an accrual basis (since it's too late to take the deduction on a cash basis). Simply run the numbers both ways and see if it helps you. If it doesn't help enough to warrant it for 2016 you could rerun the numbers near the end of 2017 to see if it helps then. Diclaimer: I think it's OK to do this type of manipulation for the scenario you described since you have done (or are doing) the work and you are charging a reasonable fee, but realize that you shouldn't manipulate the amount of the invoice, or fabricate invoices. For example, you shouldn't ever think about such things as: ""If I invoice $50K instead of $3K, will that help us?"""
I will answer this question broadly for various jurisdictions, and also specifically for the US, given the OP's tax home: Generally, for any tax jurisdiction If your tax system relies on periodic prepayments through the year, and a final top-up/refund at the end of the year (ie: basically every country), you have 3 theoretical goals with how much you pre-pay: Specifically, for the U.S. All information gathered from here: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/estimated-taxes. In short, depending on your circumstance, you may need to pay quarterly estimated tax payments to avoid penalties on April 15th. Even if you won't be penalized, you, may benefit from doing so anyway (to force yourself to save the money necessary by April 15th).  I have translated the general goals above, into US-specific advice:
"I think the key point that's making the other commenters misunderstand each other here is the concept of ""deductions"". I can only speak for the UK, but that's only a concept that business owners would understand in this country.  For things like child credits or low income tax credits, we don't get paid them at the end of the tax year, but into our bank accounts every couple of weeks all year round. Therefore, we have nothing to ""deduct"". If we work for a company and have business expenses, then the company pays for them. If we make interest on our savings, the bank pays it for us. We make money at our jobs, and the employer works out what taxes and national insurance we owe, based on a tax code that the government works out for us annually (which we can challenge).  To be fair, it's not like we're free from bureaucracy if we want to claim these benefits. There are often lots of forms if you want child benefit or disability allowances, for instance. We just apply as soon as we're eligible, rather than waiting to get a lump sum rebate. So it appears to be a very different system, and neither is inherently better than the other (though I'm personally glad I don't usually have to fill in a big tax return myself, which I only did one year when I was self employed). I'd be interested to know, since Google has let me down, which countries use the American system, and which the British or Czech."
Those extra treat points have to come from somewhere, and they come from American Express charging merchants a higher percentage than Visa or Mastercard. So it's less attractive for those merchants to accept it.
"Aside from an annual fee, if any, the card issuer makes money 2 ways, the transaction fee, about 1.5%-2% charged to the merchant, and interest from you if you leave a balance month to month. Obviously, the bank has some cost in processing statements and maintaining your account. If up front you are saying you will not have any chance of providing a certain profit level, they may have no interest in your business. (As you updated.) Other card issuers (almost surely with fees) might. Put the cards on ice. A bag of water in freezer. Don't be so hasty that you ding your report this way. By trashing the history as well as utilization, you may impact your score enough to do some harm if you actually need credit in the near future. I know this is a game with the credit agencies, a ""how good a borrower am I"" game, but it can really impact your bottom line if you don't play along.  In reply to Michael's comment 1/5/15, if I have one card and am budgeted for $1000/mo in spending, in order to keep utilization down to less than 20%, I'd need a line of more than $5000. Even if I ignore utilization, my January spending is $1000, but the bill is cut on the 31st and not due till Feb 25th. So a line of nearly $2000 is required unless you wish to make mid cycle payments on an ongoing basis."
this article offers tips you can use to make the most out of your business reward credit card. keep these tips in mind and don't forget to tell share them with your friends, especially those who are also managing small business, like you.
Etiquette doesn't really come into the picture here. The business offers a service and I choose to accept it. Personally, I use my debit card as much as possible. For every transaction, I record it in my checkbook. Then, when I do reconciling, I know exactly how much I paid for various categories of stuff. Good for budgeting. Most often my purchases are over $10 but when they aren't, I have no qualms about using the card.
"You may want, or at least be thinking of, the annualized method described in Pub 505 http://www.irs.gov/publications/p505/ch02.html#en_US_2015_publink1000194669 (also downloadable in PDF) and referred to in Why are estimated taxes due ""early"" for the 2nd and 3rd quarters only? . This doesn't prorate your payments as such; instead you use your income and deductions etc for each of the 3,2,3,4-month ""quarters"" to compute a prorated tax for the partial year, and pay the excess over the amount already paid. If your income etc amounts are (nearly) the same each month, then this computation will result in payments that are 3,2,3,4/12ths of 90% of your whole-year tax, but not if your amounts vary over the year. If you do use this method (and benefit from it) you MUST file form 2210 schedule AI with your return next filing season to demonstrate that your quarterly computations, and payments, met the requirements. You need to keep good per-period (or per-month) records of all tax-relevant amounts, and don't even try to do this form by hand, it'll drive you nuts; use software or a professional preparer (who also uses software), but I'd expect someone in your situation probably needs to do one of those anyway. But partnership puts a wrinkle on this. As a partner, your taxable income and expense is not necessarily the cash you receive or pay; it is your allocated share of the partnership's income and expenses, whether or not they are distributed to you. A partnership to operate a business (like lawyers, as opposed to an investment partnership) probably distributes the allocated amounts, at least approximately, rather than holding them in the partnership; I expect this is your year-end draw (technically a draw can be any allowed amount, not necessarily the allocated amount). In other words, your husband does earn this money during the year, he just receives it at the end.
"I can't give you proper legal advice, but if I called their customer service and used half an hour of my time to wait and explain the situation in detail, and their official response was ""just use the points,"" I would do just that. Of course you would have stronger legal standing if you had recorded their answer, or had it in writing from them. But I don't think spending these points will come crashing down on you. And morally I see absolutely no problem with spending these points; it is not as if you are stealing from someone else. These points can usually be given away in any kind of crazy manner. Sometimes there are lotteries or events where they give away 100,000 points for new customers who open up an account on a specific weekend. Sometimes they give points to customers who want to terminate their contracts as an attempt to coax them into staying. They have given you a lot of points and don't really care. As a result you are probably staying their customer forever – and will most likely tell this story to many friends. This is free advertising for them. Heck, maybe they would even make a news story out of this some day, it could be good publicity. Everyone is essentially getting these points ""for free"" but in fact the company has a business case by improving their image and customer retention with these points. So you can spend these points with a sound mind morally. Legally you would have to contact a lawyer, but I think chances for legal repercussions are small if you have done your duty, informed them and their customer service basically said it's ok."
I'm not a tax advisor, but I've done freelance work, so... If any of your side-business revenue is reported on a 1099, you're now a business owner, which is why Schedule C must be filled out. As a business owner, minimum wage doesn't apply to you. All revenue is income to you, and you owe taxes on the profit, after subtracting legitimate (verifiable) business expenses. You'll want to talk to a real tax advisor if you're going to start expensing mileage, part of your house (if you use a home office), etc. Don't forget that you'll owe self-employment tax (the employer's half of your payroll tax).  You can't save money on business taxes by paying yourself a wage and then counting it as an expense to the business. You'll definitely want to talk to a tax expert if you start playing around with finances as an (the) owner of the business. Income that is not reported on a 1099 should be reported as hobby income.
That isn't how it works, and that's definitely not the way it should work for either business or personal taxes. A business is free from taxes only if they have made a net loss over the year. This is **very** different from simply having less cash at the end of the year than at the beginning. A business could have less cash if they bought assets, paid off debt or any number of reasons and still pay taxes. On the other hand, they could end up with *more* cash at the end of the year than they began it with and still be free from taxes, as long as they made a net loss for the year. The cash balance has nothing to do with whether they pay taxes or not.
It's my understanding that deferred revenue will be included as income as the services are rendered. In this way, gains originating from deferred revenue are not recognized until they are actually earned.  It's a formality so the accounting adheres to the matching principle. It may help to view a DR as an advance payment (say like what an airline may do with ticket purchases that occur before the flight).   It sounds like you're wanting to penalize the business for having to eventually provide a service. But I don't know if that would be accurate, I mean, from the business's perspective, isn't it always preferable to be paid in advance? Are you concerned the company may not have any recourse should the customer try to back out or something?  I don't think I'm understanding your question, could you come at it from another angle to explain it?
Most wage-earners don't notice this because it happens automatically through payroll withholding, but as self-employed you are responsible for making sufficient and timely estimated payments, and will owe a penalty if you don't. However, since this is your first year you may have a 'safe harbor'; if you also have income from an employer (reported on W-2, with withholding) and that withholding is sufficent to pay last year's tax, then you are exempt from the 'underpayment' penalty for this year. If you elect corporation status then the corporation (which is really just you) must always make timely payments of withheld amounts, according to one of several different schedules that may apply depending on the amounts; I believe it also must make estimated payments for its own liability, if any, but I'm not familiar with that part.
Debit cards with the Visa or Mastercard symbol on them work technically everywhere where credit cards work. There are some limitations where the respective business does not accept them, for example car rentals want a credit card for potential extra charges; but most of the time, for day-to-day shopping and dining, debit cards work fine. However, you should read up the potential risks. A credit card gives you some security by buffering incorrect/fraudulent charges from your account, and credit card companies also help you reverse incorrect charges, before you ever have to pay for it. If you use a debit card, it is your money on the line immediately - any incorrect charge, even accidential, takes your money from your account, and it is gone while you work on reversing the charge. Any theft, and your account can be cleaned out, and you will be without money while you go after the thief. Many people consider the debit card risk too high, and don't use them for this reason. However, many people do use them - it is up to you.
You can do this through a journal entry in Quickbooks.  It can all be entered as one entry, there's no need to do separate ones for each bill. The journal entry should debit Accounts Payable and credit your equity account.  In the line for Accounts Payable, make sure to choose your name in the 'Name' column.  This, in effect, enters a credit to your account, which will offset the bills that were shown there previously. The last step is to apply those credits to the bills.  Even though they offset each other, your name would still show up in any Payables reports and in the Pay Bills window.  To do this, open the Pay Bills window and select one of the bills owed to you.  There should be an option to choose 'Apply Credits' or something similar (depends on which version of Quickbooks you are running).  Choose that option, and apply credits in the amount of the bill, so that it zeroes out.  Do the same for all of the other bills.  Once they are all checked off, click the button to Pay Bills.  This won't actually 'pay' anything, but will instead just apply the credits to the bills as indicated.
A debit card takes the funds right from your account. There's no 'credit' issued along the way. The credit card facilitates a short term loan. If you are a pay-in-full customer, as I am, there's a cost to lend the money, but we're not paying it. It's part of the fee charged to the merchant. Thus the higher transaction cost.
My guess would be for small merchants there could be a small difference. For large merchants, the cash is also at a cost equivalent to the card fees. Check for my other answer at  How do credit card companies make profit?
It depends on your bank and your terms of service, but using the card one way or the other may affect things such as how long it takes to process, what buyer protections you have, etc.  It also affects the store as I believe they are charged differently for debit vs credit transactions.
This may not exactly answer your question but, as a small business owner, I would highly recommend having a professional handle your taxes. It is worth the money to have it done correctly rather than doing something wrong and getting audited or worse having penalties assessed and owing more than you thought would be possible. I would recommend this especially if this is how you make your primary income, you can always write it off as a business expense.
1) Every credit card company charges vendors a fee. That's sufficient to make an acceptable profit per charge even if some of that money goes into marketing expenses -- and the cash-back offer is a marketing expense. 2) Many if not most consumers pay interest; probably everyone does so occasionally when we get distracted and miss a payment. 3) The offer encourages you to put more payments on the card -- and in particular on their card -- than you might otherwise. See #1; that increases net income.
Credit cards and debit cards make up the bulk of the transactions in the US.  Visa and Mastercard take a percentage of each credit card transaction.  For the most part, this fee it built into the price of what you buy.  That is, you don't generally pay extra at the grocery store if you use a credit card (gasoline purchases are a notable exception here.) If you were getting something like 2% of a third of all the retail transactions in the US, you'd probably not want to rock the boat too much either.  Since there is little fraud relative to the amount of money they are taking in, and it can often be detected using statistical analysis, they don't really stand to gain that much by reducing it through these methods.  Sure they can reduce the losses on the insurance they provide to the credit card consumer but they risk slowing down the money machine.  These companies want avoid doing something like reducing fraud by 0.5% revenues but causing purchases with the cards drop by 1%.  More security will be implemented as we can see with the (slow) introduction of chip cards in the US but only at a pace that will prevent disruption of the money machine.  EMV will likely cause a large drop in CC fraud at brick-and-mortar stores but won't stop it online.  You will likely see some sort of system like you describe rolled out for that eventually.
It is likely the policy of the credit card company.  If you are running a business, you should factor in theft as part of your mark-up/margin.  Every major business accounts for theft within their business practices and accounting.  That way they are covered for instances like yours.    If you have not been accounting for theft, then I'd highly recommend it.  This might be an expensive learning lesson for your family business.  Either implement new procedures such as checking ID with credit cards to match the names, or factor in theft/loss of product into your margins.  Ideally, do both.
Compared with a Sole Proprietorship, the main disadvantages of an S-Corporation or an LLC are that it adds a lot of management overhead (time, and possibly money if you don't do it all yourself), and there are fees you must pay to incorporate, as well as additional yearly maintenance fees which vary by state. You should be able to weigh the tax savings and liability protection against the extra costs and hassle, and see which way the scales tip. As a rule of thumb, the bigger your business gets or the more income you make, the more attractive incorporating becomes. Note there are some additional taxes that certain jurisdictions impose on business income. For example, IL and CA charge 1.5% tax, NY is less, but NYC is 8.85%! In NYC specifically, you could actually end up paying slightly more tax as an S-Corp than you would as a Sole Proprietorship. In most places though, the nominal local taxes will still be less than the FICA taxes you could potentially save.
The math is pretty simple.  You can spend less overall if you pay points.  Things to remember are:
Your question begins with a misunderstanding.  When you prepare your tax return (Form 1040/1040A/1040EZ) you always try to minimize your total tax bill.  When you fill out form W4 you trying to estimate how much tax will be shown on next years tax return.  The penalty for having too much tax withheld is not having the use of the money until you get a tax refund. At the moment interest rates are very low and your economic loss is the temporary loss of access to the money. One exception would be if you are carrying credit card debt. In that case you are, in effect, paying 20-30% interest to borrow money you lending to the US Treasury for 0% interest. The penalty for having too little tax withheld is having to make a large payment with your tax return. If your pre-payments aren't at least as much as your total income tax from last year there may also be modest underpayment penalty based on the difference between your pre-payments and your total income tax from last year or this year whichever is less. A large underpayment will trigger a different larger underpayemnt penalty. The W4 combined with the withholding rates tends to over-withhold income tax for most, but not all, taxpayers. Most people don't have enough savings to pay a large tax due, which leads to more penalties and an even larger bill. Over-witholding protects the overall tax system from the consequences of those events. People tend to be very unhappy, not quietly. On balance your greatest economic benefit depends on whether or not you have high interest debt. If you do, then accurate and even slightly under-withholding will probably work to your advantage as long as you can pay next 4/15. If not, avoiding the chance of having any unexpected balance due next year may be more important.
"There's no law in California that says you have to have a cash register. Logging cash sales manually, as you are doing, is fine. A cash register would help you track your cash sales as you describe. Some POS software will also allow you to log cash transactions, but it sounds like you just use a credit card processing web site or application, not a full-fledged POS system. In any case, for a small business, one option might be to get a cash register to log your cash sales, and continue to process credit cards the way you are (or continue as you are doing). Come tax season, use the output from both systems to calculate your income. You might want to consider an accounting software like Quickbooks so you can reconcile your income and expenses and statements from different sources. Also, as with any small business, it's worth your while to consult a tax accountant to make sure you're doing everything ""by the books"". Once you're set up properly, keeping the books in order becomes routine and easy."
Unless a study accounts for whether the users are following a budget or not, it is irrelevant to those who are trying to take their personal finances seriously. I can certainly believe that those who have no budget will spend more on a credit card than they will on a debit card or with cash. Under the right circumstances spending with cards can actually be a tool to track and reduce spending. If you can see on a monthly and yearly basis where all of your money was spent, you have the information to make decisions about the small expenses that add up as well as the obvious large expenses.  Debit cards and credit cards offer the same advantage of giving you an electronic record of all of your transactions, but debit cards do not come with the same fraud protection that credit cards have, so I (and many people like me) prefer to use credit cards for security reasons alone. Cash back and other rewards points bolster the case for credit cards over debit cards. It is very possible to track all of your spending with cash, but it is also more work. The frustration of accounting for bad transcriptions and rechecking every transaction multiple times is worth discussing too (as a reason that people get discouraged and give up on budgeting). My point is simply that credit cards and the electronic records that they generate can greatly simplify the process of tracking your spending. I doubt any study out there accounts for the people who are specifically using those benefits and what effect it has on their spending.