It’s amazing what can change in a year’s time! Significant changes to income tax code for individuals were made within the past year, even before the COVID-19 outbreak. Here is a reminder of those important changes and how they might affect you:

You have invested years of blood, sweat, and tears building your business. You and your family made many sacrifices to ensure your company was a success. Likely you haven’t developed an exit plan for your business. Then the pandemic happens, and sales drop to a level that appears below the point of no return. You may be thinking, “I have to close permanently and walk away”.

Before you shutter your business and walk away, seek professional advice. It breaks my heart to see businesses that don’t take a moment to at least research the possibility of selling. Just walking away invalidates all those long days and hard work.

Personal and professional development should be ongoing and congruous processes in our lives. Personal development spans all areas of life and is as beneficial to a college student as to a consultant neurosurgeon. Learning new skills, earning new qualifications, and even deepening our spiritual sides can provide us with fulfillment of our talents and potentialities. Ongoing development can help us discover our life’s purpose.

Starting a new business is one of life's most exciting adventures. However, in order to build a successful company, you need to start turning a profit as soon as possible. At the beginning of any business, expenses are unavoidable, but you can increase your profits by minimizing these expenses as much as possible. If your business operations were halted due to the coronavirus pandemic, and you are reopening with limitations that are still in place for small businesses. Limitations may include occupancy restrictions, reduced schedules, and strict health guidelines. It is essential to be efficient with budgets through the economic recovery.

The holiday season is upon us.  Department stores have taken down Halloween and have almost completely skipped over Thanksgiving to begin displaying Christmas decorations.  If you haven’t already started thinking about your holiday gift-giving, you could find yourself scrambling at the last minute – and that’s never good.  Before you know it, you’re rushing “willy-nilly” through the aisles of the department store and grabbing up anything you can find without considering the cost.  So, here are some tips for surviving the holidays without breaking the bank.

You might not be able to hire a full-time cybersecurity specialist or install top-of-the-line software, but protecting your business’s data doesn’t necessarily need to be complicated or expensive.

There were nearly 42,000 online security incidents around the world over the past year. And about 43 percent of those targeted small businesses. That means that small businesses are more likely than any other entity to fall victim to data breaches and cyber-attacks.

If you ever wanted proof that quality company leadership is critical to an organization's success, look no further than the old saying of "people don't quit their jobs. They quit their leaders." To that end, being an efficient CEO involves a lot more than just "having a vision" or "barking orders." It's not about commanding anyone to follow your lead - it's about showing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that your lead is worth following in the first place. People won't work hard, put in long hours and dedicate themselves to your dream because you told them to - they have to want it for themselves, too.

Cloud accounting is a big idea that brings with it a lot of lofty implications, but if you had to distill all of that down to its bare essentials it would probably look at lot like this:

There are a lot of perfectly reasonable reasons for not having filed your income taxes. Many people who fail to file are new to the job market, and never having filed before may simply have been unaware of the requirement to do so. Some people know but are too overwhelmed with other life events, including illnesses, death, or job loss. Whatever your reason and whether you’ve only missed one year of filing or several, there comes a point when you either remember on your own or are prompted for a request for a copy. Now, what do you do? And how much trouble are you in?