Tax Deductions (Business Tax Deduction Tips)

Real estate depreciation offers substantial opportunity for increasing tax deductions. Most depreciation schedules are established by simply separating land and long-life improvements. This simple approach is lawful but sharply understates lawful depreciation. About 20-40% of improvements for most properties are short-life items. Short life items can be depreciated over 5, 7, or 15 years. There are about 130 short-life items that have been determined by legislation, tax court decisions and IRS rulings.

Real estate depreciation can typically be increased by 50-100% for the first 5-7 years of ownership by obtaining a cost segregation study. A cost segregation study precisely values up to 130 components of real estate that can be valued as short-life property.

By obtaining a cost segregation study, it is possible to obtain a windfall of tax deductions by “catching-up” previously under-reported depreciation. This one-time “catch-up” can occur in the first tax return filed after the cost segregation study is performed without filing any amended tax returns.

Reviewing fixed asset listings (of business personal property) can generate a meaningful amount of tax deductions. They often include items that should have been expensed, which have been sold or thrown away or which have an excessive depreciation life. Items that should have been expensed include operating expenses (sometimes included by error) and maintenance or repairs (which was necessary but did not increase the life of the assets or component.) Section 179 allows business to use up to $108,000 of 2006 capital expenditures as tax deductions. Confirm you are not capitalizing assets that could be claimed as a tax deduction.

Casualty losses also offer opportunity for tax deductions. For a casualty loss, you can deduct: 1) the market value immediately before the casualty less 2) the market value immediately after the casualty less the amount covered by insurance. The portion that is not intuitive is: the market value after the casualty is much less than the value before plus the cost to renovate. Other factors which can and should be considered for tax deductions are: lost rent/usage, stigma (in some cases), construction management, construction risks, and entrepreneurial effort.

Bad debts are a subjective matter. Judgment is required to accurately estimate the amount that should be claimed as a tax deduction. If bad debts have not been examined carefully for several years, they may offer a meaningful tax deduction opportunity. (This applies to companies who utilize accrual accounting. Companies who use cash accounting can’t claim a tax deduction for bad debt since they never recognized the revenue.)

Do well by doing good. You reduce taxes in several ways when making charitable contributions. For example, you purchased land 10 years ago for $200,000, and it is now worth $1,000,000. However, you now realize you will never use the land for the intended purpose. You can donate the land to a qualified charitable organization and take a tax deduction for $1,000,000. However, you do not have to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciation.

Tax deductions sometimes seem arcane and complicated. However, a knowledgeable team of advisors from several fields can reduce your federal income taxes. The complexity of the tax code makes it difficult for any one personal to be knowledgeable in all areas.

Cost segregation produces tax deductions and reduces federal income taxes across the country and in every size market. Below are just a few examples of cities where cost segregation generates meaningful tax deductions.

City:

  • New York, NY
  • Houston, TX
  • Hartford, CT
  • Las Vegas, NV
  • Memphis, TN
  • Philadelphia, PA
  • Orlando, FL
  • Phoenix, AZ
  • Atlanta, GA
  • Bridgeport, CT
  • Worcester, MA
  • Akron, OH
  • Harrisburg, PA
  • Salt Lake City, UT
  • St. Louis, MO
  • Portland, OR
  • Scranton, PA
  • Greenville, SC
  • Bakersfield, CA
  • Madison, WI
  • Chicago, IL
  • Fresno, CA
  • Riverside, CA
  • Albany, NY
  • Indianapolis, IN
  • Birmingham, AL
  • Ft. Lauderdale, FL
  • Baton Rouge, LA
  • Augusta, GA
  • Honolulu, HI

Cost segregation produces tax deductions for virtually all property types, including the following:

Property Type:

  • Medical facility
  • Shopping mall
  • Restaurant
  • Country club
  • Fast food restaurant
  • Power center
  • Hotel
  • Car wash facility
  • Convenience store
  • Health spa

Almost every industry, including the following, can generate cost-efficient tax deductions by using cost segregation.

Industry:

  • Golf courses and country clubs
  • Transportation equipment manufacturing
  • Electrical component manufacturing
  • Real estate lesser
  • Apparel manufacturing
  • Wood product manufacturing
  • Plastic and rubber products manufacturing
  • Furniture stores
  • Beverage and tobacco product manufacturing
  • Building supply dealers

Tax reduction services include federal income taxes, state income taxes and property taxes. We do not prepare income tax returns. Instead, our advisors review your circumstances and suggest cost effective options to lawfully reduce your income tax liability. 5. O’Connor & Associates is a national provider of commercial real estate consulting services including cost segregation studies, tax reduction, feasibility studies, tax return review, apartment inspections . O’connor associates services includes business valuation tax deduction, due diligence, income tax, tax reduction, property tax, feasibility studies, real estate consulting, market research, Denton Central Appraisal District, Tips and Tricks for Appealing Your Property Taxes in Collin, Collin county appraisal, Federal tax reduction

How to Better Engage Hiring Managers in Your Recruiting Process

One of the most common challenges I hear from the HR professionals I talk with is how to better engage their hiring managers in the recruiting process. The hiring manager is one of the most important stakeholders in the recruiting process, but they are often the hardest to effectively engage in the process. It really isn’t that surprising, since most hiring managers are primarily focused on the operations of their unit and often don’t have a great deal of time to devote to recruiting.Here are some tips on how to better engage your hiring managers in the recruiting process.Collaborate with Managers up-front to determine good initial screening questions and criteriaEspecially in today’s economy the chances are good that you will receive a flood of applicants to any job you post online. In many processes the recruiter screens the initial applicants and only passes the top candidates on to the manager for feedback. In order to find the best candidates and make sure top candidates don’t slip through the cracks, you should set up some good screening questions and criteria for the recruiter to use.Some questions can be pulled directly from the job posting you created, which you carefully composed such that it attracted the right type of candidate. For example:
Do you have a Bachelors degree?
How many years experience do you have in direct sales?
Are you willing to travel up to 50%?
Other questions may require deeper analysis and a discussion with the manager about what makes an ideal candidate or who has succeeded in this role in the past. For example:

What do you like most about being a salesperson?
Please describe your home office equipment and environment (i.e. for a telecommute position)
Describe a recent time when you had to respond to a customer issue and what steps you took to solve the problem.
These questions can be asked during an initial phone screen or interview. But many Applicant Tracking Systems are able to streamline the process by asking applicants to answer these questions during their online application. For example, with a well designed system the recruiter is able to create any number of screening questions to pre-screen job applicants, and even score the responses automatically and “knock-out” applicants who are unqualified.Make it easy for Managers to review candidates A few years ago I was the manager at a company that used an Applicant Tracking System to streamline their recruiting process. Everything worked great – recruiters posted jobs online, applicants applied and were pre-screened and scored, and everything was stored in a central database which both the recruiter and manager could access.The problem was when it came time for me to go in and review applicants to my job, it was so cumbersome that the process would grind to a halt. Each person I had to review took 5-10 clicks to get to their information, the system was sluggish and unresponsive, and it was difficult to submit and view feedback on the candidate. I remember wishing for the “good old days” when I would just get a paper resume on my desk!Managers are busy just like the rest of us and if you don’t make the review process simple and quick they won’t use it, or it will delay your time to hire. Here are some questions to ask to make sure your review process is easy for managers to use:

How many people will the manager need to review? Will they be receiving every single applicant to your job or only the top candidates that the recruiter sends them?
If managers will only be reviewing top candidates, how easy is it for the manager to find and view their information? How many clicks does it take before they are viewing the candidate’s resume. How many clicks to move to the next resume to review?
How easy is it for the candidate to submit feedback on a candidate, and view the feedback of others?
Does the process require the manager to login to your recruiting system to view candidates, or are you able to send them resumes through email to collect reviews? Many managers don’t want to memorize another login to another system and would greatly prefer to receive candidates via email.
Collect better feedback through forms and questionnaires Many applicant review processes consist of the recruiter emailing a resume to a manager with the single question “What do you think?” While there’s nothing wrong with this simple approach, there are advantages to collecting more structured feedback from managers through a questionnaire or form.When you ask somebody what they think of a particular movie, you’ll likely get back a black-or-white answer like “it was great!” or “it was awful”. But if you ask them to rate a movie on a scale of 1-5 on some key criteria (story, acting, music, costumes, etc) you’ll get a much richer review and separation between other movies they may have reviewed.The same applies to reviewing candidates. When you ask a manager to answer structured questions and provide numeric rating on a candidate, you’ll force them to think broadly about the candidate and not just provide their first-impression. Ideally if you are going to use manager review forms and questionnaires in your process, you will want to streamline the collection of the data with online questionnaires, ideally in an Applicant Tracking System. And once again, it needs to be easy for the manager to complete the questionnaire or they won’t use it.In an applicant tracking system, you can create Manager Feedback Questionnaires and have them asked directly on the page where the manager views the candidate’s resume and other information.Support different levels of involvement from your managers Finally, every manager will have his or her own style and will likely want a different level of involvement in the recruiting process. Some managers are very “hands-off” and just want the recruiter to find a good candidate for their department with the least amount of work on their part. Others are very “hands-on” and want to see every single candidate that comes in and decide themselves which ones meet the initial qualifications.As such, you should keep in mind that whatever process you put in place should be flexible enough to accommodate the requests of different hiring managers. For a manager who wants to delegate to the recruiting group, you should be able to send them only top-candidates, already pre-screened, for them to interview. For a manager who wants to be more involved, you should be able to set it up so that person can see all applicants and see everything that’s happening in the system.If you are implementing an Applicant Tracking System, make sure it has flexible workflow support to allow you to implement these types of different processes efficiently.

Pharmaceutical Education and Employment Opportunities Are on the Ascent

What are the usual professional responsibilities of pharmacists? Well, they dispense medicine prescribed by the physicians, in the first place. Also they are responsible to give the customers knowledgeable advice regarding the possible side effects and dosage of the medications to be administered. In case the patient should be made aware of the necessity to take certain precautions to be observed during the course of medications, a pharmacist is responsible for informing the patience about such precautions, if any are needed. Such are the most common responsibilities of pharmacists, as they are widely assumed by the general public. Still, as any licensed pharmacist can tell you, the responsibilities are not limited to those mentioned above. First of all, any licensed pharmacist is required to have a degree in pharmacology. Secondly, such specialist should be aware of the various medicines, their generic name, dosage and possible side effects. Besides the good professional understanding of the regulating legislature related to manufacture and sale of various medicines any good professional pharmacist must command sound understanding and knowledge of the composition of medicines. And that is not all, such issues as the right storage conditions for the medicines are of critical importance, since the efficiency of prescription medications during the period of their shelf life largely depends on the correctness of their storage conditions!As you see, any licensed pharmacist has a long road of learning to go before been accepted as a fully-fledged and respected member of the pharmacists community! But the natural questions are “How good are the employment opportunities in the pharmaceutical industry today? But what do the forecasts for the near future hold in stock for pharmacists? Is it really worthwhile to invest time and hard-earned money into becoming a professional pharmacist?” All these question are quite justified, since nobody would like to send time and money down the drain, investing them into professional specialization that turns out to be without future.Let us have a closer look at the present-day employment opportunities of freshly graduated pharmacists and the expectations for the near future.As has been confirmed by the various reports of analytical agencies specializing in the job-market related issues, the pharmacist’s specialization enjoys quite enviable demand. Traditionally, the most of the pharmacists still find employment with community pharmacies and drug stores, as they used to do over the decades. Well, that is no surprise, people got used to seen a pharmacists behind the counter of a drug-store or a pharmacy, handing out the prescription medicines as well as those that do not require prescription (they are justly referred to by the term of “over-the-counter” medicines). On the other hand, during the last decade the professional pharmacists have been in huge demand in public service and pharmaceutical industry. Hospitals, railways, large shopping centers and airports – they all look for good professionals in the field to fill in vacancies in their specialized their drug stores. Another interesting job opportunity for pharmacists could be found with medical drug information libraries and consulting, since the medical and nursing staffs are in need of information about new drugs – the industry of medications is constantly advancing, coming up each month and year with new generations of medications. Many specialists in pharmacology who graduated as pharmacists have developed successful and self-fulfilling careers, finding employment as tutors in colleges and universities. Others prefer to write or edit books of pharmacology, as well as reference guides – as you see, the employment and career opportunities in the pharmacology industry are in plenty!What about the forecasts and expectations for the near future? The demand for professionals in the pharmacology in general and for the pharmacists in particular is expected only to grow considerably during the period through 2016 and beyond. The reasons for such forecasts are well-grounded. The population will continue growing in numbers – and the numbers of hospitals and other health care establishments are destined to grow accordingly, to accommodate the increasing demand. That means that more and more pharmacists will be required to fill in new outlets and positions – in traditional drug-stores, in hospitals and related job settings. Secondly, the number of senior citizens is also expected to grow considerably. Senior citizens of all the aged population groups are known to be the main consumers of prescription and “over-the-counter” drugs. As the result, the demand for specialists able to handle the growing demand on the part of the patients is guaranteed to increase over the practically foreseeable future period.What are the usual education and certification requirements for those whishing to take up a career as pharmacists?The educational and certification demands for pharmacists are very definite and strict. All persons, whishing to build a career of pharmacists are required to have a degree from a college (associate’s, bachelor’s or master’s one), upon which they need to get licensed by the pertinent agency in order to start a professional career of a licensed pharmacist. Besides, the educational establishment they have gradated from should be accredited by the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education and Examinations. Such are the basic mandatory requirements for a professional licensed pharmacist, wishing to start up a successful career in the industry.Besides the specific subjects, related to pharmacist’s specialization, any accredited pharmacy degree program should usually include courses in mathematics, natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences.As you see, the academic requirements for the pharmacology students are noticeably high. In order to insure the adequate level of academic excellence among their student the majority of the pharmacy colleges have introduced admission tests for aspiring students.The students, whishing to continue education – as well as those who have already some experience in the professional field and are after the better career opportunities – are offered continuing education options, such as bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as well as doctorates in various specialized areas of pharmaceutical industries.One of the good options for busy working professionals to continue education and get a higher academic degree in pharmacology would be to make use of modern means of distance education – the online pharmacy degree training schools and programs. Those online establishments – surely, we are speaking about the reputable and properly accredited courses, nothing like some shady “diploma mill” sites – have proved to be a good competition to the traditional, campus-based ones.Another consideration to be given a serious attention and thought – as far as career advancement in pharmacology and pharmacy industry is concerned – is that your success would largely depend on the type of work you will be able to get and your business talents/skills/experience. As an illustration to this statement you could easily find online the career stories of success: for instance, people who worked for drugstore chains became top-managers. Pharmacists employed at various hospitals – general or specialized – got to be directors of pharmacy services. The government agencies and educational institutions also offer interesting and promising openings. Pharmacy degree specialist could also build excellent careers by taking up teaching or research, that all depends on your personal talents, individual inclinations, career objectives etc. Anyway, besides the required level of academic excellence, necessary for each specific position, any newly graduated pharmacist should realize that their jobs always require them to communicate and interact with people of different types. From this point of view good person-to-person communication skills would always be a great advantage, so take care to acquire them by all means!