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Welcome
to the November edition of The Rodman Report. Without further
ado, lets get to it!
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Home
Office Deduction - Do I
Qualify? |
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 Your
home may be a great place to get a significant tax
deduction. If you qualify, you may deduct a portion of your
homeowners insurance, home repairs, and
utilities equal to the percentage of space
the office occupies. Homeowners may deduct depreciation for the
portion of the home used for business, while
renters deduct a portion of their rent. These deductions
cannot exceed the income from the business, but excess
deductions may be carried forward.
Qualifying for
this deduction, however, is not easy. To qualify to
claim expenses for business use of your home, you must
use part of your home:
- Exclusively
and regularly as your
principal place of business,
or
- Exclusively
and regularly as a place where you meet or deal with
patients, clients, or customers
in the
normal course of your trade or
business.
Please
note that any
personal use of the business area of the
house will make you ineligible for the
deduction.
If you are an employee and use a part of
your home for business, you must meet the tests
discussed above plus:
- Your
business use must be for the convenience of your
employer, and
- You
cannot rent any part of your home to your employer and
use that rented portion to perform services as an
employee for that employer.
For
example, if you recently had a child and are now
telecommuting as your means of employment, that would
not qualify you to deduct your home office expenses
because the use of a home office is for your convenience,
not your employer's.
Please call us if you think
you may qualify for this deduction, or if you are
currently deducting a home office but have questions.
Below is a link to the IRS publication which discusses
the home office deduction in great detail.
For the IRS
Publication on the home-office
deduction...
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Rodman
Seminar: Awesome Customer Service -
11/9 |
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The
Rodman Fall Seminar series continues on Thursday, November
9th. The topic for the seminar is Towards Awesome Customer
Service. The presentation will be led by
Larry Rice, Director
of Strategic Consulting at Rodman &
Rodman. Wowing customers is the way to a profitable
business by making your customers more loyal and much
more likely to tell everyone they know about you. Larry
will show you how to do it with easy-to-implement
strategies. This event should not be missed!
The seminar runs from 7:30 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. and
includes networking and a continental breakfast.
The event is no cost. Please
feel free to bring a friend or colleague. Space is extremely
limited. To reserve a spot, please call
Jen
Reading of Rodman &
Rodman at 617.965.5959. Click here
to email Jen directly.
For further
information...
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3
Tips To Avoid Employee
Fraud |
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 Small
business often spends a lot of time and money investing
in technology to prevent their customers from stealing
their goods. What gets overlooked far too often is a
much more potentially damaging crime - employee fraud.
Employee fraud costs
small businesses billions each year. Because
it is an "inside job", the fraud often costs the
business astronomically more than any theft a customer
can perpetrate. It is not uncommon for a single incident
of employee fraud to cost over $100,000. Most
of these crimes are created by accounting personnel who
steal the money through the manipulation of the books of
the company.
The causes are typically:
- Owners
or management who are unfamiliar with or
uninterested in the accounting area of
their business,
- Trust
for the handling of cash and the accounting for cash
is in the same
person, and
- The
person in the position is one considered "trusted and
therefore is unsupervised."
Statistics
show that the average length of service of an employee
committing fraud is 10-15 years. We're
not suggesting you never trust your employees again.
What we are suggesting is that you implement a few
simple procedures, that will help prevent many of these
crimes from occurring. Most employee theft is not
planned, but a crime of opportunity. They did it because
it was easy to do. The following 3 tips make it not so
easy, and thus the incentive to commit fraud is taken
away:
- Open
your mail - Do not
allow anyone access to it before you have opened it.
Signs of fraud often occur through the mail via vendor
collection letters, customer questions regarding their
accounts, etc. Follow up on any mail that seems
unusual in nature.
- Open
and review your bank statement and checks
- We
often suggest that the bank mail the monthly statement
directly to the owner's home. You should review that
statement and ask questions. Even if you don't find
anything suspicious, the fact you are asking about
bank transactions goes a long way toward preventing
fraud behavior.
- Make
it easy for your employees to notify you via anonymous
tip - The
most common way a fraud is uncovered is by an
anonymous employee tip. Communicate with your
employees and make it very easy for them to tell you
about suspicious behavior without having to be
responsible directly for the
information.
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Check
out our new
website! |
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Our
website has been remodeled and is now open for business!
We're still putting in some finishing touches (please
check back for new
photos of our team), but the entire site has
been redesigned and streamlined with our clients in
mind. You'll find information about the full breadth of
the services we offer, an extensive online tax
guide, directions to our office, past issues of our Successes
& Strategies newsletter, updated profiles of our
growing team of professionals and much more.
As always, we appreciate our clients' feedback. Please
drop us a line or give us a call with any suggestions or ideas you
have that will make our website a greater
resource for you.
Click here to
go to the Rodman & Rodman home
page...
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