TIM – Week 4 – The Social Market LLC

The sun is out! I have Capri jeans and flip flops on… and, where is everyone? Literally! A few are out enjoying the sun… or working on their businesses.

And, where is everyone?

Tonight, we opened the session each sharing where we are in the process of building our businesses, what we are making progress in, what we are we second-guessing, what we are we moving forward with, what we are overwhelmed with, ect. The community developing here is getting really neat!

Lara shared, “I need to think outside the box with everything I need to do and grow 5-10 years from now” and Melinda said she was really concentrating on market research.

SESSION 1

Tanner introduced the evenings first guest, Karen Russell of CFO Certified Public Accountants. Here are a couple of the things she said that resonated with me:

“I’ve learned a lot. But, I don’t know everything.”
“With taxes & the government, ignorance is no excuse.”

We talked about federal taxes, state taxes, bank accounts, record keeping systems, tax plans and sales tax. She also discussed these pieces of information that I thought were great for a soloperneur starting up a business:

Federal taxes – You can pay monthly or save throughout the year. However, it is suggested to pay quarterly (3-mo).
Pay roll – (take your own money = distribution)
More than $6,000 – file taxes
7.65% (taken out of an employee check) = 15.3% of income (self-employment taxes) for Medicaid/Medicare
Own business – Income Tax — S Corp (tax election =

“So, that’s what you didn’t know!”
Karen Russell

BREAK!

WOW! Break was spicy tonight!! We missed you Andrea, but the chicken tostadas were AWESOME! Minnie Events & Catering, LLC

SESSION 2

Next, we Tim Counts presented “Understand Your Financials”… a bit overwhelming, if you ask me. Although, he did a wonderful job engaging us in group participation. My flair for design was VERY evident during this section of the program.

Numbers, numbers, numbers… not my thing. However, I need to learn and tonight was a great night to do so. Here are a few of the topics we discussed:

Assets
Owners Equity
The difference between a CPA & an Accountant
Process of compilation, review (ask for backup) and audit
A ‘trial balance’
Cash vs cash flow
Income statement
Trial balance = foundation of a financial statement
Proof & prove
Balance sheet vs income (owners equity)
Cash basis result = important (projections – “if I don’t have the cash, it won’t get done.”)
Assessment & evaluation

I think one of the more helpful (maybe I should say, understandable) discussions we had was about “co-mingling” personal and business bank accounts. If you work from home, he made these suggestions:

One common shared expense for business and personal is a car. Record mileage to include the car in business expenses.
The home. Take the square footage of use and multiply it with the safe harbor weight = $$ (includes rent/electricity). Or, another option is to deduct 10% of your home’s mortgage, electricity, internet, etc. (I’m not sure I have “safe harbor weight” correctly… do you have a link to learn more? If so, please share. THIS is all I could find.)

CLOSING

In closing, Tanner Collins suggested using a graph bar to show anticipated profits during our pitch deck presentations… to start, homework is creating our 3-year income projections.