Sometimes the best advice is not necessarily the newest.

At least that’s what you might think about tax tips when you see the 2005 date on a Microsoft Corporation copyright. The notice comes at the bottom of a worthwhile StartupNation.com piece by tax professional Joseph Anthony. His tips for small businesses and solo practitioners are Google’s gift and well worth reviewing, especially at tax time, which your LiveChime blog has already warned you is officially here. In this case, the suggestions are straightforward and sometimes even witty, coming in a blog item titled “Smart Business Tax Advice: 5 Common Mistakes.”

Anthony sounds like he’s seen some doozies. And you will not have to look far to find someone who has fallen into these traps. One favorite is right up front: “Not saving receipts of less than $75.” Anthony explains, “People sometimes get excited when they hear that the IRS doesn’t require receipts for meal and entertainment expenses of less than $74. Don’t fall into this trap.”

The tax tips expert goes on, writing: “You may not need the receipt, but you still need to have some sort of record documenting where you went, when you went there, who you were with, the business purpose of the meal or entertainment and the business relationship between you and the people you were with.”

Sound advice for small businesses and solo practitioners, but there’s more. Anthony also takes aim at those among us who: lump equipment costs with supplies (“capital expenditures have to be depreciated,” he reminds us), fail to track reimbursable expenses, get confused about auto-related costs and make gift mistakes.

“It seems like every year I see at least one small business saying that it had a couple thousand dollars in deductible business gifts in the previous year,” Anthony reports. He says the problem there is that the Internal Revenue Service “allows us to deduct only up to $25 worth of gifts to any individual.”

IRS itself is in on the act

Speaking of the IRS, the agency also gets into the act when it comes to offering tax tips to small businesses and solo proprietors this time of year. At IRS.gov, there’s a page devoted to the Small Business and Self-Employed Tax Center. That’s where you’ll find a range of tools for tax preparation. Among the links here: multiple forms for small businesses, employer ID numbers, tips on opening or closing a business, employment tax information and an IRS video portal. There’s even a link to  a “Small Business Events” spot, where the agency tells visitors about workshop and phone forums targeting small businesses.

Nothing is more important during these weeks, though, than what the IRS calls “Filing Season Central.” Once there, you can find the tax people’s tax tips. There are links to data about everything from “Six Facts the IRS Wants You to Know about the Alternative Minimum Tax” to information about rental income. You can follow links to more links and even more links, learning about bartering and a whole host of tax-related issues.

After paying . . . debating the future

Once you’re done with your taxes, you can take time out to read at Huffington Post about exactly what small businesses and solo entrepreneurs are facing, en masse, when it comes to taxes. Kristie Arslan, the executive director of the National Association for the Self-Employed, insists in her post this week that health insurance remains “a luxury item for many small business owners, purchased when times are good and forsaken when times are lean.”

Arslan knows small businesses won a little something with last fall’s Small Business Act, which provided a “temporary retrieve.” Self-employed businesses owners were able to deduct the cost of their health care coverage, which Arslan says “will put about 15 percent of their premium back in their pocket. For the average self-employed business owner, the temporary deduction amounts to about $2,000.”

The catch: that deduction is allowed only for one year. Arslan is thinking long term. “Self-employed business owners need Congress to make the deduction permanent, she says, “and make the tax benefit of purchasing coverage fair to all business entities.”
It’s never too early to start the struggle over establishing next year’s deductions.