Business & Finance

Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category

The moment you get your W-2 form in your mail, you need to decide how to do your taxes. If you wish to receive your IRS refund fast, then nothing is better than online tax filing. What you need to do during the tax season is to determine how to prepare your return file and how to submit it to the IRS so that you will have your refunds faster.

There are couples of reasons because of which most people are doing online federal tax. Even the IRS recommends doing taxes online using free software. If you are regularly in habit of doing it online, then you will have a record of it. So, you can easily track online your each year’s tax record if you have some questions about your previous year’s return. All your information will be ready at just a click away that saves your time for digging up several documents.

Filing taxes is not an easy thing that anybody can do conveniently, but using software can really make it easy for you. You do not have to get confused as to which sorts of forms you will need to fill up, the software will guide you to choosing forms. The software will do all sorts of calculations and math required for you. Moreover, you can also locate your W-2 electronically. Many software programs have error check feature that can minimize your chances of making errors and inviting unnecessary audits. It is very crucial to submit the IRS your error-free online income tax return because you may get penalized if your file is found to be fraudulent.

Preparing online income tax return is fast and easy which can be completed within an hour compared to paperwork. By going through the step-by-step procedure in the software and submitting the exact information, your tax return will be ready within an hour. The software will also help you decide tax deductions and credits to minimize your taxable income.

The first step in the process of creating the marketing plan was to identify the goals of the research. Goal identification took up ten percent of the overall project time i.e. two weeks. This was done in two steps i.e. clarifying the overall ones and the specific ones. In order to do this, it was necessary to examine the mandate of the project. Besides this, it was necessary to examine the mission statement of the organization because it gave a clear indication of the limits which the project could accomplish. (Herron, 2003) After an examination of the mission statement, it was then essential to look at some of the key issues that needed to be changed in order to improve the current situation within the organization. This was done by looking at the epidemiological repercussions of the current scenario.
In other words, the overall goals were determined by examining some of the problems or negatives that arose out of a lack of the project’s advantages. The goals also had to be made in accordance with the marketing approaches that would later be used to achieve those goals. For instance, business policies within the organization were one example. Secondly, advocacy would also form an important of this plan and so would mobilization. All these items were taken into consideration while identifying goals of the project. The most central part of the goal creation process was identification of the target audiences. These were divided into two categories i.e. the internal audience and external audience. It was crucial to collaborate with the internal audience in order to ask them whether they could carry out the goal of the project. It was also necessary to ask this internal audience what they thought about the situation at present within the organization and also what they thought needed to get done. By collaborating with the internal tem, it was possible to create goals that were indeed relevant to the major players within the organization. Examples of members of the internal audience included employees, other project members, board members and major decision makers within the organization. (Capko, 2004) External audience members were also consulted in the process of goal creation.
This entailed asking them about their take on the issue and whether they would actually perform the proposal’s suggestions. Care was taken to be specific about the major requirements. The goal setting process was done within a specified timeline. Since this would govern the overall direction which the marketing plan could take, then it took up ten percent of the entire project making time. It was also the first process involved in creating the marketing plan. The second process was conducting an audience analysis for the marketing plan. The timeline for this process was a period of three weeks. Audience analysis was important in clarifying those individuals who had already accessed the proposals in the marketing plan and those who had not. Market research formed a crucial part of this phase of the marketing plan. First of all, the available materials on the subject matter were sought. Additionally, it was important to look at similar projects conducted by other organizations. Here, some in-house databases were consulted. The data bases specified issues such postal codes, consumer habits among others. Demographic data was also essential in understanding the type of audiences for the plan. Interviews and focus group information conducted by other researchers were useful resources here. In the second step, it was crucial to inform the media because they would be some of the major outlets for the marketing plan.

Businesses that do not have account receivables can use a technique that is similar to factoring to acquire quick cash advances to help their cash flow needs also. What I mean is that a merchant with a monthly amount of credit card transactions can use the number of monthly credit card transactions in place of the monthly account receivables to get quick cash advance loans.

Factoring is a cash flow technique where factoring companies purchase a percentage of a business’s account receivable at a discount in exchange for quick cash advance loans. The factoring company collects the account receivable from the buyer to satisfy the quick cash advance loan. Hence the loan usually is not paid back by the business. The amount collected from the account receivable is kept by the factoring company as payment for the loan.

In like manner, some merchant account companies will provide quick cash advance loans to merchants whose monthly credit card transactions total in the thousands of dollars. When the merchant account provider company receives credit card purchase funds from the buyers, the loan equivalent funds collected is used to satisfy the quick cash advance loan. Hence the loan usually is not paid back by the business. The quick cash advance loan equivalent amount collected from credit card transactions is kept by the merchant services provider company as payment for the quick cash advance loan. The excess credit card collections– amount greater than the quick cash advance loan amount– is processed normally.

I needed to make some big changes in order to fix my cash flow situation and feel more financially secure. I started by changing the terms of my payment policy. A good friend of mine at the time was working for a company called Alliance Payment Technologies. She opened my eyes to something called an Automatic Clearing House. After doing a little research, I realized that this was exactly the solution I was looking for in order to minimize my accounts receivables, without having to go down the dreaded road of accepting credit cards. So what, you ask, is an Automatic Clearing House? In plain English, according to Google, an Automatic Clearing House is a secure, private electronic payment transfer systems that connects all US financial institutions.

Using an Automatic Clearing House helped me to make the changes I needed to stop having large Accounts Receivable balances. So how did they do this exactly? Companies like NetDeposit who specializes in Accounts Receivable Truncation, Direct Deposit, Electronic Check Conversion, Web Check and my favorite Recurring Billing. The Recurring Billing enabled me to have my flat fee monthly recurring projects taken out of my client’s bank account automatically on a monthly basis – no invoicing and no waiting. I also changed how we handled our onsite bookkeeping clients by setting a weekly minimum based on an estimated number of hours worked that would be taken out of the client’s bank account on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. On top of all of this, I also changed my billing to be monthly in order to reflect adjustment bills from if we had gone over/under the minimums in the month for onsite clients set up as recurring. Even though I had changed my billing to be done on a monthly basis instead of biweekly, with this new automatic payment system in place, my receivables would be minimal.

This turned out to be exactly the solution that I had been looking for to solve all my collection and cash flow problems. It made a dramatic impact on my cash flow situation and minimized my collections almost completely. It enabled me to be able to budget and manage my cash flow issues on a more regular basis. So if you have ever found yourself in the position of feeling strapped for cash while you’re waiting on your clients to finally get around to paying you for the services you have rendered, this may be exactly what you’re looking for. In this tough economy especially, you may want to consider minimizing your accounts receivables by using an Automatic Clearing House to collect your fees for you.

Mortgage rates shot up this week with the 30 year rate moving from 4.81 to 4.94. Rates also moved up substantially last week. So now in the last two weeks rates have moved from 4.71 to 4.94. This is highest the 30 year rate has been since November 5th. Although the other mortgage products have moved up in the last two weeks they have not risen as dramatically as the 30 year rate.

For the last few months the 30 year rate has always been the obvious choice. Since 30 year rates have risen .23 points in the last two weeks while 15 year rates have only risen .11 points and the 1 year arm has only risen .10 points, now it’s becoming less obvious. I would still think 30 year rates is still probably the default choice for most homeowners there are probably rare circumstances where it might make more sense to look at a 15 year fixed mortgage or to look at a 5 or 1 year arm. If one is sure that they are going to move in a few years it might then make sense to look at other options. If one is not sure what they are going to do then with rates still historically low its probably better to lock in long term with the 30 year rate.

In addition to straight mortgage rates it’s always good to look at actual mortgage payments. We took today’s rates and used a mortgage calculator to translate them into a payment on a 200,000 loan. We also did the same thing with rates from December 3rd and June 18th.

So what are rates going to do moving forward? Although rates are expected to rise long term after rising so quickly in the last two weeks its likely we could see a bit of a pull back in rates. Long term though we should expect to see rates substantially higher in the next year or two.