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The most obvious steps in tax preparer duties are usually the most important. For example, gathering the income reporting records of a taxpayer is a critical procedure. Experienced tax practitioners learn to ask taxpayers about all their income-producing activities for the year. An important objective of the registered tax return preparer program is establishing consistency in applying tax rules to various income sources....

Lenders often demand far more security than they need when a business borrower seeks a loan. While this may be a prudent and cautious lending strategy for banks, it can prove disastrous for a business borrower or guarantor who pledges personal collateral for the loan.

For example, a lender may ask for a deed of trust or mortgage on the business borrower's personal home in addition to a security interest in the business inventory, receivables or other intangibles of the borrower's business. It may also demand a guarantee by a corporate officer and insist on a deed of trust of the guarantor's house to secure the guarantee. In such situations, both the borrower and guarantor are at risk of losing their homes if the loan defaults....

The last decade has seen some interesting developments in our shopping habits as more and more of us are shopping online. In recent years we've seen many high street chains closing branches and in some cases, Woolworths for example, closing down altogether. This has been blamed on the recession as many people are simply not spending as much as they once were, however this is not strictly the case, as online shopping has steadily grown in spite of the recession. Many retailers offer lower prices for online shoppers than they can offer in their high street stores, and retailers who operate online online can often undercut many of the larger retailers significantly.

It is important that you choose accounting software that is both suitable for your business, and is easy for your employees or yourself to use. Manual accounting can be very time-consuming, and is also prone to human error. No matter how experienced a traditional accountant is, he or she can still make mistakes that software cannot make.

Most people now understand that a 'computer error' is either a programming or an input error, and that people make errors, not computers. It's somewhat amusing that a machine that can count only in ones and zeros cannot make computational errors. Perhaps we should follow their example! Perhaps one day we will, but that is irrelevant for the moment!