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5 Legal Tips For Wrapping Up The Year

Even though it isn’t the end of the year, there are some things you can do to help prepare your business for taxes. You can also start taking steps to make the end of the current year much easier for you. Most of these things to do require good bookkeeping and simple organization. While it is possible to follow each of these legal tips on your own, you will find that cloud applications designed to manage auto repair shops will make them a lot easier as they can handle most of the actions for you, saving you time, effort, and potential headaches.

Separate Labor From Parts
If you have already been in business for more than a year, then you likely know that you will need to separate costs and income based on labor from those based on parts. This is simply an element of the law that must be followed when filing your taxes and other financial paperwork. Instead of having to separate these two items to see what elements are taxable at the end of the year, you can make life easier by keeping them separate throughout the year. Both you and your accountant will thank you for the extra effort and your accountant may even charge less for your organization.

Keep Information Up-To-Date
No matter the time of the year, you want to ensure that every bit of information is up-to-date. This will prevent you from having to sit down and spend days updating it at the end of the year. Also remember to print out copies of various reports, including sales, collections, and expenses monthly or more frequently as this will keep you organized. This is another area in which management applications can help as they will be able to detail each of these reports for you, making them easy to save and/or print.

Request Tax Exemption Certificates
In any business, some customers are bound to qualify for tax exemption. If you don’t have the proper paperwork when you provide their services tax-free, you may find yourself scrambling to find it at the end of the year, a task which would require contacting each previous client and hoping they have the paperwork. Instead of this hassle, always ask your customers to give you a copy of their tax exemption certificates when you send them the invoice for their auto repairs.

Enter Bills Right Away
Just like every other piece of information, you want to make sure that your bills are always kept up-to-date. The easiest way to do this is to enter each of the bills as soon as you receive them or as soon as pay them, depending on the system you set up. This will keep you organized so you don’t have to worry.

Know Detailed Sales
When it comes time to complete your taxes and other legal end of the year paperwork, you will need to have detailed information about your sales. This should include the total number of sales as well as the amount your repair business collected each day. The easiest way to do this is to enter the relevant information right away and manage it via a cloud application. This will let you access it from anywhere so the information is always up-to-date.