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Archive for April, 2010
The company is bust – but corporate card bills live on
posted by Jenny @ 8:50 PM
Friday, April 30, 2010
The company is bust – but corporate card bills live on
When a company goes under, employees can be stuck with the liability for their corporate credit cards.
Becky, Birmingham, Ala.
My company, an LLC, is insolvent and dissolving. No formal bankruptcy will be filed, and unsecured creditors will not be paid. I know there’s potential for my credit card company to serve me with a lawsuit if I am unable to commit to a payoff plan. Can my employees also be held liable? In other words, can employees who charged company expenses on the corporate credit card be sued for the amount they charged on the card?
By Lenora Chu, CNNMoney.com contributing writer
Where liability rests depends on the specific terms of the member services agreement under which the corporate card was issued. Those agreements differ widely from issuer to issuer.
Some agreements stipulate that the card issuer must first pursue the company or master cardholder — usually the company officer or director that first opened the account — for unpaid balances, says Joseph Rosenbaum, an attorney and partner with the law firm Reed Smith LLP.
Others allow the issuer to come after both the company and its employees for various charges, says business attorney Steven Fox of the law firm Epstein, Becker & Green.
In this scenario, the agreement generally says that the master cardholder is liable for charges he makes on his individual card, as well as those made on other corporate employee cards, Fox says. Make sure when you write a business checks, that you have the funds to cover for it, or it will add to more problems you have.
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Like most businesses you most likely keep a very good record system so that way you can track your business checks. Its always a good idea to check your bank statement every month to make sure your checks are matching up to your other paper work.
Having good easy to read checks help in this as well. If you have a check that is messy and small and hard to read then checking it can become a hassle. So make sure when ordering your checks to make it simple and keep that nice clean look to them.
How a capital gains tax break could get cash to startups
posted by Mr. Peachtree user @ 8:20 PM
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
How a capital gains tax break could get cash to startups
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — To motivate the well-off to funnel more of their cash into small businesses, should the federal government offer investors new tax breaks?
President Obama thinks so. He’s thrown his support behind a proposal to eliminate capital gains taxes on investments made in 2010 and 2011 in qualifying small businesses. The House of Representatives has already passed the legislation; the Senate has yet to take it up.
Bank credit is scarce and investors are skittish, but that didn’t stop these 6 startups. They found creative ways to raise cash during the downturn.
“We should eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment so these folks can get the capital they need to grow and create jobs,” Obama said at a February town hall meeting in Nashua, N.H. “That’s particularly critical right now, because bank lending standards have tightened since the financial crisis and many small businesses are still struggling to get loans.”
It’s a message he’s repeated often in recent months, and one that resonates with entrepreneurs: Nearly 60% of the 500 small business owners polled in February by PNC Financial Services Group think their business would benefit from the move. Using your business checks is always a good idea, so you can track your purchases.
Here’s a look at what the tax break would do — and who would benefit.
Pittsburgh is the 2nd best place to launch your business.
posted by Odd Ball @ 8:24 PM
Monday, April 26, 2010
MSA: Pittsburgh, PA
Best places ranking: #2 among large metro areas
Population: 2,351,192
Best places ranking: #2 among large metro areas
Population: 2,351,192
Greater Pittsburgh is home to a workforce with hard-won manufacturing skills from the city’s steelmaking past. Need machinists? They’re here — and that’s a draw for small businesses.
The region combines that talent pool with a mix of highly educated students from the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon University and Duquesne University. Those institutions helped make Pittsburgh a leader in robotics, healthcare, and artificial intelligence. Locals cite the city’s culture as one of its biggest selling points: There are tight-knit neighborhoods, many built around eastern European communities that prize a strong work ethic. With business picking up, its important to save money. Instead of buying your business checks from the bank, why not order cheap business checks that can save you up to 75%.
Most of the city’s small businesses are family-owned concerns that have morphed to serve new markets. Resources like the Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence help both startups and generations-old companies get the skills they need. Pittsburgh’s location on major North-South and East-West interstates connects companies with distant markets and suppliers.
State taxes aren’t low, and the recession-fueled tax shortfall hurts: The state may have to take over Pittsburgh’s pension system. But small businesses say the local workforce is resilient, and with valuable, transferrable skills.
Native Pittsburghers often stick around to raise their own families. It can be hard to retain outsiders, through — those drawn from elsewhere to Pittsburgh’s world-class educational institutions typically collect their degrees and leave.
If you are interested in making your business checks more friendly to pursuade more customers to come in, then I suggest adding your logo to your checks. When you do this it will show your customers that you are proud of your company and want everyone to know about it.
Adding your own personal business logo onto checks will not only catch the attention of your current customers but it will also catch the eye of any on lookers as well. It could potentially help boost your numbers during this hard time we are having lately, and lets face it some of us are willing to make as many changes as possible to up the numbers.
Have you ever been in a situation where you realize at last minute that you are almost out of business checks. And then you realize that what you have may not make it till you recieve the new ones. Well there is a way to avoid this situation from happening.
The best thing to do is when you open your last set of checks to go and order more checks so that way, the new ones will be in before you run out of the checks you already have. Its so simple that once you get into a routine of doing that you will find that you wont find your self without checks ever again.
Making A Good Business Plan Makes Good Sense
posted by BizCheckWriter @ 1:00 PM
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Get the competitive edge you need to ensure your business’ profitability even before you start the ball rolling. Make a good business plan outline which will be the best indicator to judge your potential for success. If you a looking for lenders or investors, a business plan outline will help present your ideas in an organized manner. Let’s face it; investors aren’t going to handout blank checks to someone who can’t even estimate their startup costs.
Your business plan should be no more than 30 to 40 pages long, excluding the attached supporting documents. Have it neatly bound and attractively packaged. Make a copy for each investor you plan to approach, but do not give out too many copies at once. Keep track of each copy and be sure to retrieve it when if you are turned down for financing.
If you have been shopping for checks you know that there are several things to choose from. But if you are a person who likes to be hands on in creating things for your business then choosing the blank check option is the best for you.
When choosing the Blank Checks you can still choose the color of the check that would best suit your company’s image. And you have the control right at your finger tips as to what information goes on your checks. You can even decided which style of checks would be best for your company, there are checks on top, check in middle, and even a full page depending on the amount of checks you would need that is best for your company.
The biggest banks are minting money. Can they keep it up? Do we even want them to?
posted by Odd Ball @ 9:06 PM
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
(Fortune) — The biggest banks are minting money. Can they keep it up? Do we even want them to?
The six biggest bank holding companies – Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) and Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) – raked in $18.7 billion in profits in the first quarter. With the banks making money, hopefully it will be passed out into loans for the small business companies. Then they will be able to write more business checks for payroll and help the economy.
That’s more than six times as much as they earned in the fourth quarter of 2009, and their biggest haul since the financial crisis of 2008.
It’s their most profitable quarter since the spring of 2007, according to data compiled by SNL Financial. Back then, the big six made $23.5 billion in the last stages of the housing bubble. Profits then crumbled in the second half of that year and in 2008, prompting a flurry of government-assisted mergers that made some of the biggest institutions much bigger.
On the surface, the big banks’ profit prospects look good. The economic conditions that have helped them – low short-term interest rates, the return of private funds to capital markets and slowing losses on mortgage and consumer loans – are expected to persist throughout the year.
That should provide more fodder for a profit rebound that has sent the giant banks’ shares up an average 42% over the past year, and is padding the wallets of big bank employees.
Oklahoma City, OK is the #1 place to Launch a small business
posted by Happy Business Guy @ 6:06 PM
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
MSA: Oklahoma City, OK
Best places ranking: #1 among large metro areas
Population: 1,206,142
Best places ranking: #1 among large metro areas
Population: 1,206,142
Places that are booming with business like, Oklahoma is great for the economy. The business that are new, will need to order cheap business checks, for either their peachtree accounting, or quickbooks program. Just make sure you contact your bank for all your requirements.
Stable and affordable, Oklahoma City is a haven for entrepreneurial risk takers. It boasts the second lowest foreclosure rate among large U.S. metro areas, along with the second lowest median rent. Through the Great Recession this former Dust Bowl capital has been spared many hardships, with a diverse local economy spread across medical research, energy, education and government.Oklahoma City also benefits from a high concentration of deep-pocketed local investors, many of them veterans of the oil and gas industry, who are willing to take a gamble on companies that might spend 10 years bringing a new product to fruition. And the city itself has been a powerful friend to life-science startups, funding the 1996 construction of the Presbyterian Health Foundation Research Park. The complex — 700,000 square feet of space in seven buildings on a 27-acre site — has attracted an influx of innovative biomedical firms.
Oklahoma City has its drawbacks. Among the most tornado-prone cities in America, it has the dubious distinction of getting hit in 1999 by the worst twister on record, with winds topping 320 miles per hour. And forget about entertaining your visiting clients with top-notch sporting events: Oklahoma City has only one professional franchise, the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder, which had its first season in 2008 and finished 26th in the league. -Alec Foege