BLOGS, NEWS & UPDATES
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Allowable Motor Expense Rates (2017)
Allowable Motor Expense Rates (2017) Revenue amended the rates for claiming motoring expenses with effect from April 1, 2017. Given that most businesses use these rates as the basis for Revenue-approved motor expense claims for businesses, you should be aware of the...
What tax/accounting returns do I need to make for my business?
Which type of returns should you make? To answer it, the first thing we have to do is to identify the form of your business. Are you a sole trader, a partnership or a limited company? This table summarises the key reporting areas. Sole Trader Partnership Company...
Is Xero right for your business?
What is Xero? Xero is a cloud accounting application that provides similar functionality as most of the standard accounting packages such as Sage 50 or QuickBooks. Being a cloud service, the data resides in the cloud and the application is accessed via a web brower. ...
Struggling with your work-life balance?
One of the most common problems for self-employed people is achieving or maintaining a good work/life balance. I recently had a client who was finding that he was overwhelmed by the amount of work that had to be done and was seriously considering pulling back from the...
How to prepare financial projections
Feedback I get regularly from the clients is that they don’t know where to start with the financial projections. So in this article I want to give you a framework and an overview of how I go about doing projections. My approach is something that has built up over...
How To Get Better At Predicting Business Costs.
Do you know much it costs you to open your doors in the morning? Thats the easiest way to predict your business costs. There is a friend of mine, a retired banker who describes business owners in control of their business as ‘they know exactly how much it costs them...
Decision-making and the importance of understanding cash flow
As I said in my last blog post, one of the most common areas where my business clients want advice is around decision-making – knowing which of the options they’re faced with will be most beneficial for their business. Whether you’re a brand new start-up business, or...
Making the best business decisions – how to evaluate your opportunities
One of the questions that I get asked most often by business owners is how to decide between one or more options – when faced with path A or B, how do you know which fork to choose and what the potential outcome may be? These sorts of question arise for businesses of...
Why a good budget is vital for every business owner
In one of my recent blog posts, I mentioned the need for a business to create an annual budget. One of my readers contacted me, saying “I don't really know why I'd need a budget if I'm already doing the basic bookkeeping”. So, in this post, I’m going to set out why I...
Putting your accounting knowledge into practice: an engineering perspective
What should a business owner do to make sure he or she has the best possible information at his/her fingertips? We’ve already discussed how to identify the key transactions of the business and also how to record the information that’s important to your business and...
Turning your financial transactions into insightful information: an engineering perspective
Understanding the nuts and bolts of your accounting really does give you an advantage as a business owner. As we outlined in our last blog post, breaking down your transactions into inputs and outputs (and thinking like a process-driven engineer) is the first step in...
Understanding the nuts and bolts of accounting: an engineering perspective
Understanding the nuts and bolts of accounting: an engineering perspective I was a latecomer to accounting. I first completed a degree in engineering and only moved to accounting after that. Almost everyone who heard what I was doing told me how difficult I would...
You’re a start-up: what are the key things you need to know about accounting?
I’ve had several new business owners come to me over the years saying, "We're a small start-up, but nobody tells us what we really need to know about accounts". If this is the situation in which you find yourself, you’ve probably gone into business because you had a...
How to avoid accounting surprises
One issue that often comes up with new clients is the frustration they feel when the accounting results turn out to be significantly different from what they expected. They may have had a very busy period, worked hard, and expected to show good results. However, when...
Six elements that make an excellent finance function
As a business advisor, I get to see a lot of different businesses and their finance functions. At one end of the spectrum, the finance function just does the basics i.e processing invoices, managing cash and preparing the core reports. At the other end of the...
Seven Drivers of Highly Engaged Staff
This months Blog Post comes from Mindshop Colleagues Mark Buckland and Wayne Lockhart In his highly acclaimed book ‘Good to Great’ Jim Collins suggests that employing, leading and managing engaged staff is like taking a bus trip. In doing so he outlined two...
How you can Get on top of your to do list
I was talking recently with a friend who commented that he doesn’t feel that he is achieving enough. He sat down at the start of the year and made a to-do list of all the things he wanted to get done. This list included ideas for 2 new products and improving his...
10 Tips stand out in Social Media
This blog post comes from Mindshop colleague, Fergal Coleman. Now based in Australia, Fergal has strong Galway connections. His family came from Galway, he worked for CK Electronics for a couple of years and he played for Galway United for a period. Fergal has a IT...
Improving Productivity with Smartphone Apps
On a number of occasions over the past few weeks, I have had discussions with friends and clients about how they use their smartphones to increase productivity. I am getting great use out of mine and would be lost without it. However, others are barely using the...
How to know what to change in your Business
In the poem Advent by Patrick Kavanagh, he mentions “the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children". When you look at your business, do you see that newness, or have you stopped to notice the stale things? Have you become so used to...
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