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There are times when an expense is well worth the cost. One, is retaining an IRS Tax Attorney online or locally. When you are in trouble with the IRS or being audited, the one thing that you do not want to do is go into their office alone. Hiring a tax attorney is not only necessary it is critical since they are lawyers who are specially trained in tax law and tax related issues. They can assist you with both state and federal tax problems. It important that you have a tax attorney that is well informed with all the tax laws.

When you get the letter from the IRS, the word AUDIT just jumps off the page. Your heart beats faster and you begin to panic. Many people do not realize that having a tax attorney will help alleviate that overwhelming feeling of dread and help you sleep better. Tax law is not to be minimized and representing yourself against the lawyers employed by the government is, in word, just foolish.

A qualified tax attorney is well trained in dealing with the IRS and may negotiate you out of any tax problem you may have including a IRS levy, tax lien or tax debt since he or she knows what the tax laws are. You may end up with little or no debt to the IRS.

When you are in debt to the IRS, as thousands of Americans are every year, a tax relief attorney can help alleviate any debt you may incur. You don’t want just any lawyer with a J.D. following their name, tax law should be the only focus of the attorney, and he or she should be able to a resolution to your tax problem.

It is important that you find the right tax attorney for your current situation. There are two different categories personal and corporate. Each is experienced in the area of tax law that is specific to your needs. Each will assist you in avoiding the maximum penalties that the IRS can impose. Some research online will yield websites you can quickly find a prospective IRS tax attorneys in your area if you don’t have one in mind.

Tax attorney fees will usually cost more than a regular attorney, however, it is in your best interest to find one if you are in trouble with the IRS. Do not be fooled into thinking the auditor is there to fix your problem, their sole purpose in life is to take what they think belongs to the government and a IRS tax attorney’s sole purpose it to prevent it.

What is great about a attorney specializing in tax law representing you is that they know every loophole in every law and will use it for your benefit against the IRS should the need arise. If you find yourself in a complicated situation and the IRS is hounding you, it is a good idea to consult a IRS tax attorney online or in your area as soon as possible for. You will be glad you did.

By: Ronn Espy

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Despite the vast improvements in information technology, computers (on which modern IT is based) cannot as yet take over business management. However, business information systems have transformed the effectiveness, power and efficiency of management.

In an earlier article on business management software, we looked at surface aspects of how modern management information systems help businesses. We saw how computers speeded up and improved the quality of operations. We also mentioned the existence of broad categories of business software – office suites, functional software such as accounting and inventory, and industry software such as retail management software. In this article, we seek to look more analytically at the role of information management systems.

Decision Support, Problem Analysis and Overall Control

Business managers often need to make decisions that can affect the business’ fortunes one way or other. For example, a company with sales outlets or distributors spread over a wide geographic area might want to optimize the logistical operations of delivering merchandise to the outlets. The best solution might be affected by numerous factors such as demand patterns, availability of merchandise, distances involved and the option of using external carriers (who can find two way loads and might prove a lesser cost option over long distances) instead of own vehicles.

While it might be possible to use complex mathematical formulas by hand to compute the best solution, computers transform the whole process into a routine task of feeding certain information as input and obtaining suggestions for best solutions as output. The task can typically be done in a few minutes (instead of hours or even days) and it becomes possible to examine several alternatives before deciding upon one that seems most realistic.

Identifying problems and analyzing the factors that cause them also has been transformed by modern computer information systems. In a typical MIS environment, standard reports are generated in a routine manner comparing actual performance against original estimates. The software that generates the report can be instructed to highlight exceptions, i.e. significant variations between original estimates and actual performance. Managers will thus become aware of problem areas in the daily course of their work simply by looking at the reports they receive, without having to do detailed data collection and computations themselves.

Identifying the factors responsible for the problem can also be routinized to some extent by using such tools as variance analysis. Variance analysis is an element of standard costing system that splits deviations from estimates (or standards) into causative factors such as increase in price of materials used, excessive usage of materials, unexpected machine downtimes, etc. With such a detailed report, managers can delve deeper into the problem factor, such as why there was excessive usage of materials.

Control is also exercised through variance analysis. Budgets are prepared for all business operations by concerned managers working in a coordinated fashion. For example, estimated sales volumes will determine the levels of production; production levels will determine raw material purchases; and so on. With good information system management, it then becomes possible to generate timely reports comparing actual sales, production, raw material deliveries, etc against estimated levels.

The reports will help managers to keep a watch on things and take corrective action quickly. For example, the production manager will become aware of falling sales (or rising sales) of particular products and can prepare to make adjustments in production schedules, and purchasing and inventory managers will become quickly aware of any mounting inventories of unused materials. MIS thus enhances the quality of communication all around and can significantly improve the effectiveness of operations control.

Effective MIS Involves Humans and Computers Working together

The major aspect to note is that MIS provides only the information; it is the responsibility of concerned managers to act on the information. It is the synergy between efficient, accurate and speedy equipment and humans with commonsense, intelligence and judgment that really gives power to MIS.

By: Gopinathan T

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It can be very difficult to get insurance quotes. You can spend hours over the phone speaking to numerous insurance companies in an attempt to get cheaper quotes from them than the last company you spoke to. You’ll have to give the same information to each of them at least once, mostly a few times just to be sure they got it right. It can be a tedious and very aggravating experience.

This does not only take up a great deal of precious time, but it also costs a king’s ransom in phone bills as most insurance companies don’t have toll free numbers for you to call them on. If you also then take into consideration that most insurance companies work regular hours (from eight to five in general) most people can only call for quotes whilst they tend to be at work. If they spend too much time on getting insurance quotes they might find themselves in trouble for spending work materials on private matters.

Fortunately, the world wide web has opened up new doorways for getting quotes. It is very quick and easy to get quotes online instead of doing it manually, over the telephone. It is also possible that you will get lower quotes from applying online portals.

The first thing to do would be to do a search for insurance quotes or insurance companies through your favourite browser’s search engine. The search engine will return a large selection of companies from which to choose. There are many sites that offer you a number of quotes whenever you enter your information in the sections provided. The greater number of insurance quotes you get the more likely you are to locate the right choice for you.

The usual way these sites work is that you put your details into a single form that features all the information that an insurance company could ask for. Wait a couple of minutes and the site will return with a variety of quotes coming from a selection of different insurance providers. If you sign up to a number of sites at one time, you can get twenty quotes in a few minutes.

The portal sites don’t just gather any insurance quotes, they find the most competitive and relevant quotes that they can. Portal sites reduce the cost of brokers together with other administrative costs. They cut down on the need for call centre agents and data capturers. On the whole, they save insurance companies a lot of cash in miscellaneous expenses, consequently insurance policies taken from portal sites are cheaper than those taken through the manual method.

The long and the short of it is that you no longer have to get insurance quotes directly from the insurance agencies over the phone. Instead you can get them from portal sites on the internet. These sites only require you to enter your details once or twice in order to get as many insurance quotes as you can handle. Getting insurance quotes over the internet saves you a lot of time and money.

By: Samson Muric

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Small business accounting software reviews mainly focus on contents of profit and loss account. It is also known by several other titles such as income statement, statement of earnings, statement of operations and profit and loss statement. While the balance sheet, as a stock/position statement, reveals the financial condition of a business at a particular point of time, the profit and loss account portrays, as a flow statement, the operations over/during a particular period of time. The period of time is an accounting period.

Since the purpose of every business firm is to earn profit, the operations of a firm in a given period of time will truly be reflected in the profit earned by it. Thus, the income statement/profit and loss account of a firm reports the results of operations in terms of income/net profit in a year. The profit and loss account can be presented broadly in two forms: the usual account form and step form.

In operational terms, the accounting report that summarizes the revenue items, the expense items and the difference between them (net income) for an accounting period is called the income statement. There are three contents of the profit and loss account: revenues, expenses and net income/profit/loss.

Revenues can be defined as the income that accrues to the firm by the sale of goods/services/assets or by the supply of the firm’s resources to others. Alternatively, revenues mean the value that a firm receives from its customers. The value/income can arise from three sources: sale of products/goods/services, supply of firm resources to others, and sale of assets like production plants, investments, and so on. The cost of earning revenue is called expenses. An important item of expense appearing in the profit and loss account is the cost of goods sold. The difference between revenues and expenses is net profit. The profit and loss account may also show the appropriation of the net profits between dividends paid to the shareholders and retained earnings/ amount transferred to reserves and surplus.

By: Elizabeth Morgan

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business accounting

Having completed your life coaching course and received your diploma its time to drum up some business.
The best way to do that is to put together a plan of action, however the know how and motivation to take action can sometimes remain a mere wish.

There is a proven formula to keep yourself motivated and knowing where you are going with your Life Coaching business, is to create a Business Plan.

Have you got a business plan? If not, you are seriously missing out on a great tool that will give you the advantage and guaranteed success to achieve both a happy lifestyle and financial success.

A well structured business plan gives you the edge to focus on your ideas, with enthusiasm and energy.
Here’s my tip for creating success: The Six Step Coaching Model.

The principle of smart questioning forms the workings of the model with; Why, What, Who, When, Where = How.

WHY – ask yourself why you want to be in business for yourself. Go on be honest. Is it just to get extra money? Or, are you serious about creating a sustainable future for you and your family.

Only you can answer your WHY. Go ahead give it a go.

WHAT – ask yourself what you want to achieve by becoming a life coaching business owner and more importantly what you’ll give in return for having the privilege of working on your own terms from home. Believe me it’s a privilege to work from home with no boss, no 9 – 5 having to be out of the home or staying late at work, no compute and no stress.

WHO – so, who’s involved in your home based business and how does your working for yourself impact on other family members and your social life? You’d also be wise to consider who your hero/heroine is in the arena of personal development and delve a little deeper into how they got started and become a success.

WHEN – now is the time, now is the best time, now is when you get things done. OK, so you may have a future time in mind after certain things have fallen into place, but you know what, now is the only time to move forward with being in business.

WHERE – it’s all in your head, your thoughts, your ideas, it’s all about you.

Yes, that’s right it’s all about you. It’s vital that you are honest with your self when deploying The Six Step Coaching Model as part of your strategy. After all as I’ve said before it’s all about you, your choices, your finances, your health you’re your lifestyle.

When you know t he answers to the five W questions above you’ll have the ‘HOW to’ knowledge to write an action packed business plan that is clear, focused and realistic with the gumption to follow through.

Looking forward to celebrating your success, so tell me more about your goals and ambitions as a professional life coach.

By: PaTrisha-Anne Todd

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business plan

Nine out of ten strategies fail to be implemented successfully. We are starting to understand the very important lesson that implementing strategy is harder than creating the right strategy from the study of success and failures of previous strategy implementations.

When we triumph over implementation it can become a blue ocean strategy – that is a competitive differentiation and while there are many tools and techniques for crafting strategy there are very few for implementing it. Rosabeth Moss Kanter put it very eloquently when she said: “Ethical standards and our ability to groom future leaders inevitably decline. That’s why execution, or “making it happen,” is so important. Execution is the un-idea; it means having the mental and organizational flexibility to put new business models into practice, even if they counter what you’re currently doing. That ability is central to running a organization right now. So rather than chasing another new management fad, or expecting still another “magic bullet” to come along, organizations should focus on execution to effectively use the organizational tools we already have.”

To further support Rosabeth Moss Kanter comment, consider the fact from Barons that only 15% of the 974 programs reviewed in Fiscal 2005 were rated effective.

In addition, from 1917 to 1987 only 39 of the original Forbes 100 survived and only two outperformed the market, GE and Eastman Kodak.

Many strategies are expected to deliver growth. This creates even more issues due to the “Growth Paradox”. As businesses grow they create new and larger challenges which again emphasizes the need to be good at strategy implementation.

It is time to switch the focus from just crafting strategy to crafting and implementing it. If for no other reason, it is estimated that U.S. managers spend more than $10 billion annually on strategic analysis and strategy formulation. If 90% fail then that is a waste of $9 billion.
Strategy implementation is a relative new field that’s genesis was the high failure rate and lack of a framework. The field is about 10 years old and the research on the subject is just being gathered. There has been various research:

1. Kaplan and Norton, the originators of the Balance Scorecard, published also that 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully.

2. In a study of 200 organizations in the Times 1000, 80% of directors said they had the right strategies but only 14% thought they were implementing them well, no doubt linked to the finding that despite 97% of directors having a ‘strategic vision’, only 33% reported achieving ‘significant strategic success’. (Source: Why do only one third of UK organizations achieve strategic success?)

3. Harvard Business School teaches that at least 70% of all change initiatives fail.

4. A long term study by Newcastle University, (1973 – 1989) showed that business success is governed more by how well strategies are implemented than how good the strategy is to begin with.

5. The Economist Intelligence Unit reported that organizations realize only around 60% of their strategy’s potential value because of failures in planning and execution.

With the pendulum now swinging away from leader’s main responsibility of crafting the strategy to the recognition that they are also responsible also for its implementation and that can be even harder, there is a fast growing global interest in the field.

Strategy implementation is defined as the actions an organization takes today to deliver the strategy, tomorrow. The key word is “action”. People in an organization are always taking action.

The critical question is, “Is it the right action?” Are the actions that their staff members are taking today driving the implementation forward? We know staff members are always busy and frequently have more work than they have hours in the day but strategy implementation is the collective individual actions taken every minute of every day by every staff member. If there are not enough of the right actions being taken then the strategy is heading for the graveyard.

“One of top management’s biggest blind spots is the failure to recognize that any significant shift in strategy requires changes in day-to-day activities throughout the organization. Small shifts may require only minor changes. Significant shifts require significant changes-from subtle to sweeping-that can only be successful if implemented systematically. And people at all levels can either help or hinder the transition.”

Executing Your Strategy, Morgan, Levitt & Malek

Leader’s also have a fundamental responsibility to create the right conditions in the organizations. They must, for example, encourage the right people; clearly communicate the strategy objectives, create the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs); align the culture to the implementation; redesign processes, change the way staff members are reinforced to encourage the right behaviors and actions for the new strategy to be implemented and then review the strategy implementation every two weeks. This can be an overwhelming list but if it was easy to deliver the promises of a new strategy then nine out of ten implementations would not fail. And the pass mark is when the leaders deliver at least 50% of the objectives of the new strategy.

The leaders must identify what needs to be done and where to put the organization’s focus.

Although it is not unheard of for two organizations to have the same strategy, for example number one in the industry or differentiate through customer service or leading product, each organization’s implementation of the strategy is unique and the leader must first identify what needs to be done and then lead staff members to perform the required behaviors and actions. The leader’s role is to translate the strategy in to daily actions that staff members can take. Strategy implementation is not the same as change management.

Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change, both from the perspective of an organization and on the individual level. It is applied as the solution for running out a new sales program as it is for strategy. Strategy implementation is a specific approach which drives the right actions today to deliver tomorrow’s strategy. The challenge is for leaders to stop doing what doesn’t work.

Change management is flawed as a methodology for implementing strategy as the research is revealing. If we keep doing the same thing then no wonder we keep failing and the strategy fails! It is time to change the way we think about change. We must go beyond change management as we know it and focus on implementation.

Consider that 30 years ago management was about control and change management was designed as command and control. But business has dramatically changed. We have moved to empowerment and a teaming methodology. Many leaders use change management out of ignorance, as they are not aware of an alternative and end up taking the wrong the actions.

After crafting the strategy for the organization’s future the leader’s role is to ensure that staff members are set up for success in its implementation by being guided by the leadership on what actions to take. The problem on many occasions is that even the leaders do not know what the right actions to take are. In addition leaders often have the wrong mindset. Leaders often underestimate the implementation challenge and what is involved. They believe that once they have created a new strategy, the hardest part is over. Not true. The hardest part – implementation – is just beginning.

In the 10 per cent of organizations that successfully implement their strategies the leaders double the effort compared to what they had spent crafting it. In some cases, leaders are cognizant that implementation requires extra effort. In reality, however, very few are able to free up valuable time and resources to do justice to the implementation process. In other cases, leaders become so caught up in managing the day-to-day business that they lose sight of their goal to implement the new strategy and as such are taking the wrong actions.

The research in the field of strategy implementation started to become part of the mainstream awareness in 1999 when Fortune Magazine ran a front page on “Why CEO’s Fail”. The article, which has since been quoted on numerous occasions, explained that “organizations fail to successfully implement strategy not because of bad strategy but because of bad execution”. This was one of the first times the field of implementation (execution and implementation are interchangeable), had received major exposure.

In 2002 Ram Charan followed up the article by co-authoring with Larry Bossidy Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Crown Business, 2002. The book made execution a common word in business conversations. Since its publications there has been a greater focus on the topic by leaders and a handful of books and articles have followed on the same topic.

There is, however, still a vast gap of knowledge, techniques and tools in the field.

For much of the last 40 years the focus in business has been how to create the right strategy and quite rightly. It is the leader’s responsibility to create strategy, it is what they are paid the big bucks for and it is critical to the success of the organization that they get it right. A plethora of tools and techniques have been created to assist in the strategy formulation. Hundreds and even thousands of books have been written on the topic and in every city, consultants are standing by to offer leaders their support and wisdom.

As a result we have improved at understanding strategy and how to create it. Although it is worth noting that even strategy is still being developed. Consider the simple fact that we do not have a globally common definition for the word “strategy”.

There is a change in the wind. In the last ten years we have started to ask, “What happens after we create the strategy and why are there so many failed strategy implementations?” These questions are just starting to be asked because we are just discovering from the research that so many strategy implementations fail.

Instinctively most leaders know that implementation is tough and can recall at least one corporate wide implementation; they participated in, that failed. It is, however, only in the last few years that strategy implementation has started to become a recognized field in its own right. We are starting to understand that implementation fails not because we have the wrong strategy, in most cases, but because the challenge of implementing the strategy is tougher than most CEOs and leaders anticipate and they underestimate the whole challenge.

Professor Joseph Bowler of Business Administration at Harvard Business School http://harvardbusiness.org/ recently said, “One of the criticisms we would have of some of our colleagues who have studied strategy (and some consultants who advice on strategy) is that they assume that once you design strategy it gets executed. They don’t look inside the process and realize that it’s much more complicated.”

By: Robin Speculand

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