A common question that we get asked, is “what portion of my home expenses am I able to claim for tax purposes?” Where a self-employed taxpayer uses his or her home partly in furtherance of the conduct of a business, he or she is entitled to a partial deduction for the outgoings which relate to the use of the home for the work related activities. These include: – Heating –… Read more
The IRD standard mileage rate for motor vehicles is now 77 cents per km. This rate applies to the 2012 income year. The standard mileage rate may not be acceptable where an employee’s business travel exceeds 5,000km. The reimbursement should be based on actual expenditure or a reasonable estimate of the expenditure likely to be incurred by the employee. One way to claim in Xero is to enter the mileage… Read more
Owning a rental property has become topical again with the recent positive movement in the Auckland residential property market. Besides the question of which property to buy and where (and ignoring the difficulties of increasingly crowded auction rooms), many property investors will be wondering which legal structure to use for their investment. Loss Attributing Qualifying Companies (LAQCs) were popular in the past. That popularity contributed towards some negative media coverage… Read more
Recent advances in small business accounting software are changing the way that accountants are able to interact with their clients. Using online or “cloud” based accounting software such as Xero gives accountants the opportunity to work with their clients on a regular basis, rather than just collecting records from businesses and preparing annual accounts after year end (as an aside, Xero is fast becoming a New Zealand success story which… Read more
For those who need more functionality than a cashbook system, the next step up in the off-the-shelf software market for business is the simple general ledger system. Typically these systems can keep track of accounts receivable (so you can use them for invoicing your customers), accounts payable (so that you can keep track of who you owe money to and when it is due) as well as all transactions that… Read more
For an owner of a small or medium sized business, the days of “shoebox record keeping” are long gone. There are several good quality, low cost accounting packages to suit every kind of business, ranging from simple cashbook systems to Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP) systems capable of handling not just accounting information, but also human resources, customer relationship management and a wide range of other tasks. Most SME businesses will… Read more
As a keen follower of the move towards cloud based systems, I was interested to see Google’s foray into the online storage market. Google has had its Google Apps suite of web based applications for some time now but has very recently added a storage component to that. So what does it do? It is probably easiest for me to say the way that I am using the products, as… Read more