Although “all year long” is the right time to ensure you are planning for your company’s tax liabilities or savings, most companies look to the end of the calendar year for most of the planning.

Why? It’s the time of the year when Congress issues year-end tax extenders, and many companies have a bit more time on their hands to address operational issues due to slowing down at the holidays.

While this is not a comprehensive list of year-end planning tips for businesses, it’s intended to be a conversation starter. Certum Solutions can discuss any of these tips with you in detail and help ensure your books are current for tax planning purposes.

The leaves are changing, there are cool evening breezes and the kids are getting ready for Halloween. What else is going on? Oh yes: Some great new features in QuickBooks Online (QBO) and QBO Advanced. Here’s a summary of what’s new.

It’s that time of the year when jump scares are common, there’s undoubtedly another Halloween movie coming out and you stock up on way too much candy for the little ones who ring your doorbell on Oct. 31.

Sounds like a ghoulish-good time, but you know what’s really, really scary? When one of your customers had a bad experience returning an item.

Okay, okay – I know this might be a stretch, but bear with me here while I tell you more about how you can improve your return policies without losing potential sales. And along the way, we’ll have a ghostly good time.

As the leaves are starting to fall, and families in our corner of NC are preparing mountain drives to see the changing colors, the narrative of our books is starting to reach the concluding point of the year. In my office, my current project is almost scary to say out loud, so I'll write it instead. I started my first book this summer, and am working with my editor to come out with a comprehensive guide to new business owners looking to start their own business, filled with memories of my own pitfalls and successes. I'm not going to pretend it is all roses, and I'm not someone who glosses over failures to make myself look like a constant success, but I am a believer in sharing our successes and failures for the greater good.

Businesses who sell products and services online—as well as their brick-and-mortar counterparts—ought to know more about the very important CLV, or “Customer Lifetime Value.”

In short, CLV tells you what you can expect from an average customer over the course of your business relationship. It’s not intended to show one moment in a buying cycle; rather, it encompasses the entire timeframe someone is a customer.

By now, there’s nothing new about creating an attractive and well-functioning website to garner sales. However, the difference between the business that barely sells what it can to the one in which inventory is a constant need because sales are robust, is vastly different.

Here are four ways to drive more traffic to your website.

Intuit QuickBooks has several new features recently introduced to help you streamline your workflow, so let’s get right to it.

Business owners—from the solopreneur to the largest size business—can realize some tax savings when it comes to accounting for the mileage you drive, although the rules can be a bit confusing. Here’s what you need to know.

Despite the heat this summer, the Certum Solutions team has heard so much about Pickleball, the court sport that is all the rage. That got me to thinking: Playing pickleball is similar to running an e-commerce business.

The last several years have been challenging, to say the least. The global pandemic arrived quickly, leaving many businesses unprepared to pivot quickly enough to address the needs of their customers. It didn’t matter if you had a brick and mortar location and/or sold your products and services online. We all faced issues in continuous operations, working remotely, and giving customers what they needed to survive.

Each month, Certum Solutions presents feature highlights in QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Advanced, and other products in the Intuit ecosystem. If these updates are helpful to you and your business, please drop us a note to tell us how you are using them, and what you’d like to see us cover in the future

When it comes to a loss, there is no commonality. You could operate your business out of a warehouse or manufacturing plant, or maybe your company is on the 12th floor of an office building. Whether you’re hit by a hurricane, earthquake, or tornado—or you’re the victim of a massive fire—no one I know has ever said they were 100% prepared for the potential loss of business, let alone your livelihood.