Tracking and Filing of 1099

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Prashant

1099 – Is it the year Crusaders struck or something else? It is January and in the United States this could mean only one thing – a form that IRS requires all businesses send to its independent contractors whose services were engaged last calendar year. Typically, these would be people who are paid on a per job basis like artists, web designers, legal consultant, videographers and others. 1099 comes with a dizzying array of variants and 1099-MISC being the most common. This post is all about 1099-MISC.

Is this meant for me?

Did you pay anyone more than $600 towards rent or other services provided? If the answer is yes, then you need to issue a 1099 for them. There are other reasons you might be required to send a 1099. Head over to IRS website and read the instructions carefully.

What is the Deadline for Filing?

As early as January 31st, 2013 you need to send your vendors a copy of the 1099-MISC.…

Year End Accounting: Read these tips before you close your 2012 books!

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Prashant

The good news is that the world didn’t end on 12/21 as the Mayans had predicted. The bad news is: you still need to work on your accounting and taxes for 2012. Here are some tips in the form of a checklist so you can avoid overpaying or underpaying the taxman. It’s important you do this before you close your books for 2012. Happy 2013!

Reconcile your bank accounts

If you have been manually entering the bank transactions, it is imperative that you reconcile the bank balances with the actual bank statements. Look for the usual culprits like cancelled or uncleared checks. Give this a skip if you have setup a feed for online banking and have forgotten how to enter the bank transactions.

Complete your invoicing

Send the invoices for all the services you have rendered; products that you have sold and for any task that remains unbilled.

Record all your supplier bills

Ensure that you haven’t missed entering any supplier bills.

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Zoho Books Gets Even Easier to Use With Automatic Bank Feeds

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Prashant

We’re always looking for ways to simplify life for our customers. We are thrilled to announce a major update to our accounting software, Zoho Books: You are now able to connect your bank and credit card accounts securely and automatically download transactions right into Zoho Books.

Reduce manual data entry
Let me illustrate with this with a simple example. You’ve bought a flight ticket using your credit card. To keep track of this in your accounting system, you’d need to manually classify this as a Travel Expense and enter multiple information including the amount, date, reference number, the airline from whom the ticket was purchased etc. This is tedious and can lead to mistakes. Even after going through this you are still not done – you still need to reconcile this with your bank statement. This is just one transaction.…

Is Double-Entry Accounting here for eternity?

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Prashant

Take any popular

accounting software today, be it a SAAS player like us or our desktop counterparts or even the entreprisey ERP solutions, and I bet they all are based on double-entry accounting. For the uninitiated, double-entry accounting is a system of bookkeeping that enforces recording two aspects of a financial transaction – one that indicates the source of amount involved and another to indicate how it is put to use. It is said that this method was first codified by Luca Pacioli, an Italian monk in the fifteenth century (and I’ll leave it to The Almighty

Wikipedia to explain the rest).

It is fascinating to see that a system devised to catch financial inaccuracies six centuries back still finds its place in the world of accounting software and remains largely untouched. This when accounting software by itself is undergoing a transformation of sorts from desktop to the web.…

SAMTEQ Limited gets paid faster using Zoho Invoice and improves its cash flow

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Prashant

Recently, I had a tete-a-tete with Ken Coley of SAMTEQ Limited, a Scottish Web development company. He had some interesting things to share on his company and how

Zoho Invoice fits into his fast growing business. Some excerpts from our conversation:

1. How did SAMTEQ get started?

SAMTEQ Limited was established in 2009 by Sam Coley, at the age of 16 and has enjoyed rapid growth to a successful web development company. SAMTEQ creates web solutions for small to medium businesses, based in Scotland but serving the UK and beyond. SAMTEQ specialises on making extremely easy to manage websites, with a unique CMS system developed in-house. SAMTEQ customers tend to be owner managers and have little time to do anything apart from concentrate on their business. As a growing business we do not have an accounts department so we have to manage our invoicing between our paid work.…

Cash is King: Cash Flow Statement in Zoho Books

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Prashant

Real physical cash is what keeps your business running. It helps you pay your employees, make prompt vendor payments, juggle your marketing budget, meet unforeseen emergency expenses etc.

Isn’t it surprising, nay, shocking then to find that many businesses don’t know how much cash they have in their kitty at a given moment of time? And, when accessing this information is difficult, taking adequate action when cash levels fall below a certain threshold isn’t easy either. That could upset the best laid plans of any business.

We wanted businesses regardless of their size, not to get caught unawares but to overcome such a situation. So the team behind Zoho Books, the makers of your favorite

online accounting software, has come up with a nice

cash flow report. This report pretty much summarizes everything that has to do with your cash & cash equivalent accounts like checking and savings accounts.…

Online Payment Gateway Usage Statistics

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Prashant

Work.Online
reads Zoho’s tagline. As a corollary to this, the Zoho Invoice team is fanatical that small businesses invoice.online and get paid.online. When your invoicing software was released, it was integrated with PayPal and we quickly added Authorize.net and Google Checkout to our repertoire. With that, we completed the troika of payment gateways to provide our customers a complete online invoicing experience. It is over two years since our customers have been accepting electronic payments and it is time to introspect and to gain interesting insights into to which payment gateway most of our customers turn to. So let’s talk some real numbers.

Payment gateways – How they stack up against each other?…