Tax planning for a small business is the work you do during the year to legally lower next April’s bill: choosing the right entity, timing income and purchases, funding retirement, and capturing every credit and deduction you qualify for. Tax filing looks backward at what already happened. Tax planning changes
The R&D tax credit is one of the few tax breaks that can put cash back in a startup that is not yet profitable. Most founders assume a credit is useless until they owe income tax. The R&D credit is different: a qualified early-stage company can apply up to $500,000
Most small businesses overpay tax not because they miss the exotic deductions, but because they never cleanly capture the ordinary ones. A deduction lowers the income you are taxed on, so every legitimate business expense you track is money you keep. The problem is rarely knowing that a deduction exists.
S-corp tax savings come from one move: paying yourself part of your profit as a salary and the rest as distributions, so the distribution part avoids the 15.3% self-employment tax. That is the whole engine. Everything else is detail about how far you can push it and what it costs
An LLC and an S-corp are not two versions of the same thing, and that is where most of the tax confusion starts. An LLC is a legal structure. An S-corp is a tax election. Your LLC can keep its legal protections and still choose to be taxed as an
Last updated: May 2026 Bookkeeping Services Pricing: How to Compare Quotes Apples-to-Apples Two bookkeepers quote your business. One says $400 a month. The other says $1,600. Same business, same conversation, four-times difference in price. Which one is right? Usually neither, in the sense of matching your actual needs. The $400
Last updated: May 2026 Tech Startup Accounting: What’s Different and What to Get Right Tech startup accounting fails in five predictable places. Revenue recognition is wrong because the bookkeeper booked annual contracts as monthly cash. R&D expenses are wrong because nobody capitalized them under the new Section 174 rules. Deferred
Last updated: May 2026 Ecommerce Bookkeeping: What Sets It Apart From Standard Books Ecommerce bookkeeping looks like regular bookkeeping until you open the books and find six months of Shopify deposits sitting in a clearing account with no reconciliation. Then it looks like a forensic accounting project. The difference between
Last updated: April 2026 Your seed investor asks for a 13-week cash flow forecast. Your Series A lead wants monthly cohort analysis. Your board expects a budget variance report. None of this was in the “how to start a startup” manual, and your bookkeeper cannot help. Startup accounting is not
