Reviews

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-08-18
Summary: "Helpful info"

If your small business does its own taxes via software, instead of an accountant, then this book can provide good supplemental information. This book can also help you decide what to keep as personal expenses versus small business expenses, in order to minimize taxes.

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-20
Summary: "Great Recap for one's deductions"

This book is very concise and easy to read. It provides me with an overview of deductions to consider for my taxes. Unfortunately I did not find new items that would have saved me money, items that are/were not already covered by my advanced (Home & Business) turbo tax program. The sections related to IRS and how various items may trigger audits with them were most informative.
Depending on your background, you may also want to consider other publications by NOLO, if your primary goal is not related to business taxes, but to personal tax deductions. A quick search on Amazon will give you a list of NOLO books geared towards tax deductions for Professionals and Landlords.

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-03-17
Summary: "Deduct It: Lower YourSmall Business Taxes"

I would recommend this item for anyone interested in starting a new business from their home. The publication has information on what to deduct, forms to use, and how to keep records.

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-03-16
Summary: "Essential for Small Business"

If you're a small business owner, this book is essential for planning your tax deductions for the year as well as guiding you through your tax filing. It's written in the clear language of Nolo books with a good amount of examples and easy to understand flowcharts to help you determine which deductions are applicable to your situation. The tables for figuring out how to depreciate your possessions were also very useful.

PROS:
+ Clear, concise language with good examples, tables, and flowcharts
+ Helps you during tax time as well as tax planning for the year ahead
+ Completely updated for the current year
+ Helps you avoid audits

CONS
- There isn't much coverage of state to state tax filing differences.

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-03-05
Summary: "Fantastic Read - Wins the Dog-ear Challenge"

I thought this book would be somewhat dry (after all, we are talking about taxes and accounting), but it was extremely enlightening and helpful.

As I started reading this book, I developed a challenge, how many of the pages in the book would I dog-ear (fold down) for me to come back to and review because the content was something I found valuable and wanted to revisit. Given that this is a 514 page book (about taxes no less) it could be quite a challenge.

I dog-eared 87 pages, so about every five pages, there was something significant enough that I wanted to remember and come back and revisit as a reference.

The book was extremely interesting and would share things with other business owners that I was learning and the response was usually, "ooh, we're not doing that.", and not always in a negative way, there are a lots of different deductions that I never knew about or those that I knew of but didn't know much about.

I highly recommend this book to any small business owner. The book covers different tax situations whether you have an LLC, Partnership, S Corp, C corp, etc. It also helped to answer a lot of questions.

You can go to the Internet for a lot of your questions, but I've found you'll often find conflicting answers and wonder whose perspective is correct especially if no credentials are given. This book helps alleviate those concerns and is written in a straightforward, easy-to-read format.

I especially liked the coverage of the following topics:

- Section 179
- Health Insurance and other benefits and how your business structure affects what you can deduct and what doesn't count
- Information on business travel and that there are different rules for travel within and without the US
- Employing family members
- Tips about audits
- Different levels of tax professionals and what you can expect from each
- Discussion about business gift limits
- Using your vehicle for business
- Start-up expenses and what you can and can't include
- Retirement plans and how they can affect your taxes and your business if you have employees

Obviously, with 514 pages, there's a lot more that the book covers. I highly recommend any small business owner to get and read this book.