Defining Rights and Establishing Control to Protect Your Firm and Clients In this article, the authors propose best practices used to establish acceptable use policies (AUP). These AUPs define rights and establish controls that protect the firm and client information. ...

and How Can You Make it Work for You? In this article, Dr. Frederiksen discusses branding and the value and importance of maintaining and creating a brand. ...

How to Retire in Your 30s or 40s The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement encourages people to save as much as half of their income in their early years so they can retire sooner and focus on other pursuits as they live off their investment portfolio.  Tom Anderson provides several retirement calculators and tools geared to the FIRE movement. To read the full article in CNBC, click: Use Thes ...

Small Business Borrowing Falls to Lowest Point Since October Small business borrowing fell in April to its lowest point since October and was down five percent from April 2016, according to the Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index.  The drop is seen as an indicator of potentially slowing economic growth. To read the full article in Reuters, click: U.S. Small Business Borrowing Drops to Six Mo ...

How Personal Financial Planning Complements CPA Practices Adding personal financial planning services can help CPA firms build stronger bonds with clients and open up opportunities for referrals, writes Stuart Kessler, CPA, PFS.  He shares several techniques that can help your PFP practice, beginning with helping clients feel relaxed and comfortable during initial meetings.  CPAs who are interested in addin ...

How to Tell the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth The often-unspoken truth is that many deposition or cross-examination questions that expert witnesses in the field of forensic accounting, business valuation, or matrimonial litigation will be asked are written to make the truth sound like a lie and a lie sound like the gospel. This second article of the Unimpeachable Neutrality series offers proactive t ...

Executive Services (Part II of IV) In the May/June 2017 issue of The Value Examiner, the authors gave a detailed description of how clinical services for physicians can be calculated. QuickRead is pleased to present an overview of this series, which will be presented in four parts. Please look for the more detailed analysis in The Value Examiner. This article is a follow up to the April 23, 2017 QuickRead a ...

In earlier blog posts we discussed the potentially pernicious effect of a decline in the value of pre-public companies on equity compensation granted to employees.  Sujan Rajbhandary, senior member of Mercer Capital’s Financial Reporting Valuation Group, explains that unlike preferred investors, employees also depend on their employers for current income. To read the full article in Mercer Capital's Financi ...

If you are feeling stressed and overworked, it is time to re-evaluate your choices.  This article offers three tips for adding more balance to your day. To read the full article in Inc., click: 3 Tips to Stop Feeling So Overworked and Overwhelmed. ...

When helping clients claim Social Security benefits, past planning strategies may act as the best guides.  Over the last several months, we published dozens of stories including insight from advisers and analysts on Social Security planning tips and strategies.  Some of these include insight related to long-term funding issues, clients working abroad, evaluating the impact of taxes as well as tips for deali ...

What Your Expertise is Worth When pursuing new engagements, financial consultants often face competition from others who are willing to accept below-market rates. This fee-based competition can be demoralizing and frustrating, but the tips shared in this article may help. ...

Does the IRS or Anyone Care? (Part II of II) Part one of this article presented the “current method” and “option pricing method” (OPM) for allocating value to common stock for 409a valuations, and how these two methods differ in pricing of common stock. Part two examines the implied changes made by OPM and how it affects stakeholders. The article begins with a brief review of the key impacts on the valuatio ...

When and how do externally-driven events affect company value?  What certain events constitute meaningful data points from a valuation perspective?  And are they benchmarks or outliers?  Lucas Parris, senior member of Mercer Capital’s Financial Reporting Valuation Group, explains. To read the full article in Mercer Capital's Financial Reporting Blog, click: Amazon, Whole Foods, and Value Implications. This ...

Unproductive meetings are unpopular with workers and costly for businesses.  Experts advise companies to treat meetings as a last resort and to focus on making the meetings they do have more efficient. To read the full article in InTheBlack, click: Is it Time to Ban Meetings? ...

Self-directed IRAs and 401(k)s are increasingly popular.  CPAs are well-positioned to help clients ensure their retirement savings in these accounts do not fall into a prohibited transaction trap. To read the full article in AICPA, click: Don’t Let Clients’ Retirement Fall into this Trap. ...

Funeral Service Retirement Challenges The funeral industry is dynamic and one where often the directors “build to serve” and overlook the importance of “build to sell”. The authors here provide an overview of the valuation and consulting opportunities. ...

Does the IRS or Anyone Care? (Part I of II) In part one of this two-part article, the author presents the two methods for allocating value to common stock for 409a valuations, and then show how they affect the pricing of common stock. By way of background, to meet FMV, the standard of value requires measuring value under the representation of a hypothetical willing buyer and a hypothetical willing seller, b ...

Acknowledged king of the unicorns, Uber has raised over $8.8 billion of private funding since its founding in 2009, most recently at an equity value reported to be on the order of $70 billion.  In the wake of a highly-publicized internal investigation of the culture at the ride-sharing firm and a recent personal tragedy, founder Travis Kalanick is reportedly contemplating a three-month leave of absence from ...

Knowing what to do when your client receives a notice from the Internal Revenue Service can be a useful skill.  Here are 13 pointers, from what to do when the IRS sends a notice of deficiency to whether to extend the statute of limitation. To read the full article in The Tax Adviser, click: IRS Notice Response Tips Everyone Should Know. ...

Having a holistic understanding of your company's financial situation and value drivers is necessary to assess the organization’s performance, risks, challenges, and opportunities and drive long-term growth.  Learn three ways finance professionals can manage environmental, social, and governance risks. To read the full article in AICPA Insights, click: Three Tips to Manage Sustainability Risks and Drive Val ...