Cut Down on Email, Increase Your Biz Dev So advise Bret Owens and Dan Markovitz at AccountingToday: Too many CPAs begin the day reading through their email inbox. No doubt, reputations depend on near instantaneous client service. But let's face it—if the only value you're providing for your client is rapid response, you'll eventually be replaced by someone in Mumbai, Shenzhen or some other time zone who can ...

S Corporation Rental Income Not Passive Except When It Is Peter J. Reilly reports at Forbes: Private Letter Ruling 201118011   A C corporation is a taxable entity.  Distributions that it makes to its shareholders are also, generally, taxable to them.  People who don’t want to pay tax twice on the same income will make an S election.  The shareholders are taxed on whatever the earnings are regardless of dist ...

Hey There, Bob Posen! Steven Zelin, aka "The Singing CPA," and Edith Orenstein, Accounting WEB blogger for Financial Executives International (FEI), have teamed up to create a music video celebrating the third anniversary of the Security and Exchange Commission's (SEC)Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting chaired by Robert C. (Bob) Pozen, senior financial lecturer at Harvard University. ...

Buying an Established Business The Wall Street Journal's "Running a Business" blog analyzes the benefits of buying vs. building: If you're interested in entrepreneurship, but lack ideas or time to create a new business, buying an established company may be a wise alternative. You'll inherit a working infrastructure complete with resources you'd otherwise have to secure on your own, such as equipment and emp ...

Shannon Pratt remembers what led him to BV and discusses industry growth in the '90s Neil Beatonshares his love of numbers, describes how Practice Aids help, and remembers the 'Wild West' days of early BV Rod Burkertdescribes difficulties of calculating DLOM and explains why professional specialization is critical Chris Mercer extols LinkedIn and explains how marketability discounts are linked to BV standar ...

Lari Masten discusses the importance of the Harmonic Mean metric when using the Market Approach Curtis Bernstein discusses testing assumptions in healthcare Karen Kaseno shares smart tips for managing your receivables Richard Gray discuss the importance of comparables when valuing partnership entities Jim Harrington discuss the importance of data sets Frank Rosillo discusses the importance of good report wr ...

Espen Roback (28:26) tells how he grew up in Norway, describes his work with the 'Ebay of Illiquid Securities,' and the way appraisers can provide value through consistency Brent Sloan (18:44) talks about his focus on Fair Value and why Financial Reporting most interested him because of his M&A background. Peter Agrapides (20:50) tells how NACVA offered him his first job, and shares thoughts for today's ...

Alphabet Soup AccountingToday's Danielle Lee writes that "A growing roster of professional designations fosters credential-mania," among CPAs, and devotes an article to surveying some of the most popular credentials today, including those from NACVA: The CVA. The National Association of Certified Valuators and Analysts' CVA credential does require a CPA license, along with coursework and an exam. Establishe ...

Why Most Investors Don't Measure Returns Correctly At the NY Times Bucks: Making the Most of Your Money blog, Carl Richards opines: There’s an old saying that you should take a look at your checkbook and your calendar to see what you really value as opposed to what you say you value, because the calendar and the checkbook never lie. Dollars and cents are easy to count in the checkbook. Happiness, on the oth ...

Business-For-Sale Market Heats Up So writes Angus Loden at The Wall Street Journal blog In Charge: On the challenges of entrepreneurs managing their businesses. Sales of small businesses rose 8% in the second quarter over the same period last year, hitting the highest level since the closing months of 2008, with a growing number of smaller firms finding buyers, according to business-broker data. Getty Image ...

House lawmakers passed a bill today to overhaul the U.S. patent system for the first time in nearly 60 years, Nathan Koppel notes on the Wall Street Journal Law Blog: The House passed the America Invents Act on a 407 to 117 vote, WSJ reports.  The bill would change how the U.S. grants patents and award them to the party which is “first to file” an invention instead of the “first to invent” it. The change wo ...

David Wanetick, Managing Director at IncreMental Advantage, LLC, a valuation firm with expertise in valuing intangible assets and emerging technologies, based in Princeton, NJ,  opines at The Business Insider: Valuing a patent is complex and imperfect. Below we’ll go into some detail surrounding the methods used to determine a patent’s value. Each is applied under different circumstances, and impacted by ma ...

Who Is the Mystery Hamptons Moneybags? asks the New York Times DealBook. The hunt is on for the New York mogul with questionable cash management skills. Speculation bubbled on Wednesday after a receipt left hanging out of a Capital One ATM in East Hampton that displayed its owner’s remaining balance as $99,864,731.94 — yes, that would be $99 million and change — was posted on Dealbreaker. The receipt, which ...

The Accountable Care Fiasco That's what the Wall Street Journal calls the state of developing real-world guidelines for "the Accountable Care Organizations that are supposed to be the crown jewel of cost-saving reform." The theory for ACOs, as they're known, is that hospitals, primary-care doctors and specialists will work more efficiently in teams, like at the Mayo Clinic and other top U.S. hospitals. ACOs ...

Lawyers and Accountants Once Put Integrity First So asserts Mark W. Everson, commissioner of the IRS from 2003 to 2007, in an opinion piece for the Sunday NY Times: Three or four decades ago, investors and regulators could rely on these professionals to provide a check on corporate risk-taking. But over time, attorneys and auditors came to see their practices not as independent firms that strengthen the int ...

No Parties After IFRS Adoption in Canada When measuring the costs of IFRS implementation, there are the not-at-all trivial costs of changing accounting methods.  But there are also opportunity costs of spending time becoming IFRS compliant that you could have spent doing something other things. "The greater cost has really been the diversion of intellectual capital during this time period from doing more pr ...

SEC Wakes Up to Reverse Merger Companies Weeks after several Chinese reverse-merger companies have stopped trading in the US amid widespread fraud allegations, the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued a warning that, hey, maybe investors ought to think twice about those reverse-merger companies.  Okey doke!  Mark Gongloff relays from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.  The Securities and Exchange Co ...

Forbes reports:  In the last (pre-drinking) session at the D: All Things Digital conference at the Terranea resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on Wednesday, we heard from  Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and founder of Netscape and various other tech start-ups. Chatting him up: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the session: Marc ...

More Feedback: Editor: I read the May 2011 QuickRead – “Tips for Valuators” concerning stub years. I have run into this issue several times and I have seen it misapplied many times and I am glad you wrote about the topic. I noticed two points in the article that I believe need further clarification. The first thing that I noticed in the article is that the PV factors need to be modified as well if you are d ...

Calculation Engagement vs Valuation Engagement. In April, QuickRead featured some analysis of In Re: Marriage of Hagar in our Case Law—State section.  At issue in Hagar was the difference between a Calculation Engagement and a Valuation Engagement.  The Calculation Engagement the husband in the case presented was deemed unsuitable by a judge, in this particular case, because it the valuator admittedly didn’ ...