Archive for January, 2011
Basic Inventory Accounting Techniques
Many accounting principles are taught, but there is no reason specified for why you are supposed to account this way. It is the method you are taught and you go along with it. In my personal experience, inventory accounting techniques were one of these principles that was taught but never explained. Throughout the course of this paper, I will explain why inventory count and techniques are important, explain three inventory techniques, and describe how to use them.
When you own a business, knowing how much inventory you have is crucial. How else are you supposed to know if you have a surplus or shortage of goods. What is even more crucial is the way that you account for this inventory as it leaves your possession. Especially in today’s market, prices fluctuate rapidly. The item that came into your store a month ago probably does not cost the same as the identical product that came in yesterday. With a warehouse full of the same item, how do you differentiate between the products cost? How do you calculate what your profit off an item is if you do not know the original cost? Which numbers do you report to the IRS if you have several different costs of goods sold? This is all where inventory counts come in. That is why there is a system and regulations to follow when regarding inventory.
The first technique is FIFO, short for “first in, first out”. In this technique, the oldest good in inventory is the next one to be sold. When referring to a good being sold, I’m not talking about a specific good being sold, but instead the monetary value attached to that good. The second technique is, LIFO, short for “last in, first out”. This is the opposite of FIFO, with the last item checked into inventory being the first item to be sold. The third technique is weighted average. This technique does not give each individual good a price, but the good as a whole a price. In weighted average, each good, on paper, cost the company the same.
Now I will describe how to use each technique, starting with FIFO. Consider that at the beginning of the month you have 10 items purchased for $2.00 each. Then you get another shipment of 10 items at $2.50 each. To keep things simple, imagine these 20 items are the only ones you have in inventory. At the end of the month, you have sold 12 items. Using the FIFO technique, all 10 items purchased for $2.00 are sold because those were the oldest items in inventory. Then the two extra goods sold are accounted from the inventory received next. This would make the cost of goods sold $25.00. Now you would have eight items in inventory costing $2.50 each, for a total inventory of $20.00.
Using the same example, I will show LIFO used. At the end of the month, you again sell 12 items. This time, however, the ten items purchased this month will be the first ones sold. The remaining two items will come from the beginning inventory. Now the cost of goods sold is $29.00. The remaining inventory costs $16.00 on the books. Using this technique, as long as your inventory never gets to zero, the first items you bought will always be accounted in inventory.
The final technique I will discuss is Weighted Average. Using this technique, each good is assigned the same value, the average cost of good. To get the weighted average, the simplest way is to multiply the unit cost by the amount of units purchased for that amount. Do this for all different unit costs in the inventory. This will give you the amount you paid for all inventory in stock. Then divide this number by the amount of units in inventory. This is the weighted average. Now at the end of the month when you are calculating cost of goods sold, each good sold is recorded at this price. Using the previous example, the weighted average of the inventory would be $2.25 ( (10 x $2.00 + 10 x $2.50) / 20). Each of the twelve items sold would be marked as costing the company $2.25, totaling $27.00. The remaining inventory is equal to $18.00.
As you can see, the three different techniques used have brought different totals for cost of goods sold and inventory remaining, but if all the inventory was sold, the outcome would be equal among the different techniques.
Term Life Insurance
This policy holds a great value for the people who are settling down in life and have fixed short term goals in life.
The various types of Term Life Insurance are:
1.)Level Premium Term Life Insurance: As per this plan the premiums for the policy remains same throughout the entire term period. This is considered for the most common form of term plan.
2.)Return of Premium Term Life Plan: As per this plan the premium is paid for the fixed term and the 100% premium is paid back at the end of the policy. Therefore, the premium is also higher in this plan.
3.)Instant Issue Term Life Insurance: This policy reduces the formality of medical checkups and can be issued online within 15 minutes.
There are also added benefits which are available with Term Life Insurance. They can also be referred as included features. These features are available without paying any premiums.
1.)Accidental Death Benefit Rider: – As per this feature the insured is eligible for the benefit when dies due to an accident.
2.)Childrens Term Life Insurance: – This extends the life insurance coverage to the primary insureds children.
3.)Waiver of Premium Rider: – If the insured becomes completely disabled, the insurance coverage still continues.
Various plans from Companies: – Although a detailed features and benefits for the Term Life insurance can be found at policybazaar.com, however the two major key providers of this service are Reliance Life and Aegon Religare Term Plan.
Reliance Life: – This plan provides the coverage for the limited period of time. The key features include higher Interest protection with optional disablement and accidental coverage along with the discounted premiums for women.
Aegon Religare Term Plan: – This plan is available online on policybazaar.com and reduces the complication of paper work. Even this policy provides the coverage of death of the person during the policy term. All you need to do online is to know the correct amount on the plan calculator, and compare the terms and benefits with different products and with few clicks you can buy the policy on policybazaar.com.
Since the policies are available online, therefore they are widely popular now as people come from an educated background and are computer literate. This provides a smooth buying experience.
Payday Loans
With fast payday loans you’ll be able to get cash quickly. The one proviso is that you simply are in a position to pay it back again rapidly. You don’t get any points for guessing when you have to spend it back both, there is a very large clue inside the identify. For anybody who is not very certain and desires to create sure that their guess was correct, then it is around the day which you are paid. It’s not really as easy as that although, you can’t be unemployed and say that whenever you eventually obtain a job you will then spend back again the loan. The loan company requirements to know that you’re already in permanent employment and that you are earning enough to be able to manage the mortgage, as well as interest.
Some people possess a issue using the fact that there’s curiosity on the mortgage. They feel that if men and women possess the income to create a mortgage and they are capable to then get it back, it can be mere profiteering to cost interest as well. Nevertheless a lot of people understand that if a lending company didn’t charge interest there would be no incentive for them to really produce a loan in the first location. The sorts of folks who feel it’s problematic are probably planning to be suspicious any time a business is creating a profit. If they’re making a profit then that means that they are charging much more than they have to and they’re exploiting their buyers, who need some thing and are willing to pay more than needed to be able to get it. This is really a cost that’s often made from payday loan companies due to the fact lots of individuals believe their rates of interest are also substantial.
Inside a feeling needless to say, men and women are right to become a bit upset about having to pay far more compared to actual cost. As rational beings, they need to spend nothing for what they get. Even so they don’t anticipate to spend absolutely nothing for points, even things that are crucial to them. For example nobody expects to get food for free of charge, they accept that it costs cash. We even need to pay for that drinking water that arrives out of our taps, and we will need that to survive too. Does this imply that organizations are wrong to be producing a profit? Of course it doesn’t. They’ve the opposite impression towards the clients, they need to have the ability to cost an infinite quantity for the items or solutions that they provide. They don’t do this although (instead of just because it could be impossible to charge an infinite quantity). They do not get it done simply because then people wouldn’t be able to find the money for it and they would by no means sell something. As a result they have to carry their prices right down to what ever the client can manage to spend. So the producer desires to charge the maximum quantity they are able to along with the customer desires to pay the minimal quantity. The happy medium that’s found is called the price.
There is certainly no one, nevertheless, who is just a consumer or simply a producer. To get money, each client needs to function, they have to become component of an organisation. That is not usually true obviously, they may well have inherited prosperity, but their cash needs to occur from an individual who’s functioning or who has worked. Therefore the producer has to create cash so that they can pay their workforce. You might say, though, that this merely arrives out with the costs facet, even the operator could just get a salary from the firm, there is no need to create a profit. Nevertheless if all companies acted like that then they would don’t have any cash to ever invest. This indicates they’d by no means have the ability to increase. That indicates that the good organizations would not be able to do more enterprise than the poor organizations. It wouldn’t matter just how much they decreased costs, if they were not permitted to create a profit then they could never grow any larger as a firm. Needless to say you can say that you simply just take out the money for investment, and do not make that a part of the profit calculation. That could be great besides that you simply could allocate each part from the funds in that way and it might by no means seem as if everyone was ever before producing a profit.
What earnings genuinely mean is that you simply are taking assets at one price, combining them and making a product or services which is really worth a lot more. That’s precisely what they must be performing and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In case your company is producing a loss then you’re not allocating the sources properly to create them far more valuable and in case you continue to complete that then it’s correct which you really should go from company.
Although this hasn’t been applied to payday finance in particular, it surely does use equally to fast payday loans too as other services and goods.
Accounting For Small Businesses
What do we have in mind, when talking about big corporations in terms of governmental regulations and the use of accounting policies and practices? Of course regulations are heavier and stricter. Regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and Internal Revenue Service have oversight functions over corporate bodies that there is more interference on the part of the government. In some territories the SEC may even have quasi-judicial functions, resolving intra-corporate disputes and controversies.
With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 that lead to the creation of PCAOB or the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, accounting standards have been more stringent. Companies are now obliged to report on the efficacy of their internal control procedures in obtaining their varied objectives. They were also required to make detailed disclosures based on the generally accepted accounting principles.
Because of the nature of corporations, their accounting demands also are gargantuan. In a corporate set-up, there might be a dozen of divisions, segments and business units. The challenge is how to consolidate the financial performance of these sub-entities to come up with a consolidated statement of income. Big businesses like that of corporations necessitates centralized, more structured and well-defined accounting system.
On the other hand, directly opposite these mammoth corporations are small business, with capital ranging from a few hundred bucks to not more than 50,000 dollars, and usually taking the form sole proprietorship. These businesses usually are owned by a single individual or few individuals without really formalizing their agreement to form a legal partnership.
As such, the capital is mainly coming from the owner. The proprietor also normally does multi-tasking, wearing different hats at the same time. Because the business is small, the demands are also small, regulation and accounting wise. They are not the usual subject of scrutiny of governmental watchdogs. Of course the lean size of the business should not undermine the accuracy and completeness of accounting records. This matter transcends to all business entities regardless of the size. As a matter of fact, while the business is small, things must be set right and proper so it would be much easy to expand in the future.
Cost cutting is usually the strategy of small business. Sometimes, these measures would even impair the need of an accounting system that generates records and transactions. Owners of small business may have the tendency of not focusing on accounting concerns because it does not produce direct results on business. However, many good managers and finance people would recommend that a system, whether manual, or automated or a transition of both must be put in place.
Manual accounting is a form of accounting system that does not use accounting software or uses software but does not automatically process transactions. This is usually found in small businesses that maintain the physical book of accounts like journals and ledgers. All or almost all of the steps in the entire accounting cycle are done with lay hands. Starting from entering transactions in journal, summarizing them by posting in the ledger, preparation of trial balance, adjusting entries, up to the generation of financial statements and supporting notes; all these are manually done. These companies have accounting system, only, it’s manual. The main reason why companies still embrace manual accounting system is obviously pecuniary in nature. The company might still be in the start-up stage or perhaps it has small number of transactions and these transactions are just routinary. Although of course, this cuts cost, the main criticism that could be leveled against this set-up is it requires a lot of dirty work and space for maintenance of physical documents and records. As much as some companies would like to have a fully automated accounting system, their resources would not permit. In the process, they resort to a manual one.
Acquiring integrated systems through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) producing a totally paperless environment would prove untenable also for small business. A paperless environment, where transactions are automatically initiated, entries automatically generated and master files are automatically updated is an attribute of a fully automated accounting system. Reports are also generated with little or no human intervention at all. Moreover, these reports could be customized based on the specific need of the user. This would entail tremendous volume of resources, however. For purposes of economy, small businesses usually settle for an interface or commingling of both manual and fully automated systems, meeting half-way as they say. Although data are still inputted manually from source, productivity tools are employed to make the whole process faster and more efficient. Say, the system has the capacity to group together similar accounts into one. Instead of manually calculating the balance of say, Cash account, the system does the automatic posting for you. From raw transactions in a period, trial balances can be made available, so as with the financial statements to wit, Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Cash Flows and Changes in Equity. This capacity is way below fully automated systems but is more efficient compared to manual accounting.
To conclude, the business has to make a rather important choice whether to adopt an automated or settle to manual accounting system. It has to make an honest review of itself and check its capacity to shift. At the end of the day, what is more important boils back to the accuracy, reliability and completeness of accounting records and reports.
Umbrella Insurance
What is an umbrella insurance policy?
An umbrella policy is not like a different kind of insurance plan, but simply a liability policy that stretches out over the limits of your existing home insurance or auto insurance policy. And like an umbrella protects its carrier from the coming rainfall, an umbrella insurance policy protects policyholders from the claims of individuals that exceed the limits of their underlying home insurance or auto insurance policies. You don’t need a separate umbrella insurance policy for both home and auto coverage – one umbrella policy extends protection for claims under each policy.
How does it work?
Having a pool can be a lot of fun, but it can also bring a lot of liability to a home owner’s doorstep. If one of your friends or neighbors is visiting your home and is injured while swimming in or walking around your pool, it could result in a very large claim against your home insurance policy (depending on the nature and extent of the damages suffered). For the sake of this example, let’s say that you have a home insurance policy with limits of 0,000. Your children’s friends come over one afternoon to enjoy the pool and one of them slips and falls in, resulting in a neck injury and partial temporary disability that creates a need for several years’ worth of physical therapy and surgery in order for that person to walk again. This could result in a liability claim of million or more – but your home insurance will only pay up to 0,000. The rest of the claim is your responsibility to pay – unless you have an umbrella policy. If you did, the umbrella policy would pay the remaining 0,000 due and you would not have to sell your home or dip into your personal assets to pay the claim. The example would work the same way if your automobile was the cause of the injury rather than the pool.
Because umbrella policies are not required by law, it is up to you whether or not you have one. When you consider the damage to your finances and your future that a single liability claim could have, you might find that the additional protection of an umbrella policy covering your home and auto is just enough to help you sleep easier at night.
7 Ways to Improve the Efficiency of Your Online Business
Running an online business presents a whole new set of challenges. There are so many ways in which you can market your business that it is difficult to know where to start. Often business owners get so bogged down in trying to figure out what to do that next that it starts to affect the efficiency of the business. It’s important to keep reminding yourself of the key purpose of your business. When you do everything with your main strategy in the forefront of your mind, you will ensure that your business operates with maximum efficiency. Here are some tips to help you improve the efficiency of your online business.
1. Have a Clear Strategy for Your Online Business
Many companies simply start a website because everyone else is but they don’t think clearly through the purpose behind the website and how they want it to influence their business. The result is usually a great-looking website that really doesn’t add much value to the business. When taking your company online, have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your website. Do you want to use it to showcase your products or services, reach out to more potential customers, sell your services or interact with your customers? Having a specific objective in mind for your website helps prevent you from getting involved in a whole bunch of extra activities that don’t really make an impact on your business. This will help you to be more efficient in your online business.
2. Keep Things Simple
It is tempting to sometimes try to compete with the companies that rank high on the search engines. You look at their sites and see that they have various articles, blogs, FAQs, extensive product lines, chat forums and client service centers. These are all good elements of a website but they require a lot of time to keep current and effective. If you are a small or medium-sized business, you may not have the capacity to maintain all of these tools. Instead, select just two that you think will be most effective and focus on those. This will make sure that what you do is most efficient.
3. Look for Ways to Trim Expenses
Efficiency is not only about improving ways of doing things. It also includes effective ways for cutting back on unnecessary costs. Take a careful look at your office operations and consider if there are ways in which you could reduce your overhead. One cost-effective office solution is to switch from a traditional fax to an online faxing system. This can help you reduce the costs of office equipment and consumables and cut down on your telecommunications costs.
4. How Can You Speed up Processes?
Thanks to advances in technology, there are ways in which you can speed up your processes without compromising on service delivery or quality. Using online payment mechanisms, online faxing, online data capture and virtual services can help you to speed up your processes. Saving time in business effectively translates to saving money.
5. Keep Your Administration Current
Administration is a part of the business that no one likes to do yet it is essential. When you let your admin fall behind, you affect the efficiency of your operations. It’s much more efficient to pull up a file on your computer than to dig through piles of papers to find it. Create folders on your computer where you can file emails and faxes for easy reference. Make sure that your anti-virus software is regularly updated and that you run scans to keep your systems secure. Back up your system onto external hard drives. This will ensure that if computers are stolen or data is corrupted, you have a backup of your files and can continue to do business with minimal interruptions.
6. Put Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes
Always think of what your customers want. Think of how your products and services will be relevant to them. Think of ways to deliver your product that is easy and convenient for your customers. When you are focused on delivering a quality service to your customers, you will be more conscious of finding the most efficient way to do things.
7. Keep Current with Online Trends
The online industry is constantly evolving. New products are introduced almost on a daily basis that can help you to make your business more efficient. Easier ways of keeping in touch with customers and systems to help you manage your business can help you make your online business more efficient.

