When You Die
 

Good records are the foundation of tax reporting.

Well kept records contain the evidence required to minimize tax liability and support claims in case of an audit.

Your own records of employment, marriage, cohabitation, business loans and the like are equally important because your tax advisor, financial planner, lawyer or accountant may not have all the information needed to support claims against you. Advisors change, firms move, professionals retire or die and records are lost or destroyed. Thus in the final analysis it is up to you, the individual taxpayer, to ensure the completeness of your records.

Complete historical documentation is especially important at the death of a taxpayer when the executors are making the final tax calculations for the deceased.

 

Management
Getting Ready for 2010

 

Planning with a short horizon has many advantages for the owner-manager over long-term strategic planning used by large corporations.

Incremental Management for Small Business
Incrementalism is a method of achieving goals by working through a series of ad hoc stages rather than using an overarching prescriptive plan. As each phase is achieved and completed, a plan is developed to get to the next stage. Even though the planning takes place bit by bit, the ultimate goal is always kept in sight.

Take for instance the goal of driving from Halifax to Vancouver. A structured plan would lay out in advance the entire route to be taken, the number of kilometers, the average daily distance to be driven, each day's destination, each night's accommodation, and so on. The entire trip would be planned and the job of the drive would be to stick to the plan; any variation would require a new plan.

An incremental approach on the other hand would simply identify the goal as Vancouver, a destination to be reached by driving west from Halifax. Each day a decision on how to advance the following day would have to be made based on the location that had been reached the previous night. Thus, although no complete itinerary was ever designed, the end result would be the same: arrival in Vancouver.