This month’s CCPA looks at interest income, and the long and short of it is: your spring cleaning should be figuring out what to do if you’re sitting on a significant amount of cash. We don’t give investment advice around here but we want to highlight that for the first time in 10+ years there is actually interest income that can be generated by cash. Additionally, the flip side of higher interest rates is usually higher inflation so any cash sitting in a bank account is actually losing real purchasing power.

When the calendar turns to January, it means one thing for your Harmony team – tax season has begun. In this month’s Commonsense CPA we’re tackling a number of basic considerations as we enter our busiest time of year, as well as a brief expense review for 2022.

Congress just passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act. It is, of course, over four thousand pages. Read on for Harmony’s high level overview of its contents.

As the calendar turns over from 2022 to 2023 we want to take a minute to remind you of the services performed by Harmony Group so any clients who are reading this can better understand our services. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and take advantage of these services or ask questions about anything you don’t understand or want to learn more about.

The DC Transportation Benefits Equity Amendment Act of 2020 goes into effect next month. Beginning 1/15/23, your business may need to replace its parking benefits with some other benefit, or pay a monthly fee to the city.

This month's Commonsense CPA focuses on the tax unicorn that is the HSA: there are no income limits to using an HSA. The only real qualification is that you have to be on a High Deductible Health Care Plan (HDHP) and not subject to coverage under other plans (like Medicare, VA, etc). Your HSA is a beautiful option to reduce your taxes and lower your out of pocket health care costs.

The midterms are over and DC is now officially the first major city in more than two decades to upend the entire compensation structure of its restaurant industry. Initiative 82 is here - what does that mean for your business?

This month's Commonsense CPA offers up another primer on a basic but powerful tool in your business's arsenal for hiring and employee retention, and one that's increasingly legally mandated for businesses of all sizes - your retirement plan.

This month’s Commonsense CPA offers up another primer on a basic but powerful tool in your business's arsenal for hiring and employee retention, and one that's increasingly legally mandated for businesses of all sizes - your retirement plan.

This month's Lesson From the Line is a primer on the differences between tips and service charges - especially for those who don’t realize that the two compensation systems are vastly different, by law, or need a reminder of all of the nuances that need to be accounted for.

Harmony Group’s Commonsense CPA explains depreciation and how your business can make use of this very powerful deduction.

As we move into the hottest month of the year, it's a good moment for Lessons From the Line to take a look at the natural ebbs and flows of our industry - we're in a (mostly) blazing DC Summer and your revenue could be trending in the wrong direction. Read on to brush up on the nuances of this industry’s ebbs and flows.

This month’s Commonsense CPA gives an early digest of the Inflation Reduction Act legislation. We’ll be following up with more substantive details as they’re released later this year. This is a repost of Harmony Group’s Commonsense CPA, which you can follow here.

As we gear up for another referendum on the Tipped Minimum Wage (Initiative 82), it’s important to remind our clients of an important law that passed after the last referendum in 2018.

This month we’re discussing credit card fees because the vast majority of customers pay with a credit card and we field many questions from clients about the intentionally inscrutable nature of credit-card processing fees. So let’s start at the beginning, the difference between a credit and debit card.

This month’s Commonsense CPA focuses on an attractive retention tool that is generally underutilized by small businesses: Educational Assistance Programs. You may not be able to beat the entire labor market by expanding your benefits, but I believe that investing in your people will always pay dividends, plus a well designed plan can be easy to administer and adapt to the current economic conditions of your business.

Many of our clients are inundated by offers to take out “loans” and lines of credit from point-of-sale operators, third-party delivery companies, credit card companies and endless boiler room operations besieging our clients with enticing “loan” offers. We’ve put loan in quotation marks in the preceding sentence because what is being offered to clients aren’t actually loans in many cases, they are merchant cash advances.

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” - Milton Friedman

A slew of bad press that can be summed up as: The IRS is understaffed, underfunded, overwhelmed, and they’d like us all to be very patient with them.

We see it all the time. The end of the year comes along and we get a detailed list of what you’ve paid in wages throughout the year. There, front and center, is a W2 being paid to a partner. Let’s take a closer look at this picture.