In this episode of e-commerce news we talk about taxes because tax season is coming up we talk about some specific things that e-commerce business owners should know about tax season the first tip I have for you guys and this is really the biggest one double check that you’re not missing anything any meals that might be able to be expensed any trips that were in any way business-related really go through look at all your receipts make sure you’re not missing anything because if you’re missing a hundred-dollar dinner that you went to maybe you took a client out that’s a lot of tax money that you could be saving a lot of people want to think about what’s the best tip should I be an S-Corp sure I be an LLC things like that really high level stuff but probably the easiest way to save a lot of money in your taxes is make sure you’re not missing any expenses I recommend having a separate credit card that is only for business expenses have a separate bank account these are really some of the basic things but go through make sure you’re not missing any expenses the next tip with tax season coming up that I have for you guys is make sure that you’re writing off everything that you can do you use your phone for business do you use or going out ought to eat and you are you talking about business are you going on vacation and meeting up with people to talk about business really make sure that you’re not missing anything that you could potentially be writing off I know I’ve done this with my business there’s a lot of things that I wasn’t sure if I could I couldn’t write off and by the time I found out I could write them off it was too late the season had already passed and I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of doing or amended tax return the next tax tip I have for you guys is higher the pros I mean you don’t need to do all this yourself I like to do a lot of my own bookkeeping. So I can keep track of my expenses but the first year when i was doing my bookkeeping I didn’t know what I was doing and I you spending hours and hours trying to figure out should this expense be in this category or this category or how many different accounts should I have things like that and I ended up hiring a bookkeeper that specifically came sat down with me and she said okay this should be in this account there should be in this account and then once I spent a few hours with her I could do everything on my own I didn’t need to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on reoccurring bookkeeping fees but it’s worth paying someone to figure out how to at least set up your accounting system and how you should be properly doing everything for your business. So the next thing I need to tell you guys about is don’t forget about sales tax this is depending on what kind of shopping cart you’re on and stuff like that it’s easy to forget that you and collecting state sales tax all along and another thing is if you sell on amazon you do amazon FBA that’s a big mess when it comes to state sales tax the way it works and I’m not an expert at this but this is what at least I’ve heard is that if you do amazon FBA wherever the item is located if it’s shipped within that same state you need to pay state sales tax there. So let’s say my business is located in California and we have to pay state sales tax to any items that we send that the in recipient is also in California but for instance if I’m doing amazon FBA we send it to the FBI a warehouse and if let’s say there’s an FB a warehouse in Florida that sends it to a customer in Florida as well we’d need to pay a portion of the state sales tax give it to the Florida government this can get messy there’s  states which means that there’s  possible opportunities to have to pay state sales tax I will say and once again I’m not recommending this but I did talk to someone who did a few million dollars in amazon sales and basically what he said is net they have to come after you one by one the different states. So Florida might not come after you for the eighty dollars a state sales tax that you owe them combined it might be a lot of money but they probably won’t do it I’m not recommending this but this is someone that I know that’s doing a few million dollars in sales and he basically said that good luck to the states coming after me. So keep that in mind but if you are doing amazon FBA you might want to look into the legal ramifications and all that kind of stuff on your own see what you need to do and what you don’t need to do the last tip I have for you guys is automated you can use QuickBooks online or I actually use 0 XE r 0 and it has a lot of great features and one of the things that it does is it ties in with your credit cards and your bank account and it automatically pulls in transactions. So that you can look at it and say okay this transaction and tag it and what one of the benefits to you can create rules and you can say any kind of transaction that has the word PayPal for instance well that’s sales or maybe it’s a vendor you’re paying for instance we pay for fabric are one of the people we buy fabric from is blue moon. So if it has blue moon in the credit card title automatically tag that is materials for producing dance clothing. So use some kind of automated software it’s going to make life a lot easier if your business is doing any size you know let’s say just an artificial number over fifty thousand dollars a year in revenue you don’t want to be doing it in Excel it’s going to be way too time-consuming it’s worth paying the 30 bucks a month or whatever it is  or a QuickBooks online thanks guys that’s all the tips I have for you and don’t forget to sign up for my free ecommerce success pack I have a lot of new stuff I’m adding new checklist actually right now I’m going to be adding an SEO checklist really soon. So thank you guys and see you next episode.