4Thought Blog

Job costs are the lifeblood of your construction business and accurately estimating them will determine if a project will make money.

Managing job costs across the life of the project will ensure that your firm makes money on every job. Moreover, those job-by-job profits make the office and your executive salary possible.

Despite this, some CFOs don't take job costs seriously. Some see tracking those costs as more trouble than it is worth, while others think that the costs are so obvious that tracking them seems like extra, unnecessary work.

Neither is true and both can limit your firm's profitability. Here are seven tips that can make job cost tracking easier than you might think:

The new federal SECURE Act is intended to expand opportunities for individuals to increase their retirement savings and to simplify the administration of retirement plans.

Here are some changes that are most likely to affect individuals, including some that aren't related to retirement savings.

The Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act was mainly intended to help individuals save more for retirement.

But the new law also contains provisions that help simplify the administration of retirement plans for employers and allow more employees to participate in 401(k) plans. Here are some provisions that may affect business owners.

It's unclear how long today's taxpayer-friendly rate environment will last. C corporation shareholders may want to hedge their bets by taking proactive measures to minimize the overall tax hit on corporate income.

Here's a possible strategy that may allow owners to cash out corporate wealth at a relative low tax cost, while providing several other long-term tax benefits.

A recent spending package signed into law by President Trump on December 20 retroactively resurrects and/or extends several key tax breaks through 2020. It also provides tax relief for victims of federally declared disasters.

Here are ten breaks that can benefit eligible individuals.

What is the "regular rate of pay" for a nonexempt employee? The answer is needed when calculating hourly overtime wages, which must exceed base wages by 50%.

New regulations from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) that take effect January 15 update the definition of "regular rate of pay" to guide your overtime pay calculations.

There’s good news for rental real estate owners regarding the fruitful Qualified Business Income Deduction.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act introduced a new deduction for individuals, estates and trusts that own interests in so-called "pass-through" business entities for 2018 through 2025. The deduction can equal up to 20% of an owner's share of qualified business income from an interest in one or more pass-through business entities. The QBI deduction is subject to limitations for higher-income owners, but it can be an important tax-saving break for many small business owners.

The eligibility rules for this deduction have been a source of confusion. Only income from a "business" counts as QBI — but the term "business" isn't defined in the statutory language that created the QBI deduction. So, there was a question about whether a rental real estate venture could be classified as a business for QBI deduction eligibility purposes.

Long ago, in some countries, kingdoms used to be passed to the oldest child — and often, the oldest male. While this may have had advantages in ancient monarchies, it has no place in family businesses.

In the case of family-owned businesses, it is still sometimes the practice to install the oldest child, and the oldest son, as the successor CEO.

Experience shows that this often leads to inefficiencies and mistakes that jeopardize the continued existence of these family businesses. An old saying, "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," describes the fact that many family businesses that are passed down to children and then grandchildren tend not to survive through the third generation.

Manufacturers - take a look around your facility. If you've been building up piles of scrap, excess raw materials, obsolete equipment, returned inventory and spare parts, you probably need an investment recovery program.

Idle assets have value to someone and selling them off makes sense for manufacturers. As much as 70 to 90% of every dollar generated by investment recovery goes to a company's bottom line as profit, according to the Investment Recovery Association, a trade group for managers of surplus and idle assets.

In general, government contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder. Yet prevailing wage laws require contractors to pay wages that are comparable to those for similar work in the same city or geographical area. Such laws can make it difficult for contractors to win public projects.

However, you may have an opportunity to reduce costs and make your bids more competitive by leveraging fringe benefits. Let's look at this strategy.