Plain-text accounting insights, tutorials, and updates from the Beancount.io team.
Puerto Rico's Act 38-2026, signed March 20, 2026, ends the 0% Act 60 Individual Resident Investor rate for new applicants — decrees secured by December 31, 2026 keep legacy 0% terms, later filers pay 4%, the program extends to 2055, and LLC-owned homes no longer qualify.
Custom puppets sell for $500–$1,500 yet take 20–100 hours to build, so untracked labor quietly destroys margins. How professional puppet makers should price commissions with the materials + labor + overhead + profit formula, book 50% deposits as deferred revenue instead of income, separate design-licensing from fabrication revenue, and handle post-Wayfair sales tax on interstate theater clients.
84% of medical student borrowers owe $100,000+ and residents earn $60,000–$70,000 while their debt suggests far more — a gap Panacea Financial, a physician-founded division of Primis Bank, underwrites around with no-cosigner PRN loans, refinancing, and practice financing. What niche banking gains, what it gives up, and why the 2026 Grad PLUS elimination changes the math.
Contracts receivable — typically 55–60% of trailing twelve-month production in a healthy orthodontic practice — is a distinct metric from accounts receivable, and tracking it correctly requires ASC 606-style deferred revenue schedules, monthly insurance write-off reconciliation, and a chart of accounts that separates production, collections, and write-offs.
Effective July 1, 2026, Ontario cut its small business corporate tax rate from 3.2% to 2.2% and raised its eligible income limit from $500,000 to $600,000. Calendar-year CCPCs must prorate to a blended ~2.7% for 2026, and the unchanged $500,000 federal limit creates a new $100,000 band taxed at 17.2% — here's what to verify before your fiscal year closes.
Inland Revenue's May 2026 "Current GST Issues" paper poses 56 questions across eight reform areas for New Zealand's 40-year-old GST Act — excluding zero-rated exports from the $60,000 registration threshold, reclassifying student accommodation as commercial dwellings, zero-rating residential solar exports, and a 5% materiality test for error correction. Here's what small businesses, freelancers, and landlords should track before draft legislation lands.
New York's DCWP fined production company Splashlight $528,817 for paying fewer than 1 in 5 freelance contracts on time. Here's what the Freelance Isn't Free Act requires — written contracts for work over $800, payment within 30 days, six years of records — and how similar laws in Illinois and California now apply nationwide.
A 1.3 factor rate on a $50,000 merchant cash advance means $65,000 owed no matter how fast you repay — an effective APR that can exceed 300%. How confession-of-judgment clauses let lenders freeze bank accounts without a hearing, why stacked borrowers default at 3–5x the normal rate, and which states now ban COJs.
Liberia replaces its 13% GST with an ~18% VAT on January 1, 2027, with mandatory registration running July 1 to December 31, 2026. Here's how GST and VAT differ, why the change forces businesses to track input and output tax separately, and a practical bookkeeping checklist to get compliant before the deadline.
Laundromat utilities run 20–25% of gross revenue, which makes water and gas meters a second independent ledger — convert metered consumption into an implied cycle count and revenue figure, compare it to coin-box counts, and a persistent gap over 5–8% flags theft, leaks, or miscalibrated machines. Includes a weekly-to-annual checklist covering multi-stream income accounts and Section 179 equipment expensing.
Starting with 2025 year-of-income returns filed in 2026, Kenya's KRA automatically cross-checks declared income and expenses against eTIMS invoices, withholding tax records, and customs data — expenses without a matching electronic invoice are reclassified as taxable profit. Here's who's affected, the exempt categories, and a compliance checklist.
House flippers are almost always IRS "dealers," not investors — flip profits are ordinary income on Schedule C plus 15.3% self-employment tax, often a combined rate over 40% versus the 15–20% capital gains rate flippers expect. How the Winthrop factors decide dealer status, why rehab costs must be capitalized into COGS, and four strategies (including an S corp election) that reduce the hit.
