#small-business
Financial management strategies and tools for small business owners
QuickBooks Online now requires choosing between FIFO and Moving Average Cost inventory valuation and adds bills of materials with manufacturing orders. How MAC recalculates a blended unit cost on every receipt, why the costing choice is effectively permanent, and the bookkeeping mistakes — stale BOMs, untracked WIP, missing overhead — that quietly erode manufacturer margins.
Intuit raised QuickBooks Online prices 17–25% in 2026 — Simple Start to $35/mo, Plus to $110/mo, Advanced to $250/mo — with payroll up ~20% and ACH fees doubled. Here's the full cost breakdown and a framework for deciding whether to stay or switch.
As of July 4, 2026, the SBA decoupled its 7(a) and 504 loan caps, letting qualified borrowers combine up to $5 million from each program — $10 million in total SBA-backed financing. Here's who benefits, how the two programs differ, and the structuring mistakes to avoid.
How to keep accurate books for a self-storage facility — reconciling manager deposits against software batch reports, applying lien-sale proceeds (which recover roughly 39 cents on the dollar) against receivables instead of booking them as income, spreading annual property taxes across months, and tracking economic occupancy and RevPAF instead of raw occupancy.
With gold near $4,200/oz in mid-2026, jewelry makers who cost pieces at historical purchase price lose margin on every sale. Recipe-based COGS — a fixed bill of materials, labor, and overhead per design, repriced at current metal replacement cost — plus channel-specific markups (2x direct, 3–4x Etsy, wholesale at 25% of retail) keeps pricing and books accurate.
Only 3% of small importers still lack a tariff mitigation strategy in 2026, down from 57% waiting it out in 2025. Five bookkeeping moves protect margins — capitalize duties into landed cost instead of expensing them, scenario-model your top 20% of SKUs, track the carrying cost of buffer stock, price product-by-product, and record country of origin per batch.
U.S. Bank's Enhanced Payments bundle charges $25/month to cut same-day ACH from $3 to $1.70, instant payments to $0.75, and domestic wires to $16. Break-even math shows it pays off at roughly 11 instant payments or 19-20 same-day ACH transactions a month — here's how to run the numbers for your business.
On June 22, 2026, Walmart quietly cut Marketplace referral fees in 14 categories — steepest in apparel, electronics, and home goods — while Amazon's 2026 FBA costs rose. How sellers can verify their new rates in Seller Center, stack New Seller Savings discounts, and track the margin impact in their books.
A flash report is a one-page, weekly summary of liquidity, productivity, and profitability metrics that surfaces cash problems weeks before the monthly close — critical when cash flow issues contribute to roughly 82% of small business failures. Here's what to include and how to build one in under 30 minutes a week.
On May 12, 2026, Xero went live with an Anthropic Claude integration that lets 4.5 million subscribers query live invoices, bank transactions, and reports conversationally. Here is how the bidirectional connection works, what the JAX Assure guardrails and session-only data policy actually promise, a due-diligence checklist before granting OAuth access, and why a plain-text Beancount ledger gives any AI the same access with no integration at all.
The US B2B BNPL market is projected to grow from $40.4 billion in 2025 to $48.4 billion in 2026 as Stripe, Amazon Business, Resolve, and TreviPay embed instant Net 30–90 terms into checkout. Here's how wholesalers and suppliers should book the provider fee (typically 1–5% of invoice value), distinguish recourse from non-recourse risk, and reconcile payouts that no longer match invoice timing.
Effective January 1, 2026, California's SB 642 expands the Equal Pay Act's definition of wages to cover bonuses, stock options, allowances, hotel accommodations, and travel reimbursements — and lets each paycheck restart the three-year claim clock, with back pay recoverable up to six years. Here is what changed and a practical compliance checklist for small employers.
