Top Three Reasons Why Businesses Should Outsource Tax Preparation

This is an interesting article on outsourcing which I found on the following Link

Many small and medium businesses are cropping-up every day all over the world. Only a few of them remain profitable, while over 70% are shutdown during the first three years of their operation. A primary reason is that they spend a great deal more of time and resources on their day-to-day operational activities and down the line lose focus on their core business. This brings down the profitability curve as the back-office tasks keep on gulping more and more resources. An easier way out is to outsource portions of your work to people who have expertise in those respective domains.

Your business can also utilize tax preparation services and tax processing services offered by professional service providers to file your taxes and returns accurately and on time. Here are the top three reasons why you should outsource your company’s tax preparation:

#1: Save up to 60% of your cost through offshore outsourcing

The math is simple. If you employ full-time resources who have ample experience to take care of your taxes efficiently, then you would end-up investing in their salaries, training, office space, workstations, benefits, software license, and a lot more. While if you outsource the work to an offshore company that handles tax processing services and already has a team of qualified and trained professionals then you would spend up to 60% less.

#2: Gain from the expertise of the tax preparation services provider

Companies that provide tax preparation services, tax processing services, VAT return services, income tax computation service, income tax return filing services, etc., have already invested in a solid infrastructure and their staff members have expertise in top-of-the-line tax computation tools like Intuit's Lacerte, Creative Solutions' Ultra-Tax, Intuit’s ProSeries, ATX, Drake, and many other popular financial software. Therefore, you won’t have to spend time in learning these tools. Moreover, the service provider’s staff would work at a faster turnaround and with greater accuracy.

#3: Easy to ramp-up and ramp-down resources to manage load

Typically, the finance team in small businesses (if at all they have one) takes care of the taxation part too. Throughout the year, the workload is constant but at the end of the quarter or year when the tax has to be calculated or during the time when your company takes critical expansion steps; it puts additional pressure on the finance team. If you outsource your accounting and tax preparation work, you can take advantage of a flexible team, wherein you can increase or decrease the team size whenever you want and get any amount of work done without hassles.

Through tax preparation outsourcing, you can remove yourself from the trouble to managing tax files and free-up your in-house resources to do more lucrative business development tasks.

How to be a good boss.. book review

This was published in The Star

Review by ANDREW LEE 

andrewlee@thestar.com.my

Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst

Author: Robert I. Sutton

Publisher: Business Plus

UNFORTUNATELY for many of us, bosses make our lives miserable. Of course there are exceptions, but in general, it seems that their only role in life is to annoy as many of their employees as possible.

Before you accuse me of launching a tirade against my own superiors, consider this sobering statistic from Robert I. Sutton's new book: 20 million Americans have left jobs to flee from workplace bullies, most of whom were bosses.

A 2007 Zogby survey of nearly eight thousand American adults found that of those abused by workplace bullies, 72% were bullied by their superiors.

We can thus conclude that many bosses in our world are just so-so, or worse yet, downright inept. The author's latest book follows the success of his previous work, "The No Asshole Rule."

The book was about the harm done by jerks (or assholes) in the workplace and what others could do to survive working with them.

Sutton explains that while words like bullies, jerks, creeps or tyrants could be used, "the word asshole best captures the fear and loathing I have for these nasty people." Following many months of research, Sutton realised that everything came back to a central figure – the boss.

He thus set about writing a new book with the desire to share how to be a skilled boss or how to work for one. Or, perhaps just to avoid his colleagues calling him "the asshole guy."

Says Sutton: "Bosses matter because most employees have bosses, are bosses or play both roles". This book is about what the good bosses do, not the mediocre or bad ones.

The book stresses numerous ways of thinking that contribute to the mindset of a great boss. It provides advice on how to lead teams, followed by examples of how good bosses go about managing theirs, and occasionally how bad bosses lead theirs to destruction.

Sutton provides proven advice based on extensive research. By talking to and interviewing several successful CEOs and leaders in the United States, he has managed to gain an insight into what goes on in the workplace, why some companies are more successful than others and how some sports teams continually manage to succeed at the expense of others.

Packed with case studies, he shines the spotlight on the best behaviour of bosses, and how best to adopt them.

Sutton also points out that the key to becoming a great boss is to continue learning and improving, never to rest on one's laurels.

There is no magic formula to what makes a good boss, and anyone who promises an instant pathway to success is either "ignorant or dishonest, or maybe both," says Sutton.

Doesn't this sound all too familiar? While I respect many business school graduates and their theories, many books written by them are littered with nothing but ideas that are common knowledge, or worse, management speak.

Sutton is, unfortunately, guilty of both. For instance, he writes that "good bosses have their fingers (and ears) on the pulse of what their employees are thinking, feeling and acting."

A bad boss shuns and belittles his employees, and is probably the last in and first out of work. The main problem, therefore, is identifying how these incompetent people rise to the top in the first place, and why they are not willing to change their behaviour.

If we are only to focus on the cream of the crop, we risk the same problems that teachers face in school – the inability to improve bad students.

The novelty of this book lies in the fact that the author bases his theories on successful bosses, not just on assumptions.

However, there is nothing else in this book that sets it apart from its competitors (and there are millions of management books floating around in the market).

There is also a distinct lack of wit in the book, and though some might say that management books are not renowned for being funny, I would argue that the boss who picks up this book could be forgiven for thinking that the world of management is really as dull as the reputation that precedes it.

If you think that you are a terrible boss, and have no idea how to improve yourself or your relations with employees, then this is probably the right book for you (provided that you want to improve).

However, most bad bosses would probably not recognise their own faults, either because they are stuck in their own comfort zone or because they choose to remain ignorant.

The rest of us may never become a boss in our lifetime – in which case the best you can hope for is that your immediate superior falls into the first category – that is a good boss.

Bringing up Children... Lessons to learn...

This is a wonderful article about raising children in the right way & making sure we give good citizens to the society... .Worth giving it a deep thought and acting on it...!!



One young academically excellent person went for an interview for a managerial position in a big company. He passed the first interview; BUT in that Company, the director did the last interview, made the last decision. 

The director discovered from the CV, that the youth's academic result was excellent all the way, from the secondary school until the postgraduate research, never was there a year he did not score. The director asked, "Did you obtain any scholarship in school?" and the youth answered "no". 

The director asked, " Did your father pay your school fees?". The youth answered, "my father passed away when I was one year old and it was my mother who paid my school fees". 

The director asked, " Where did your mother work?" the youth answered, "my mother worked as cloth cleaner." The director requested the youth to show his hands and the youth showed a pair of hands that was smooth and perfect to the director. 

The director asked, " Did you ever help your mother wash clothes before?" The youth answered, "never, my mother always wanted me to study and read more books, furthermore, my mother could wash clothes faster than I could" 

The director said, I have a  request, when you go back today, go and help to clean your mother's hand, and then see me tomorrow morning. 

The youth felt that the chance of landing the job was high and when he went back, he happily wanted to clean his mother's hands. His mother felt strange. With happiness  mixed with fear, she showed her hands to the kid.

The youth cleaned his mother's hands slowly and his tears fell as he did that. It was the first time he noticed that his mother's hands were so wrinkled, and that there were so many bruises in her hands. Some bruises were so painful  that she shuddered when his mother's hands were cleaned with water. 

This is the first time that the youth realized and experienced that it is this pair of hands that washed the clothes every day to earn him the school fees and that the bruises in the mother's hand were the price that the mother paid for his graduation and academic excellence and probably his future.

After finishing the cleaning of his mother's hands, the youth quietly washed all the remaining clothes for his mother. 

That night, the mother and son talked for a very long time. 
Next morning, the youth went to the director's office. The director noticed the tear in the youth's eye and asked: "Can you tell  what you did and learnt yesterday in your house?" 
The youth answered, "I cleaned my mother's hands and also finished washing all the remaining clothes".

The director asked, "Please tell me what you felt" 

The youth said:

"Number 1, I know what  appreciation is now'. Without my mother, I would not be successful today. 

Number 2, Now I know how to work together with my mother. Only now do I realize how difficult and tough it is to get something done. 

Number 3, I know the importance and value of family relationship."

The director said, "This is what I am asking, I want to recruit a person that can appreciate the help of others, a person who knows the suffering of others to get things done, and a person that would not put money as his only goal in life to be my manager. You are hired." 

Later on, this young person worked very hard, and received the respect of his subordinates, every employee worked diligently and as a team and the company improved tremendously.

The Lessons from this anecdote:
A child who has been protected and habitually given whatever he needs, develops "entitlement mentality"and always puts himself first. He is ignorant of his parents' efforts. When he starts work, he assumes every person must listen to him, and when he becomes a manager, he would never know the suffering of  his employees and always blame others. These kinds of people,  may/will achieve good results and  may be successful for a while, but eventually would not feel a sense of achievement or satisfaction. 

If we happen to be this kind of (protective) parent, this is the time to ask the question

- whether we did/do love our kids or destroy them. 

-You can let your kid live in a big house, eat a good meal, learn to play the piano, watch a big screen TV but when you are cutting grass, please let them experience it. 

-After a meal, let them wash their plate and bowl together with their brothers and sisters. 

-It is not because you do not have money to hire a maid, but it is because you want to love and show them the  correct way.
 
-You want them to understand that no matter how rich their parent are, one day they will grow old, become weak and that their hair too will grow grey.

-The most important thing is for  your kid to learn how to appreciate, experience and learn the effort and ability needed to work with others to get things done. They should also value, appreciate what the parents have done and love them for who they are!