As every reader will surely recall, the federal government issued a number of tax proposals for private corporations last summer. The government ultimately abandoned or replaced all of them, except for new rules that address so-called “income splitting.” Those rules, now in force, are extraordinarily complex and will impose a heavy compliance burden on small business. The rules should be set aside.

Income splitting involves diverting dividend income (and certain other types of income) from one family member to another member in a lower tax bracket. The planning is disarmingly simple.

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This week marked the one-year anniversary of the launch of the government’s much-maligned plan to overhaul the tax rules governing Canadian controlled private corporations (CCPCs), which originally proposed to shut down three areas: income sprinkling of dividends among family members, the accumulation of passive income inside of CCPCs, and surplus stripping, whereby dividend income is effectively converted into lower-taxed capital gains.

The proposal regarding surplus stripping has been abandoned (at least for now), but legislation limiting income sprinkling has been passed and is effective for 2018. Similarly, a new rule addressing the accumulation of passive income in a CCPC by restricting the corporation’s access to the small business deduction’s low tax rate once its passive investment income exceeds $50,000 will begin applying in 2019.

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Technology is changing how everything gets done – from how we communicate, to how we shop, to how we drive. Technology is also transforming how business gets done – and the implication is clear: technology can be the key to help you power your prosperity.

But, the constant wave of new technologies can be overwhelming for small businesses to understand, let alone keep up with. In this three-part blog series, we discuss Intuit’s® approach to emerging and advanced technologies. In this third post, Laurie McCabe, co-founder at SMB Group, talks to Bharath Kadaba, senior vice president and chief innovation officer at Intuit, about blockchain and how small businesses could potentially benefit from it in the future.

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“Fair market value” is an important concept in tax law. That phrase, FMV, is used throughout our Income Tax Act, appearing literally hundreds of times, from the rules to be used to value inventory (“lower of cost and fair market value”) to the determination of the appropriate amount that a charity should put on a donation receipt when property is donated “in-kind” to the charity.

How fair market value is actually established, however, can be the subject of some disagreement, as we learned in a decision released by the Tax Court this week concerning the appropriate value to be ascribed to wine that was donated to two Ottawa charities.

In 2005 and 2006, the taxpayer donated 21 bottles of wine, consisting of 19 different labels and vintages, for use in charity wine auctions held to benefit the Ottawa Food Bank and the Ottawa Chamber Music Society.

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Oh yeah: We also have a fresh batch of QuickBooks® Online updates and improvements to add to your May jubilation. There’s a ton of goodies this month, so let’s get right to it!

New! Get paid faster with Progress Invoicing
In a nutshell: Waiting until the end of a long project to get paid stresses the mind — and the bank account. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce Progress Invoicing is here! You can now bill customers for ongoing projects and get paid incrementally as you complete stages of the job.

How it works: When you start a project, you establish an overall estimate, then schedule invoices to go out after completing portions of the work. Or you can also schedule invoices around custom project milestones.

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