Tax Center/Business Taxes

You started a business. The IRS noticed.

Nobody opens a restaurant because they love quarterly filings. Here's the paperwork side of being your own boss — entities, estimates, payroll, deductions — explained once, in plain English, by people who do it for a living.

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You'll notice there are no dollar figures on this page. That's deliberate.

Rates, brackets, and limits get adjusted every year, and a guide with last year's numbers is worse than no guide at all.

So this page sticks to the things that stay true: how the pieces fit, where the traps are, and what has to happen on time. The current numbers — what the limits are this year, what your situation actually owes — are a phone call away, and that call is free.

Pick your container.

How the business is structured decides how it's taxed, what you can be sued for, and how much paperwork you've signed up for. The big three, honestly described.

Sole proprietorship

The default. You and the business are the same animal: profits land on your personal return, and self-employment tax applies to essentially all of it. Simple to start, zero legal separation. Fine for testing an idea; worth outgrowing once the idea works.

LLC

A legal wrapper, not a tax category. It puts a wall between the business's problems and your house, while the IRS taxes it like a sole prop or partnership by default — or like an S corporation if you elect it. Flexibility is the selling point. Use it.

S corporation

An election, not a thing you found at the courthouse. You become an employee of your own company: a reasonable salary through payroll, the rest as distributions — which can trim self-employment tax meaningfully. The price is real payroll, real filings, and real discipline.

Which one?

It's arithmetic, not ideology. The right answer depends on profit, payroll, state, and where the business is headed — and it changes as those change. We run the math, show our work, and rerun it when your life moves. No religion about any of it.

Quarterly estimates.

Nobody withholds taxes from your invoices. The IRS noticed that, too.

The American tax system is pay-as-you-go. Employees never see it happen; owners have to do it on purpose, four times a year.

The payments land in April, June, September, and the following January — a schedule that is neither quarterly nor intuitive, but it's the one we've got. Each payment is your running guess at the year's tax bill, paid in installments before the year is over.

Guess too low and the IRS charges you for the privilege — penalties and interest, even if you pay in full come April. There are safe-harbor rules: pay in enough, pegged to this year's bill or last year's, and the penalty math leaves you alone. The exact percentages are the kind of detail that shifts with the rules, which is why we keep track of them so you don't have to.

Done right, the estimates true themselves up as the year moves — a good quarter means a bigger payment, a slow one means relief, and April arrives as a formality instead of an ambush. That's the whole trick. It just requires somebody watching.

Payroll.

The most unforgiving paperwork in the building. Handled right, or not at all.

The day you hire someone — or elect S-corp status and start paying yourself a salary — you become a tax collector for the government. Congratulations.

Every paycheck now carries withholding for income tax, Social Security, and Medicare. That money was never yours; you're holding it in trust, on a deposit schedule, with quarterly federal filings to prove you did and W-2s to wrap the year. The penalties for getting payroll wrong are famously merciless, because the government takes a dim view of people spending its escrow.

Then the states weigh in. California runs its employer-side payroll obligations through the EDD — registration, withholding, regular filings. Nevada has no personal income tax to withhold, but don't mistake that for a free pass: it keeps employer obligations of its own. Two states, two rulebooks, and we work both daily.

Our advice on payroll is short: don't improvise it. It's the one part of the operation where "close enough" costs real money.

The deductions people forget.

The standard is "ordinary and necessary" for your trade. The religion is documentation. Believe in both and most of this takes care of itself.

Home officeThe part of your home used regularly and exclusively for the business. "Exclusively" is doing real work in that sentence — the kitchen table doesn't count.
Vehicle & mileageBusiness miles count; the commute doesn't. Keep a log as you go — a mileage diary invented in April convinces no one.
Equipment & depreciationThe truck, the oven, the rig. Write it off now or spread it over years — the timing is strategy, and current limits apply. Call before you buy, not after.
Retirement contributionsOwner retirement plans take pre-tax dollars off the table for your own future. The yearly limits move; the logic doesn't.
Health insuranceSelf-employed owners can often deduct their own premiums. Often — the rules care about how you're structured, which is half of why structure matters.
Professional servicesLegal, bookkeeping, accounting — including the people who find the rest of this list for you. The paperwork of doing business is a cost of doing business.
Travel & mealsBusiness travel is deductible; meals partly so, within current limits. The receipt and the reason are the whole game. "Conference in Vegas" works better when there was a conference.

Recordkeeping, the short course.

Every deduction above lives or dies on this. Three habits, none of them hard.

Separate the money.

A dedicated business bank account and card, from day one. Commingled funds are how legitimate deductions die in audits — and how LLC walls get knocked down.
Write it down warm.

Books kept monthly, while you still remember what the charge was. Reconstructing a year from bank statements every April is a hobby nobody chose.
Keep the paper.

Returns, receipts, payroll records — held for several years at minimum, longer for anything involving property. Storage is cheap. An undocumented deduction isn't.

What we take off your plate.

All of the above, in practice. You run the business; this page becomes our problem.

Entity analysis

The sole-prop / LLC / S-corp math, run on your actual numbers and rerun when the business changes shape. In writing, with a recommendation.

Quarterly estimates

Calculated, trued up against the year as it actually happens, and put on your calendar with the vouchers ready. No ambush in April.

Payroll coordination

Your people — and your own S-corp salary — paid right and on time, the filings handled, the deposit deadlines never met in court.

The books

Monthly bookkeeping that feeds everything else on this page. Clean books make cheap returns; it's that mechanical.

The returns

Federal and state, business and personal, prepared by the same people who planned them. One firm, no telephone game.

A direct line

Buying equipment, hiring your first employee, eyeing a move across the state line — call before you sign. That call is where the money is saved.

Get back to the actual work.

You're good at the thing the business does. The estimates, the payroll, the entity math — that's the thing we do. Ten minutes on the phone and you'll know if we're a fit.