Depreciating Dental Equipment for Tax Purposes: What’s Required?
Depreciation is a very complex element of the tax code. It’s best you don’t try to tackle it on your own.
From time to time, you may buy a piece of equipment for your dental practice. This can be anything from a small computer found at the front desk to a large CEREC machine in an exam room. You don’t plan to retire this equipment after using it for a year. Rather, it will be used over a period of years, so you’ll want to depreciate it for tax purposes.
What do you need in order to depreciate a piece of equipment? First, you must own it. If you rent a piece of equipment, you cannot take a depreciation deduction for it. (However, there is a deduction available for rental payments that is recorded on your Schedule C, on another line.)
Second, you have to use it in your dental practice. You can’t claim depreciation on the family computer that you only use in your business part of the time. You can take some depreciation, but the amount you can record in depreciation will be reduced by the percentage you use the computer for personal tasks.
Third, the equipment must have a determinable useful life, which must be longer than one year. In other words, you have to know how long you should be able to use the equipment. The IRS establishes guidelines that determine the expected life of specific pieces of equipment. If you don’t anticipate using it for longer than a year, you should deduct it as another type of expense for the current year.
Finally, you will also need to know the depreciable basis of the property. This is a fancy term for a complicated concept. It’s calculated by taking the amount you paid for the equipment and any parts added to it (to make it run better or last longer), less any casualty losses and any depreciation you had recorded in a prior year.
There will be times when you can’t take depreciation on a piece of equipment. For example, if you bought some equipment and started using it in your dental practice, but then decided it wasn’t what you needed and got rid of it, you can’t take depreciation on it. Or if you made the purchase to upgrade another piece of equipment, or added an addition to your home for a home office, you cannot deduct depreciation for it. You could, however, take depreciation on the value of the upgraded piece of equipment.
There are other issues involved in calculating depreciation. This is a very complex area of the IRS tax code, and we don’t expect you to understand it fully. So if you’re planning a major purchase of equipment for your dental practice, let us help you determine the best way to claim it for tax purposes.
The Benefits of Accepting eCheck Payments for Small Businesses
Small businesses can benefit from accepting eCheck payments in many ways. It’s a good idea to explore the potential value it can bring to your dental practice before dismissing the idea or missing out on something that can add value to your practice for patients, while simultaneously helping your practice become more efficient and productive.
Increased Security
Whether your dental practice handles high dollar checks or multiple checks for small amounts of money each and every week, the need for security is vitally important to protect the financial state of your business, as well as the personal and identifying financial information of your patients.
Electronic checks provide one of the most secure means for accepting payments on the planet today. Your information and that of your customers is protected with 256-bit encryption, public key cryptography and countless other security measures designed to give you and your customers peace of mind.
Greater Efficiency
Small businesses today are always looking for ways to become more efficient. How about the efficiency of eliminating the entire step of delivering checks to the bank day after day? How much time will that save over the course of a year? More importantly, how can your business benefit from faster access to the cash proceeds from customer payments?
Other Benefits of Accepting eChecks in Your Business
Some of the other benefits you might want to keep in mind as you decide whether or not accepting electronic checks or ACH (automated clearing house) payments is the best course of action for your dental practice include the following:
- Eliminate paper waste of thousands of checks each year thereby helping to preserve the environment
- No need to store checks while waiting delivery to the bank
- Offering expanded payment options to customers
- Fewer instances of fraud
- Lower processing costs
- Greater flexibility when selling products from brick and mortar businesses on the World Wide Web
Businesses really appreciate the fact that they no longer need to wait for consumers to actually write checks and mail them in or find themselves at the mercy of a postal service – a process that sometimes results in lost checks in the mail. On the flip side, consumers appreciate the fact that they no longer have to worry with keeping up with bills or making payments on time. Everything is automated for them.
As you can see there are quite a few reasons to take a good, long look at electronic payments and how they can possibly benefit your dental practice as you move your business forward.
What are Asset Protection Services?
Asset protection services exist to help place your dental practice’s assets in a position where they are all but untouchable by those you do not wish to have access to them. In the world you live in, one that’s rich with dangers and potential financial pitfalls, protecting your dental practice’s assets and wealth is more important than you may realize – whether you have a large sum of assets or not.
What Risks Impact Your Assets?
Most people are surprised to learn about the wide range of risks they face when it comes to securing and protecting assets. These risks include:
- Unemployment
- Disability
- Death
- Age
- Health
- Divorce
- Retirement
- Layoffs
- Injury
- Medical Expenses
- Litigation
- Judgments
- Legal Expenses
The list goes on and on. There are hundreds of risks, large and small, that place your practice’s assets at risk every day. That’s why it’s so important to consult with a financial planner or dental accountant that has experience providing asset protection services.
How Can You Protect Your Assets Through Asset Protection Services?
First and foremost, consider using asset protection services from a professional experienced in protecting wealth and assets. Asset protection services involve a blend of financial planning and insurance using specialists such as dental CPAs, attorneys, estate planners, insurance experts, financial planners and/or asset protection specialists.
Careful financial planning is the most important thing you can do to protect your practice’s assets now, and in the future. This is putting your head together with a professional who specializes in asset protection services, developing a plan to manage your existing assets, accumulate future assets, minimize risks and sustain growth over time. Important tools in your arsenal for your goals of financial growth and asset protection include insurance, proper planning and attention to detail.
Insurance
There are many types of insurance products on the market today. There is insurance coverage that protects your dental practice’s assets themselves. There is also insurance coverage that protects you from liability in the event that someone is injured by or on one of your assets. There’s even insurance to cover liability related to professional dental services you offer. In other words, there’s a type of insurance for many different contingencies and you should carefully consider which types of insurance serve to best protect your assets today and in the future. Having adequate insurance, however, is an asset protecting contingency that must be covered. Other insurance to consider includes medical insurance, loss of income insurance, life insurance and disability insurance.
Financial Planning
Financial planning includes components designed to reduce your risks, increase the value of your assets and sustain growth as time goes by. It involves estate planning, wealth protection, tax minimization strategies and wealth recommendations to maximize return. It’s important to work with qualified financial planners with specific experience in asset protection services for this critical task.
You want to know that your future is protected and assured. One way to increase that likelihood is by taking steps today to protect your dental practice’s assets and wealth for the long term by considering the use of asset-protection professionals. Life takes unexpected turns all the time. You can rest much easier knowing that you’re covered for most of the contingencies that could ever come your way.
Business Risks with BYOD Workplaces
Creating a BYOD workplace for your dental practice offers some distinct advantages to business in the form of improved employee productivity and engagement. These are not small benefits in today’s workplace.
Unfortunately, it brings its own share of risks to the table as well. These are just a few of the risks you should consider carefully before making the move to a BYOD workplace as they may have a significant impact on your dental practice.
What Could Go Wrong?
Just as you’d be wary of employees who come to work sick with viruses, you should also be wary of employee devices that may be infected with viruses you can’t see. While most software looks for bad things on the outside of the network, it is still vulnerable to dangers within. BYOD policies make it all too easy for employees to unknowingly expose the entire work network to viruses, malware, and more.
Other risks include:
- Theft of Device
- Loaning of Device
- Inadequate Device Security
- Information Remaining on Devices when Employee Upgrades (or passed along to children)
If these devices fall into malicious hands, the consequences could be devastating for your dental practice in terms of negative financial repercussions and beyond-repair brand reputation damage. This may be particularly detrimental for businesses, like those in the medical, insurance, and financial industries, where a sensitive and personal information data breach could cause undue harm, including identity theft, to the parties involved.
Preventing a Worst Case Scenario
While not all dental practices can accommodate BYOD policies in the workplace, those that do, must have a set of standards for making the transition as seamless and low-risk as possible.
- Create standards and policies that establish and define how the intellectual property of the business is to be accessed and treated on these devices.
- Create a plan of action, in writing, for handling the loss, theft, passing, or elimination of employee devices.
- Audit the program frequently to make sure it’s working in the best interest of the practice.
- Finally, understand that all businesses aren’t cut out for this specific work perk. Some businesses, such as legal entities, financial services business, medical firms, and insurance firms face huge legal liability risks when bringing mobile phones into the midst.
Before you decide to embrace the benefits of a BYOD workplace solution, make sure you fully expose the risks they represent for your dental practice.
Tablet Safety 101 – Making Your Tablet Safer for Public Use
People are relying on tablet devices in their dental practices more and more every day. You use them for work and some for play. Tablets provide users with many of the benefits a laptop delivers, but in a format that’s even easier to take on the go. But, is your practice’s information safe when you use your tablet?
As with most things in life, there are things you can do to make your tablet a safer choice to use for your dental practice or pleasure while on the go.
- Install anti-virus software for your tablet device. You should only use trusted anti-virus names for this though as some savvy hackers have taken to creating fake anti-virus programs that actually install viruses on your devices.
- Be cautious when installing apps. Apps are notorious for not safeguarding your privacy.
- Enable capabilities to remotely wipe your device if it stolen and notify your provider (if applicable) right away if you have not installed those capabilities.
- Don’t click on advertisements on your tablet. Many ads automatically download viruses onto your device without your notice.
- Lock your screen when you’re not using your device.
- Don’t store log-in data on your tablet device. This makes it too easy for people who “find” your tablet to access your passwords, private, and financial information. The harder you make it for them to do, the less likely it becomes that they’ll go to the effort.
- Backup your data routinely. Some people do this daily. Depending on how often you use your tablet and what kind of data is stored on your tablet, this is a wise move to make.
The Dangers of Public Wi-Fi
Public Wi-Fi connections present very specific dangers to your tablet device. Many hackers disguise themselves as legitimate Wi-Fi connections and hang out in hot spots hoping someone will choose their connection to attempt a logging on. Once you’re connected to their device, bad things can happen. Look for secure Wi-Fi connections and be cautious when using public Wi-Fi.
It’s best to avoid it whenever possible though – especially when using your tablet for your dental practice or personal financial matters. Tablet devices are somewhat risky to use – especially for personal and financial information like reviewing tax returns or balancing your checkbook in public. However, the steps above will make your tablet safer for limited use in public.
Dentist Opening New Practice Needs Bookkeeping Advice
A dentist who was about to open their first dental office approached Only for Dentists for advice. Their original plan was to do all of their monthly accounting and then hire a CPA for the annual returns. They were getting close to their opening date and their anxiety was growing, wondering if it was really worth it to save a little money. They were quoted by a firm for $300 monthly retainer to do everything for them, but weren’t sure if that was reasonable or not.
This is a very exciting time in a dentist’s career. Bassim Michael, dental CPA and founder of Only for Dentists, had the following suggestions for this new dentist. He recommended that if the dentist has the time, is willing to learn how to use QuickBooks and makes sure it is set up correctly, then it is completely fine to try it himself. Investing the time in set up and training from the beginning can help save a lot of time and heartache down the road. Once the file is set up, a CPA should review the file on a quarterly basis to make sure that the books are maintained correctly and to get proper advice and planning. From our experience, if the QuickBooks file is not set up correctly, clean ups could be more costly than if the practice had outsourced that function.
Dealing with a dental CPA can add special value, since their financial and tax knowledge is tailored to a practice’s specific needs.
Please contact us if you need help with your start-up practice’s financials.