Whether you know it or not, if your business has ever applied for a commercial loan, you’ve likely been subject to “adverse media screening.” Under this commonly used practice, a prospective borrower is “screened against” various media sources to determine whether the person or entity has been a party to any suspicious, unethical or illegal activities.

If your company sells products or services to other businesses, you’re probably familiar with the challenge of growing your sales numbers. At times, you might even struggle to maintain them. One way to put yourself in a better position to succeed is to diversify your approaches, so you’re not limited to a single method by which salespeople interact with customers.

No one likes to make a mistake. This is especially true in business, where a wrong decision can cost money, time and resources. According to the results of a recent survey, one of the primary ways that many companies are committing costly foibles is buying the wrong software.

If you own a business, you may wonder if you’re eligible to take the qualified business income (QBI) deduction. Sometimes this is referred to as the pass-through deduction or the Section 199A deduction.

The QBI deduction is:

One popular fringe benefit is an education assistance program that allows employees to continue learning and perhaps earn a degree with financial assistance from their employers. One way to attract, retain and motivate employees is to provide education fringe benefits so that team members can improve their skills and gain additional knowledge. An employee can receive, on a tax-free basis, up to $5,250 each year from his or her employer under a “qualified educational assistance program.”

The Employee Retention Credit (ERC) was a valuable tax credit that helped employers that kept workers on staff during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the credit is no longer available, eligible employers that haven’t yet claimed it might still be able to do so by filing amended payroll returns for tax years 2020 and 2021.

The driving revenue force of just about every kind of business is sales. But all too often, once a sales team is up and running, it’s left to its own devices to maintain its strengths, develop new skills and upgrade its technology. This can produce mixed results — some sales departments are remarkably self-sufficient while others could really use more organizational support.

To remove the guesswork, many of today’s businesses are investing in sales enablement. This is an enterprise-wide, collaborative and continuous approach to empowering the sales department to do its best work.

Business owners are often warned about silos. Not the tall, cylindrical structures typically seen on farms or at grain processing facilities. Rather, the insular nature of many departments that results in the hoarding of information and a distinct lack of companywide communication.

Many businesses in certain industries employ individuals who receive tips as part of their compensation. These businesses include restaurants, hotels and salons.

Summertime can mean hiring time for many types of businesses. With legions of working-age kids and college students out of school, and some spouses of business owners looking for part-time or seasonal work, companies may have a much deeper hiring pool to dive into this time of year.

It would be hard to argue against the notion that almost every kind of business today is data-driven. Without the information you need to run your company — be it financial metrics, marketing demographics or productivity measures — you’d probably fall behind the competition, and fast.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve surely heard or read about the sudden rise in concern about the banking industry. Although the story is still unfolding, an important lesson for business owners is already clear: You’ve got to be constantly on guard against the many risks to your company’s financial solvency.

One way that banks are advised to guard against catastrophic failure is to regularly perform “stress testing.” Doing so entails using various analytical techniques to determine whether and how the institution would be affected by specified financial developments or events.

But this advice isn’t necessarily restricted to banks. Businesses can use stress testing as well to get a better sense of how they should respond to a given threat.

“We love our customers!” Every business owner says it. But all customers aren’t created equal, and it’s in your strategic interest to know which customers are really strengthening your bottom line and by how much.

Sorting out the data

If your business systems track individual customer purchases, and your accounting system has good cost accounting or decision support capabilities, determining individual customer profitability will be simple. If you have cost data for individual products, but not at the customer level, you can manually “marry” product-specific purchase history with the cost data to determine individual customer value.

For example, if a customer purchased 10 units of Product 1 and five units of Product 2 last year, and Product 1 had a margin of $100 and Product 2 had a margin of $500, the total margin generated by the customer would be $3,500. Be sure to include data from enough years to even out normal fluctuations in purchases.

Did you donate to charity last year? Acknowledgment letters from the charities you gave to may have already shown up in your mailbox. But if you don’t receive such a letter, can you still claim a deduction for the gift on your 2023 income tax return? It depends.

“It’s in the pipeline!” Business owners often hear this rather vague phrase, which may be good news in some cases or code for “don’t hold your breath” in others.

Your sales pipeline, however, is a very real thing. Simply defined, it identifies and quantifies the prospective deals in progress at various stages of the sales process. Properly managing your pipeline can help your business avoid losses and meet or even exceed its revenue goals.

It might sound like the lingo of air traffic controllers — inbound vs. outbound. But businesses of all types must grapple with these concepts and their associated challenges when developing sales strategies.

Inbound sales originate when someone contacts your company to inquire about buying a product or service, whereas outbound sales arise from members of your sales team reaching out to customers and prospects.

Like many businesses, yours may not have the luxury of choosing one approach over the other. You probably have to find the right balance.

Most companies today have some sort of presence on social media as part of their marketing efforts. If you’ve spent any time online as a business owner, you’d probably agree that building a following and getting meaningful reactions to your posts isn’t easy.

One way that some companies rise above the din is to not only promote themselves on social media, but also engage someone else to do it — someone who already has a huge following and gets copious views and “likes” a day. These individuals are commonly known as “social media influencers.”

If you’ve been in business a while, you might assume that you know exactly who your customers are. But, as the saying goes, “life comes at you fast.” Customer desires, preferences and demographics can all shift before you know it.

One way to avoid getting caught off guard is to regularly conduct a targeted marketing campaign. This is an analytical approach to studying a company’s market, breaking it up into segments and focusing marketing efforts on the most potentially profitable ones.

Many small businesses start out as “lean enterprises,” with costs kept to a minimum to lower risks and maximize cash flow. But there comes a point in the evolution of many companies — particularly in a tight job market — when investing money in employee benefits becomes advisable, if not downright mandatory.

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) was signed into law to fight crimes commonly associated with illegal business activities such as terrorist financing and money laundering. If your business can be defined as a “reporting company” under the CTA, you may need to comply with new beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting rules that take effect on January 1, 2024.