Spending on Your Medical Practice at Year-End

Monday, December 21, 2009
Posted in: AcuBase and Trigram Stuff, Practice Management

As the year draws to a close, there are many different tasks that await, from helping your patients to get their year-end receipts in order, to your own tax-prep and marketing.  In previous blog posts, I have covered how important this time of year is for sending out marketing materials, and helping your patients get organized for their own year-end needs.  Here, I’d like to briefly suggest another potential preparation you can make before the year is over:  spending money!  As anyone with any experience in tax preparation knows, when a business has made money in a given year and will owe tax, it may be an opportune time to spend a little on capital investments for your business to have more write-offs.  Planning to get a new table, perhaps some new wall hangings?  Heat lamps getting a little rusty?  Computer getting a bit old?  If you’ve made money in your practice this year, you have some money in the bank, and you have calculated that you will owe taxes, why not make some of those purchases before January 1st? 

If you are an AcuBase user, and you’ve been entering payments faithfully into the program all year, run a simple report to get your gross earnings.  Go to the Reports tab in AcuBase, and select the Invoices:  Deposit Slip report.  Enter the dates from 1/1/2009 to 12/31/2009, and then go to the last page of the preview when it comes up (or print it out) to see the final tally of what you’ve made this year (gross).  If you use Quicken or another bookkeeping software package, use their reporting tools to tally up your expenses for the year.  If you made a lot more than you spent, and still have money in your practice’s account, perhaps this is the time to make some purchases.

That said, note that I am not a tax professional, and do not wish to be your primary source for tax or spending advice.  On my end, I get my estimated taxes done by my accountant in the Fall before making these decisions, and you should as well. 

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