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March 18, 2021

Tax Changes Affecting Businesses from the American Rescue Plan Act

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The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) signed into law on March 11, 2021 by President Biden contains numerous tax provisions which may affect the tax situation for your business in 2020 and 2021.  We’ll provide a general recap of some of the major changes impacting businesses in this article. 

Employee Retention Credit

The Employee Retention Credit (ERC) has been extended through the end of 2021, which adds the third and fourth quarters to the mix. It also allows the credit to be claimed against the 1.45% Medicare or Hospital Insurance (HI) taxes.

The ERC can be a significant windfall for businesses that have had a drop in gross receipts or have been shuttered by a government order. 

Paycheck Protection Program

While the current March 31, 2021 application deadline for First and Second Draw PPP loans has not been extended as of this posting, the ARPA did add more funds to the program, made COBRA eligible for forgiveness, and expanded eligibility to additional entities, including additional covered nonprofit entities, newspapers, and certain nonprofits.  

The Paycheck Protection Program was designed to save jobs by providing forgivable funds to employers and self-employed individuals so they can make payroll and support their ongoing operations during the economic uncertainty of the pandemic. 

Shuttered Venue Operators

Additional monies have been allocated to this program which was initiated by the Consolidated Appropriations Act signed in December 2020. Entities that are eligible for the Shuttered Venue Operators program, which has not opened as of this writing, can now apply for Paycheck Protection Program loans. 

Paid Sick Leave

ARPA extended the sick and family leave benefits that began with the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) to September 30, 2021. It adds the employer’s share of Medicare and Social Security taxes on qualifying leave wages to the credit calculation and increases the per employee limit from $10,000 to $12,000.

The changes also include time for the employee to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and recover from it if needed. Self-employed sick days limit is expanded from 50 to 60. 

Restaurant Revitalization Grant

Certain restaurants, food businesses, and shops located in an airport can apply for a restaurant revitalization grant that will be offered through the Small Business Association. The grant is for $10 million, up to $5 million per location, and can be spent on expenses necessary to keep the business open. A total of $28.6 billion has been allocated.

Businesses cannot have more than 20 locations, cannot be operated by a state or local government, and cannot apply if they received or have pending applications for Economic Aid to Hard-Hit Small Businesses, Nonprofits and Venues Act.

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Accounting and Bookkeeping Services for QuickBooks® Online

Scott Springer, CPA PLLC

402 A West Palm Valley Blvd #182
Round Rock, TX 78664

(737) 471-4272
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If you track transactions by the QBO fields for Class, Location or Project, but this information is missing on relevant transactions, it can result in incomplete or misleading reports. We assign the proper values to those transactions based on information you provide.

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We will categorize and record your bank, digital wallet, and credit card transactions in QBO. We will do so based upon information you provide and our increasing knowledge of your company. We will ask for clarification, as needed, to ensure transactions are recorded properly.

Go paperless! We provide a subscription to receipt capture software using optical character recognition (OCR), and we integrate it with QBO. The allows you to easily and securely capture and store supporting documentation for your expenses and vendor bills in the cloud.

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We will prepare your Balance Sheet and Income Statement. These are key reports to help you understand your company’s financial position as well as the amount of revenue and profit you’ve made for the period.

If you require historical reports, then it’s important to resolve issues that affect your Income Statement as well. It’s not uncommon for us to find numerous issues, but not all of them necessarily need to be resolved. We let you decide how extensive you want the cleanup to be based on your needs. How do we do this? By separately identifying:

  • issues that affect section subtotals (such as total income, total cost of sales, total operating expenses)
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If you require historical reports, then it’s important to resolve issues that affect your Income Statement as well. It’s not uncommon for us to find numerous issues, but not all of them necessarily need to be resolved. We let you decide how extensive you want the cleanup to be based on your needs. How do we do this? By separately identifying:

  • issues that affect section subtotals (such as total income, total cost of sales, total operating expenses)
  • issues that do not affect section subtotals but are not categorized properly within a section

Issues affecting your balance sheet account balances (assets, liabilities, equity) should always be resolved even if you don’t need historical reports. That’s because you need accurate balances as a starting point going forward.

If your bank and credit card reconciliations have not been done or are done but need to be fixed, we will take care of it for you. Reconciliations help ensure your account balances are correct by identifying missing, duplicate or incorrect transactions.

If your diagnostic review revealed that your QBO file has unprocessed bank feed items or there are missing transactions (based on bank or credit card statements), we will record those for you. We will ask for clarification, as needed, to ensure transactions are categorized properly.

If your diagnostic review revealed that some of the QBO “products” and “services” are assigned to incorrect income accounts, we will make the proper adjustments to prevent invoices from continuing to be incorrectly categorized.

We will design your new chart of accounts, tailored to your company’s needs, based on information gathered during the diagnostic review as well as other discussions with you. We will then implement the new design in QBO for you. This includes carefully mapping existing accounts to the new ones.

We will prepare your Balance Sheet and Income Statement. These are key reports to help you understand your company’s financial position as well as the amount of revenue and profit you’ve made for the period.

We will set up the open Accounts Receivable invoice balances for each customer, and we will set up the open Accounts Payable bill balances for each vendor. For each customer or vendor, you have the option of having us set up the balance for each individual unpaid invoice/bill OR you may combine the open invoice/bill balances for each customer or vendor.

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If you want financial statements for additional historical periods, we will prepare your Balance Sheet and Income Statement for those periods.

We will reconcile bank, digital wallet, credit card, line of credit and loan accounts. This means we will compare your statement balances and transactions with the ones in QBO, and we will make any necessary adjustments. We will alert you regarding any uncleared items that may need your attention.

We will categorize and record the following transactions to QBO. We will ask for clarification, as needed, to ensure transactions are recorded properly.

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We will set up your budget(s) in QBO using information you provide.

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We will set up your customers/clients and vendors in QBO using the information you provide.

You provide your general ledger account balances to us from your previous accounting system or tax return. We will provide guidance if you’re not sure how to get the information we need. We will set up your account balances in QBO.

For each of your financial accounts supported by QBO, we will either set up the bank feeds for you or we will meet with you and walk you, step-by-step, through setting it up.

We will design your chart of accounts, tailored to your company’s needs, based on information gathered during the planning meeting. We will then implement the new design in QBO for you.

We will configure your QBO settings optimally for your company based on information collected during the planning meeting. We will explain the types of QBO user permissions available, and we will set up your users and permissions based on a list of users that you provide.

We will set up your QBO subscription on your behalf after the planning meeting.

The planning meeting is critically important because we will ask you questions about your company processes and accounts. This information will help us properly plan your implementation.