Archive for May 2011
Free Farm Software for Traceability
Farm Manager makes the everyday management of modern fruit and vegetable farms more efficient, profitable, and improves traceability and quality. Farm Manager provides software designed to work in fresh produce production and processing, food manufacturing, and quality control. Farm Manager is designed to handle every facet of the business including spray management, irrigation, traceability, task scheduling and all recording requires as specified by BRC and GlobalGAP.
The entire team of the company consists of highly qualified specialists in the field of food industry, who work with the most modern technology. They constantly introduce innovations that improve quality and profits and they are in continuous contact with their customers. Pack house Software continuously expands its activities and its range. It works with producers in countries around the world. Its clients are the owners of modern farms, factories and food companies.
Farm Manager learned from performance in the last decade, and aims to improve the quality of production, to eliminate existing weaknesses and increase the profits of its customers. It provides a set of free farm software – Farm Manager Farm Management Software, that improves and simplifies farming. This software is specialized in fruit and vegetable farming. Its merit in this area are related to the control of the business, track performance, improve profits, price control and budget planning, control the report of the staff.
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Free Farm Software available in two solutions. First is for small and medium business and second for large business farming. This Management Software includes some parts. First one is Farm Diary which allows planning all needed activities like spray, fertilizing, water, planting and any task that is performed during production. It plans tasks in advance or enters when they have already been performed. They have some unique features, mainly aimed for fruit and vegetable farms. Fruit vegetable traceability is one of such features, use full for farmers.
Farm inventory is the next part of this Software. It manages all material necessary for production and packing of fruit and vegetables. This part also shows the quantity and quality of the inventory used in the production. Farm Alerts keep all farm staff informed. Farmers can set the alarm notifications via e-mail, fax or phone. Budgeting is a module of Farm alerts system. It allows the creation of the budgets that detail all of the labour, materials, quantity and so on.
This free farm software system is convenient for everybody with business related in fruit and vegetable production. The old farming connected with hard working and minimal profit stayed in the past. Contacts with the clients take place in different ways.
Farm Software provides a powerful suite of free farm software solutions which make every day farming easier and more profitable – whilst allowing you to maintain higher quality, staff performance, cost control and Farm Traceability levels.
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The Home Office Deduction for Your Business
The tax break has been expanded, but make sure you know the rules.
The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 included a modification of the IRS’s definition of “principal place of business” that will permit a larger number of taxpayers to qualify for the home-office deduction. For tax years beginning after 1998, the deduction will be available for home offices that are used for administrative or management activities related to the taxpayer’s business (for example, billing, maintaining records, ordering supplies, scheduling appointments, creating reports).
Home-based businesses, by their very nature, often have less structure. While many consider this to be an advantage, working at home can be a double-edged sword. The lack of structure tends to result in home-based workers putting in more hours than when they did not work at home. Having set office hours and “closing up” at the end of the day will help you balance business and personal matters.
Under the amended rules, a taxpayer is allowed to deduct expenses of a home office that is used for business purposes only if the space is used “exclusively” on a “regular basis” as:
The principal place of business carried on by the taxpayer,
A place for meeting with clients or customers in the ordinary course of business, or
A place for the taxpayer to perform administrative or management activities associated with the business, provided there is no other fixed location from which the taxpayer conducts a substantial amount of such administrative or management activities.
The exclusive-use test will be satisfied if a specific portion of the taxpayer’s home is used solely for business purposes or inventory storage. The regular-basis test is satisfied if the space is used on a continuing basis for business purposes (that is, incidental business use will not qualify.)
In determining the principal place of business (first provision under the definition of principal place of business, above), the IRS considers two factors: Does the taxpayer spend more business-related time in the home office than anywhere else? Are the most significant revenue-generating activities performed in the home office? Both of these factors must be considered when determining the principal place of business.
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To qualify for the home-office deduction, an employee must satisfy two additional criteria. First, the use of the home office must be for the convenience of the employer (for example, the employer does not provide a space for the employee to do his/her job). Second, the taxpayer does not rent all or part of the home to the employer. Employees who telecommute may be able to satisfy the requirements for the home-office deduction.
Home office expenses are classified into three categories:
relate only to the taxpayer’s business activity (for example, supplies, salaries). Expenditures for additional phone lines, long-distance calls, and optional phone services for the business may be deductible as direct business expenses. However, basic local telephone service charges (that is, monthly access charges) for the first phone line in the residence generally do not qualify for the deduction.
are expenditures that could be included as itemized deductions in the individual’s tax return (for example, mortgage interest, real estate taxes, and casualty losses).
would not be deductible if not for the home office deduction (for example, insurance, utilities, and depreciation).
Home office deductions are limited to the gross income from the business activity. Previously non-deductible expenses cannot create or increase a net loss from a business activity. However, a carryover to future years is available for unused, allowable home-office expenses.
Tax rules generally permit a 0,000 (married filing jointly) or 0,000 (single or married filing separately) exclusion on the gain from the sale of a primary residence. If part of the home is used for business purposes, the gain is divided into two parts — personal-use portion (the exclusion applies) and business-use portion (exclusion does not apply). For example, a taxpayer who qualifies for the exclusion, but has used 25 percent of the home for business purposes during the past five years, will only be able to apply the exclusion against 75 percent of any gain recognized on the sale of the home.
As with many tax laws there are exceptions to this rule. If you’d like a clearer picture of the size of the exclusion you qualify for, please call us.
The “office-in-home” tax deduction is valuable because it converts a portion of otherwise nondeductible expenses (for example, utilities and homeowners insurance) into a deduction. The treatment of home offices for income tax purposes is one of the more controversial provisions in the tax law.
An individual is not entitled to deduct any expenses of using his/her home for business purposes unless the space is used exclusively on a regular basis as the “principal place of business.” The IRS applies a 2-part test to determine if the home office is the principal place of business.
Do you spend more business-related time in your home office than anywhere else?
Are the most significant revenue-generating activities performed in your home office?
If the answer to either of these questions is no, the home office will not be considered the principal place of business, and the deduction will not be available.
Business use of the home by an employee must also be for the convenience of the employer. These rules make it very difficult for an employee to qualify for the deduction.
If these three tests are met, the deduction is limited to the gross income from the business activity. Furthermore, a deduction for home-office expenses cannot create or increase a net loss from the business. Any disallowed deduction may be carried over to future years.
Taxpayers taking a deduction for business use of their home must complete Form 8829. Some tax experts believe that taking a deduction for home-office expenses, whether clearly allowable or not, increases the likelihood of an IRS audit.
These are some thoughts to consider.
If you have a home office or are considering one, please call us. We’ll be happy help you take advantage of these deductions.
Laura is president and owner of 10 Key Solutions: Tax and Accounting Services. She has served in both the public and private sectors of accounting for over 25 years. Laura is an experienced and dedicated Accountant and Tax Preparer, with an attention for detail. Visit her blog for tax tips: http://www.10keysolutions.com/wordpress/.
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Beauty in architecture
‘Conceptual Art’ that dominates the world is locked substantially into the realm of thinking which is why we are required to learn about the individual particularity of the artist and her ideas. Conceptual art by its own definition has moved substantially into the cerebral realm, and minimised the experiential dimensions of the works. In 1941, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, discussed a split which he perceived to have opened up between society’s thinking and feeling; a split which he described as being one of the illnesses of our age. It was a schism that he felt society we were leaving behind with the onset of modernism, but as we are seeing, that was a premature conclusion. That split has not yet been resolved; indeed it seems to be wider than ever and the fragmentation of the artistic disciplines and their respective audiences seems to be for ever increasing within the context of our post-modern world. The relativity and inclusiveness of Post-modernism is to be welcomed and celebrated but the fact that everything should be tolerated does not mean that everything should be equally valued. The post-modern condition does not suggest a way out of this situation. In the post-modern world everything is different but equal; to introduce value into such a relative world we need to transcend the relative, engage the qualitative, and thus enter the world of excellence, the theme of this conference.
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The reason I feel that excellence is a way out of the post-modern maelstrom is because it requires us to transcend the relativity of variety, difference and interpretation. ‘Excellence’ we find defined as “pre-eminent in quality” , and ‘quality’ defined as “Degree of excellence”. It is one of those words whose definition seems to be cyclical. Its meaning appears to turn in on itself, it becomes difficult to pin it down, it is elusive rather like the phenomenon itself. It seems to me to belong to another realm, another dimension. If the relative world operates in the two dimensional plane of everyday life, the life of variety, change and difference, the qualitative world of excellence potentially cuts vertically through that dimension at every point. We could perhaps also imagine it as a series of qualitative planes stacked one above the other with the pre-eminent plane suggesting excellence. But the pre-eminent plane is never wholly grasped because the vertical transcendent dimension is infinite. Although this qualitative axis cuts through the relative world and is experienced in terms of the relative world, its characteristics are wholly different.
If the relative world is understood in terms of the relationships between objects, forms, colours, textures and ideas the qualitative dimension is distinguished by the nature of those relationships. If the relative world is described by ‘what’, the qualitative dimension is described by ‘how’. We could almost say that in the qualitative realm it matters less what objects, forms, colours, ideas are related in a work, but more importantly how they are related. When we talk about ‘what we relate’, we talk about the type, the size, the number, the cost; when we talk about ‘how we relate’, we talk about taking time, about taking care and even about loving what we are doing. When we are in the qualitative realm we focus on the way that things are brought together. The precision with which colours, forms, textures and ideas are balanced and composed becomes all important to the artist and architect. It is because these creative individuals are concerned about the way things are brought into relationships that the work as a ‘wholly integrated ensemble’ becomes more important than the individual parts. Beyond that, the way that that ensemble is stitched into the greater whole of the discipline or more generally the culture, is also of equal importance. Wholeness and balance are therefore central phenomena in a consideration of the qualitative dimension of architecture and the arts.
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