Category: Enterprise

A Brief Description Of The Sole Proprietorship


A sole proprietorship is the business or an individual who has decided not to carry his business as a separate legal entity, such as a corporation, partnership or limited liability company. The proprietorship business type is not a separate entity. Any time a person regularly provides services for a fee, sells things at a flea market or engage in any business activity whose primary purpose is to make a profit, that person is a sole proprietor.

If they carry on business activity to make profit or income, the IRS requires that you file a separate Schedule C “Profit or Loss From a Business” with your annual individual income tax return. Schedule C summarizes your income and expenses from your sole proprietorship business activity.

As the sole proprietor of a business, you have unlimited liability, meaning that if your business can’t pay all it is liable for, the creditors to whom your business owes money can come after your personal assets. Many part-time entrepreneurs may not know this, but it’s an enormous financial risk. If they are sued or can’t pay their bills, they are personally liable for the business incurred expenses and liabilities.

A sole proprietorship has no other owners to prepare financial statements for, but the proprietor should still prepare these statements in order to keep abreast of how his business is doing. Banks usually require financial statements from sole proprietors who apply for loans. And a partnership needs to maintain a separate capital or ownership account for each of the partners.

The total profit of the firm is allocated into these capital accounts, as spelled out in the partnership agreement. Although sole proprietors don’t have separate invested capital from retained earnings like corporations do, they still need to keep these two separate accounts for owners’ equity – not only to track the business, but for the benefit of any future buyers of the business.

The question you should ask yourself when planning to start a business of your own is, which business type affords me the most protection under the law? And the answer to this question is most assuredly the general corporation; but along with the protection it provides to you, the business person (or CEO), comes the added responsibility of adherence to the law as well as your obligation to stock holders, if any. The decision could be an interesting one that may take some time to come to terms with.

Making Your Accounting Principles Acceptable




It would be very easy for an employee to expect fair treatment from professionals within the company s/he’s employed with. To expect them to act within the precepts of the Golden Rule: “Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them do Unto You” which, if company management were to engage in such honorable behavior, workers would have little or nothing to worry about. But that’s not the case and therefore principles and systems must be employed.

If everyone involved in the process of accounting followed their own system, or no system at all, there would be no way to truly tell whether a company was profitable or not. Most companies follow what is commonly referred to as GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), and there are huge tomes in libraries and bookstores devoted to just this one topic.

Unless a company states otherwise, anyone reading a financial statement can make the assumption that company has used GAAP. If GAAP is not the set of principles used for preparing financial statements, then a business needs to make clear which other form of accounting they have used and are bound to avoid using titles in its financial statements that could mislead the person examining it.

GAAP is the gold standard for preparing financial statements and/or a financial report. Not disclosing that it has used principles other than GAAP makes a company legally liable for any misleading or misunderstood data. These principles have been fine-tuned over decades and have effectively governed accounting methods and the financial reporting systems of businesses.

Different principles have been established for different types of business entities, such as for-profit and NFP (Not For Profit) companies/organizations, governments and other enterprises. GAAP is not cut and dried, however. They’re guidelines and, as such, are often open to interpretation. Estimates have to be made at times, and they require good faith efforts towards accuracy.

You have probably heard the phrase “creative accounting,” which is when a company pushes the envelope a little (or a lot) too far to make their business look more profitable than it might actually be. This is also known as massaging the numbers, a practice that can spiral out of control and quickly turn into accounting fraud (or cooking the books). The results of these practices can be devastating and ruinous to hundreds and thousands of lives, as in the cases of Enron, Rite Aid and others.