Healthcare Bill & Very Small Businesses

I received a summary of the health care bill that just passed from our senator. There wasn’t much for business in it, just this one item. Thought I would pass it along. It was in the effective immediately category.

Small businesses will get a tax cut to help them pay for health insurance for their employees. Companies will get a credit up to 35 percent of the money they spend on premiums. Those credits will increase over time, eventually reaching 50 percent when the Insurance Exchanges go into effect. The full credit is available to small firms with 10 or fewer employees, and firms with up to 25 employees will qualify for a partial credit.

Interesting Tax Credit for 2010

This article from US News and World Report, just crossed by my twitter account today. Mostly the article is about your tax credit options from the 2009 small business stimulus bill (small business defined as 15 million or less) but there’s a mention of 2010 as well. In particular this:

Last week, the Senate passed a bill with a payroll tax holiday for business owners and their employees and an extension of a tax deduction on capital expenditures. The payroll tax holiday—dubbed the Hire Now Tax Cut—allows an employer to forgo payroll tax on any unemployed person hired by the firm this year.

I have noticed many of our clients starting to rehire, so don’t forget about this one. An opportunity to legally avoid payroll tax is one not to be missed.

Here’s the link to the whole article: http://www.usnews.com/money/business-economy/articles/2010/03/04/small-business-tax-breaks-in-2010.html

Here’s a decent link on the 2009 tax credits:

http://www.mspotter.com/main5.html

 

Remember, I’m just an IT person. See your CPA about this.

Cloud Services? Virtualization?

You might be starting to hear a lot about Cloud or Internet based applications and maybe even virtualization. These are the current BUZZ words in the world of IT. Less you think that Harbor isn’t on top of the latest technology I thought I would point out some of the things that we’re doing in these areas:

• hosted anti-spam
• hosted Exchange
• hosted email encryption
• hosted Sharepoint
• hosted Anti-Virus
• hosted online conferencing and meetings
• server virtualization
• desktop virtualization
• off-site backup storage for servers and PC’s
• data center data storage
• data center server co-location

and more…

The move in the industry is away from having your own servers on-site and toward paying monthly for renting someone else's technology.

We’re ready to implement these things when it is the right technology for your business but not before. It’s good to be on the front end of the technology curve but it’s bad to be on the bleeding edge. :) We want to see you stay nicely balanced.

New Intel Tablet

It’s not often that I hype a product but then I’ve never really been in love with a computer before. You probably read that our love affair with Dell has ended and Equus as an Intel builder is our new friend.

One of the things that first brought them to my attention was the Intel Tablet Netbook. It’s small; it’s a tablet; it’s water resistant; it’s shock proof; it has an anti-microbial keyboard'; it’s got 7 hours of battery life and it has a handle. It runs Windows 7 and has a TPM chip which will allow us to encrypt the entire hard drive so no one will be able to read your files if it is stolen. There’s a camera that flips around to let you record what you are seeing. Did I mention it’s a tablet? You can take written notes on it. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. I bought one and I love it.

If this sounds like you, we can get you one. It comes in at just under $700 with 2GB of RAM and the 3 year warranty.