Plain-text accounting insights, tutorials, and updates from the Beancount.io team.
Employers with prescription drug coverage owe two annual disclosures — a creditable-coverage notice to Medicare-eligible participants before October 15, and an electronic filing to CMS within 60 days of the plan year start. Missing the notice can leave an employee paying a lifetime Part D penalty of 1% of the national base premium per uncovered month.
Med spas that book prepaid packages as day-one revenue, expense injectables on purchase, or run the MSO and PC through one bank account produce financials that fail audits and due diligence. This guide covers keeping separate books per entity with reconciled intercompany balances, recognizing package and membership cash as deferred revenue per delivered session, capitalizing neurotoxin and filler as inventory until use, and a monthly close checklist that ties POS unearned balances, physical counts, and management fees to the ledger.
How independent hardware stores handle bookkeeping most retailers never face — recording co-op patronage dividends from Form 1099-PATR (taxable in full even when paid partly in paper), managing 20,000–35,000 SKUs with ABC analysis and GMROI, running contractor charge accounts, and forecasting the spring-to-winter cash cycle with a rolling 13-week model.
Illinois's Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, signed July 6, 2026, requires frontier AI developers with over $500M revenue to publish catastrophic-risk frameworks, pass annual independent audits, and report safety incidents within 72 hours starting January 1, 2028. This guide breaks down the five obligations, audit costs of $25,000–$150,000+, and a 16-month preparation timeline for startups.
Global Payments closed its $24.25 billion Worldpay acquisition in January 2026, and processor mergers routinely bring migration fees, contract reassignments, and quiet rate creep. Learn how to compute your effective rate (total fees ÷ card volume), the seven statement lines where costs hide, and a 15-minute quarterly audit that flags overpaying above 3%.
Ghost tour and walking-tour operators often keep less than half of ticket revenue after OTA commissions of 20–30%, guide pay, and year-round insurance. Here is how to book per-seat contribution margin by channel, treat advance sales as deferred revenue, and budget October to fund February.
Georgia's SB 553 (Act 472) rewrote Chapter 14 contractor licensing effective July 1, 2026 — one year of experience now means 2,000 documented hours, license lending is explicit grounds for discipline, and advertising regulated trade services without a license counts as evidence of unlicensed practice. A record-keeping checklist for electrical, plumbing, HVAC, low-voltage, and utility shops.
The FMCSA revoked 67 electronic logging devices in 2026 — including Safe ELD and MYLOGS ELD — each starting a 60-day replacement clock, after which a revoked device counts as no ELD at all. Here is how small carriers verify their device against the live registry, avoid out-of-service orders and CSA points, and book the forced swap as a clean per-truck deduction.
Delaware taxes short-term rental stays at 4.5% of rent for agreements entered on or after January 1, 2025. Who collects depends on the booking channel — platforms remit for platform bookings, but direct-booking hosts need the $25 accommodations intermediary license and must file monthly by the 15th, even for zero-income periods. Cleaning fees, linens, and deposits are excluded from the tax base.
How to keep auditable books for a jukebox, claw machine, and pool table route — booking gross revenue on venue splits, meter-to-cash collection controls, MACRS depreciation with Section 179 ordering, claw-machine prize inventory, and the state sales tax and per-machine license rules operators most often miss.
Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl lets any site owner set a per-request price for AI crawlers (minimum $0.01), collect monthly payouts, and return HTTP 402 to non-payers. Here is how to configure it without blocking search traffic, and how to record the micropayment revenue in a plain-text ledger.
Starting July 1, 2027, California's SB 919 requires franchise brokers to register annually with the DFPI, deliver a standardized disclosure document — including how they are paid — before pitching any franchise, and keep five years of auditable records. Here is what the law changes, why broker commissions of 40–50% of the franchise fee matter to buyers, and how to vet a broker before the rules take effect.
