ALG Accounting, Inc.

10/08/2026

If your business is short on cash, which bill gets paid first can decide whether a payroll tax problem stays with the company or follows you home.

It is a Friday afternoon, the business checking account shows $41,000, and the owner of a six-person HVAC company is sitting in a parked truck deciding who gets paid. The supplier wants $30,000 by five o'clock. Payroll t...

10/06/2026

Picture a Friday at 4:50. A small medical practice's bookkeeper gets an $18,400 invoice that looks just like one from her biggest vendor, with a note saying "we switched banks, use this new routing number." It was fake, and the money was gone by Monday. The IRS put this exact scam on its Cybersecurity Awareness Month warning list. Here are the habits that stop it.

At 4:50 on a Friday afternoon, the bookkeeper at a small medical practice gets an email that looks like it came from the practice's biggest equipment vendor. The invoice is for $18,400, the amount is about right, and a n...

10/02/2026

Own farmland you lease out, or know someone who does? There is now a way to spread the tax on a sale over four years. New proposed IRS regulations came out this week and I broke down who qualifies and what to watch for.

https://algaccounting.com/articles/f/selling-farmland-how-the-new-four-year-installment-election-work

09/09/2026

A lady had three years of unopened IRS envelopes in a box. She'd skipped a return because a rental property posted a loss that year, and she figured nothing was owed.

A new TIGTA report on IRS nonfiler enforcement backs up a point worth repeating: there is no statute of limitations on an unfiled return, only on collecting a balance once it is assessed. The IRS is sitting on a backlog of nearly 39,000 high priority nonfiler cases. That backlog is not protection. It is a delay.

If the IRS ends up filing a substitute return for you, it only counts your income. No deductions, no expenses, no filing status adjustments. I would rather see a return filed three years late with the real numbers on it than let an automated program write one that costs you five figures more than you actually owe.

If you have a missing year, the move is to file it before the IRS gets to it.

Link below.

ALT HEADLINE (A/B): The IRS’s Nonfiler Backlog Is Not the Loophole It Looks Like LINKEDIN CAPTION: Three years of unopened IRS envelopes were sitting in the box they arrived in when a client …

09/09/2026

A lady writes a $30,000 check to her hospital's foundation every December. She's always itemized, and she's always assumed that gift saved her 37 cents on every dollar. Starting with her 2026 return, it doesn't work that way anymore.

Two new charitable-giving rules came out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. One helps people who take the standard deduction. The other quietly disallows the first 0.5% of AGI in giving for people who itemize, and caps the value of that deduction at 35 cents on the dollar for anyone in the top bracket.

Same gift, same intent, real money lost if nobody runs the numbers before year end.

I broke down both sides of this, who it helps and who it costs.

Priya runs a solo cardiology practice and writes a $30,000 check to her hospital’s foundation every December, the same as she has for the last six years. She has always itemized, and she has …

09/04/2026

September 15 is nine days out as I write this, with two separate deadlines landing the same day for a lot of business owners.

I put together a final checklist before it arrives. Link below.

09/03/2026

An investor sold a rental property last year and was stunned by the size of the taxable gain, since depreciation had quietly cut the property's basis down for a decade.

I wrote up what cost basis actually is, and why it matters more than people expect. Link below.

An investor sold a rental property last year and was stunned by the size of the taxable gain, since depreciation had quietly cut the property’s basis down for a decade without him tracking it…

09/02/2026

A software engineer making $240,000 a year assumed the Roth IRA was simply off the table for her. It wasn't, it just took one extra step.

I wrote up how the backdoor Roth actually works. Link below.

09/01/2026

A landscaper had been using the standard mileage rate on his truck for years out of habit, never once running the actual expense method. When we finally ran both, the actual method won by almost $4,000.

I wrote up how the two methods compare. Link below.

08/31/2026

A business owner showed me a P&L with a healthy margin three weeks before he couldn't make payroll. His balance sheet had been telling that story for months.

I wrote up why it deserves as much attention as the P&L. Link below.