Cost Reduction for your business - Ideas from Smart People

Yes, times are tough and everyone needs to tighten their belts and pull up their socks.  Cut spending, cut cut cut!  What to cut though? You ask.

I have been so fortunate to have encountered a few supremely intelligent individuals lodged in the pinnacles of management who have, in all seriousness, recommended some very surgical reductions that would save the company bottom line.

Birthday Cakes

If you have more than 50 employees, there is a chance that your business may go overboard in purchasing 12 cakes a year, one for each month that employees share a birthday in the same month.  Why can't these monumental sponges celebrate their private birthdays at home instead of taking up half an hour of productive office time to eat junk food?  Will they not realize that they are hired to work?  The company is not obligated to provide an enjoyable working environment!  What is the world coming to?  People actually enjoying each other's presence at work?  The work place is not about having fun.  Quit enjoying coming to work and do your job!

Diluting hand soap

The medical profession has been a fear monger and bane to struggling businesses that are trying to keep costs down, by spreading propaganda about needing to wash hands after using the bathroom.  To prevent a small uprising from the ladies in administration, your company could reduce expenses significantly by gradually diluting the hand soap you place in the bathroom.  Remember, every penny adds up over the years. Do not throw out the old hand soap gel dispenser.  Instead, retain the bottle and fill it half way with regular hand soap gel, then add water to it.  Over a spread of 6 months, your employees will get used to the runny hand soap.  When they are conditioned, you can re-fill the empty hand soap bottle to the 1/4 level and add water to the rest of the bottle.   In years to come, your employees will gradually stop using hand soap and eventually wash their hands with just water.  We will discuss water rationing in a later segment.

Toilet paper

While we do not believe that the rain forest is of any significance to humanity, or of any value other than providing us with IKEA furniture, we do not wish our employees to jump on a pulp spending spree by going through rolls of toilet paper.  Encourage your employees to use the bathroom at home by first suggesting that each employee furnish their own drawers with a personal roll of toilet paper from their home.  This is where the medical science propaganda will come in handy.  Tell your employees that touching the same roll of toilet paper in the office means they would come into contact with more germs from their colleagues.  This way, they will not only be motivated to use their own personal roll, but eventually stop using the office toilet.  You would kill two birds with one stone as there would be less flushes and your company would save $50 on 96 rolls.

Candy/Snacks

Providing snacks to your valued employees can be a very expensive habit.  Not only would you be ruining their health/dental plan but your profit margin could be hemorrhaging severely from this detrimental but well meaning entitlement.  Call your health and human services department in your state and ask for free posters that encourage good eating habits.  Instruct your administration staff to plaster these public service announcements all over your kitchen walls to encourage them to stay away from candy and snacks.  With pictures of diabetes and other related afflictions, your staff will gravitate away from these non nutritional expenses and you will eliminate this line item from your general ledger.

Stationery

When hiring new employees, include the following pre-requisites:
Employees must provide their own -

• Pen
• Writing paper
• Calculator
• Chair
• Phone
• Laptop
• Printer & printing paper

Not only would you be reducing the burden of your cost centers, each employee's expenditure would go to their personal itemized tax deductions as well as generating more sales for local stationery stores.  Thankfully, your employees would most likely use standard deductions as these expenses would not be significant enough for them to itemize in their tax returns.  Your state representative to congress would be grateful for your efforts in preventing the loss of revenue, which is crucial to providing congressmen & their families generous incomes & healthcare benefits.

Concluding thoughts

While this list is not exhaustive, you should not be limited to these brilliant schemes to increase your business profits.  After all, you need to squeeze every penny out of your business so that you and your family can splurge on vacations overseas and indulge in luxury goods.  Employees should be happy that they even have a job that you so compassionately provide.  Lastly, you should continually remind your employees to be grateful and that they could be fired at any time depending on which side of the bed you roll out of in the morning.  Employee loyalty is lost on this decadent generation!

Double Taxation on the Same Income?

Many of you blessed souls who have had the luxury of dwelling on subjects such as corporate tax and taxes on dividends will no doubt be familiar with the axiom promulgated in textbooks stating that the profits of a corporation have been taxed twice - once at the corporation level and the second time at dividend distribution to the shareholder.

To effectively swallow this ejaculate, one must erase all thoughts of the concept of separate legal entity between a corporation and its shareholders.  In other words, you must believe that the corporation is nothing more than a bigger extension of the shareholder, the way penis extensions would work.

Other confusing ideas that lead you to question how many different shareholders with different shareholding percentages could be represented by a singular corporation should be obliterated from your thoughts.  Otherwise you would not be able to make the justification for the unfairness of double taxation.

Also, you must ignore the fact that you as a shareholder have no say whatsoever in the decision to issue dividends and its amount issued.  The board of directors who make that decision should be transparent in your belief that the shareholder has every right to every penny of the profit whenever they so desire.

Another confusing idea that you need to discard, is the fact if there was no separate legal entity, the entire profit of the corporation that would belong to the shareholder, would become taxable to the shareholder regardless of how much dividend was distributed.  As this would result in a significantly larger tax payable to the investor so it is wise to pretend that this argument does not exist.

Despite the obscure notion that there is a difference between the shareholder's investing activity and the corporation's operating activity that leads to two separate incomes for two separate entities, you must remain steadfast in repeating the mantra that it is the same income, much like urine is the same water that a person drinks when they piss into the mouth of another.

Forget the dizzy emotions of patriotism, of contributing to the country you love.  After all, this is your money we're talking about.  So keep on believing that it is unfair when investors pay taxes on dividends earned from investments when corporations are taxed when they make profits because they aren't really separate legal entities.

Accounting Standards Update 2011-12

I have recently decided to become a masochist and plunge into reviewing the latest update put out by the prestigious and beloved Financial Accounting Standards Board.

Within seconds, I was overcome by a very strong emotion.  The last time I experienced something so intense was when I was driving 4 hours to get home in the evening and had to pull over into a McDonald's carpark to snooze.

It was with great effort that I stopped myself from scrolling up and down the Adobe PDF file sufficiently to read the crucial lines that informed me what the esteemed gentlemen of high accountancy were trying to convey.

Before giving it all away, I would like to record for posterity the insanity contained in this update that I downloaded from their precious website.  I plowed past the summary pages into the Introduction and was immediately faced with what seemed to be a forest of track changes throughout the document, that had not yet been accepted.

This was also punctuated by bolded and underlined words within a labyrinth of paragraphs that seemed to lead me into the valley of darkness.  Welcome to my ADHD nightmare.  It didn't help that a lot of the crossed out text were replaced for cosmetic reasons.  There were also arrows littered throughout the pages that served as brilliantly as detour signs placed by the Coyote in the Road Runner TV series.

Given that the message of the entire missive basically said "Remember that update we issued in May 2011?  Well, fuck that.", it completely baffles me why they even bothered to include illustrations of financial statements with details of comprehensive income with corrections to the numbers used.

I guess I should be thankful.  After all, it could have been something I might actually have to work at understanding.