BY Michael Poveda

According to the UHY 2022 Middle Market Trends Survey, over 20 percent of business owners have explored the option of outsourcing their accounting function and given today’s challenging business environment, that percentage is expected to grow.

Today’s business owners have their hands full just focusing on sustaining and growing their businesses, with little time to focus on their businesses’ accounting operations, despite that function’s importance. In fact, according to a survey by SCORE, a small business mentoring organization, a full 40 percent of small business owners say bookkeeping and taxes are the single worst part of owning a business. 

Yet, it is data from the accounting operations that should lay the foundation for important business decisions. Given that and given that few companies have full accounting capabilities in-house, outsourcing their businesses’ accounting functions is increasingly more attractive to business decision makers.

That is where Client Accounting Advisory Services (CAAS) comes in. CAAS allows a business to outsource its finance, back-office and accounting operations. It is a service offered by many accounting firms. It has benefits beyond outsourcing those activities. 

Since CAAS gives the accountant involvement in all data, transactions, trends, monitoring, capturing and analysis of the business’ financial activities, the accountant is in a unique position to provide informed advice on all business decisions and intelligent input on risk/reward situations. 

By Jill Nagy

Community Bank NA opened an office in Saratoga Springs last November, filling a gap between its outposts in Latham and Whitehall and providing a more convenient location for commercial banking customers in Saratoga and Warren counties. Jeffrey M. Levy, Community Bank’s newly named president of commercial banking, who heads the new office, said that it “demonstrates our commitment to the Saratoga-Glens Falls community.”

The office is located on the second floor of The Washington building, 422 Broadway, upstairs from Northshire Bookstore and Kilwins. At least initially, the office will serve commercial clients with lending, insurance and wealth management services. The office will not accept deposits and there are no teller cages. Its four employees are “just the start,” according to Levy. Two of them will concentrate on making loans and one each will provide insurance and wealth management services. 

Community Bank has 11 branches in the Capital Region, including Albany, Latham, Whitehall, and Lake Placid.  Their southernmost office is in Albany’s Corporate Woods. Their community focus places them in non-metropolitan areas, i.e., not in large cities. In addition to the Capital Region, the bank has offices in Northeast Pennsylvania, Vermont, Western Massachusetts, and every county in Upstate New York, Levy said.  

There are no immediate plans for further expansion, Levy said, but noted that Gens Falls “fits in with our whole model.”

Levy has been with Community Bank since 2018. Before that, he held executive positions with NBT Bank and M&T Bank.  “Today, I am from Saratoga Springs,” he said. He has lived in the city for three years, after 21 years in Guilderland.

by Kenneth J. Entenmann

As the world watches the events unfold in Ukraine, it goes without saying that what we are witnessing is tragic and the human toll is something that cannot be understated. Military action always brings uncertainty, and it is difficult to assess the full extent of the situation while it is unfolding. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is no exception, and it has resulted in stunning market volatility.

However, strictly from an investment and economic perspective, geopolitical events rarely cause major bear markets or recessions. The markets tend to view them like natural disasters. That is, they are highly regionalized, they cause significant loss of property and life, but tend to be short-lived. 

Historically, dating back to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait in 1990, there have been nine global military “interventions.” The time period from the onset of the event and the market bottom ranges from 0 days to 70 days. For example, the market bottomed out 10 days after the 9/11 attack in 2001. The average decline in the S&P 500 is -6.9 percent. Importantly, the markets tend to recover quickly. 

The average one-month return after the bottom is 2.2 percent, the three-month return is 5.4 percent and the one-year return is 13.5 percent. Like all geopolitical events, the Russia-Ukraine conflict is impossible to predict. That said, it is likely to follow history’s pattern for a few reasons.

First, when we look at the global economy as a whole, the Russian and Ukrainian economies are small. The U.S. economy is the largest in the world at $21.4 trillion and nearly 25 percent of the total global GDP. By comparison, the Russian GDP is $1.7 trillion and 1.94 percent of global GDP while Ukraine’s GDP is estimated to be $156 billion. 

By Carissa Conley and Bryce Kahler

Every year, business owners across the country try to find ways to lower their taxable income and pay less taxes to the government. The easiest way to reduce tax is through operating expenses, which are necessary to run the business on a day-to-day basis. One of the most important expenses a business owner should take time to understand is depreciation: the expensing of business assets. 

Depreciation requires you to spread the cost of an asset over its useful life as it loses value. The easiest method to understand is straight-line depreciation, where the cost of the asset is expensed evenly over its useful life. 

If all assets were depreciated using the straight-line method, the business would have the same depreciation expense each year until the assets were fully depreciated.  If the asset had a five-year life, it would take five years to get the full benefit of its cost.  

But there are a lot of other depreciation methods and tax elections available to the business owner that create opportunities to manage their taxable profit in the year of purchase as well as in future years.  

There are current tax laws that offer more favorable options to accelerate depreciation and immediately expense the cost of assets, thus lowering your taxable income for the year.  It also enables you to match the expense with the cash outlay or, maybe even better, expense the property faster than you’re repaying the debt and thus put more money in your pocket now (which is why real estate investments are attractive).