James D. Peros C.A. C.P.A

The right projector is an essential part of any presentation. The quality of the projector is probably the most important part of any PowerPoint or other visual presentation to an audience of employees or potential clients. To get your point across, whether you are in sales, marketing or training, you need to project a high-quality image. Unfortunately, when presenting at offsite venues such as hotel meeting rooms, the projector provided is often of substandard quality and your presentation will not have the impact it should have.   Selecting the Right Equipment There are now more than 2,000 projector models and many screens already on the market. Selection of the projector and screen that best fit your needs requires careful consideration of the following factors. Pixels When choosing a projector, the first consideration is the purpose and place of its use. If you are just going to give PowerPoint presentations or a generic business presentation, y...

  What is the best way to price the job and bill your client? When billing a client, it is common to set an hourly rate, multiply that by the number of hours worked on the file and bill the client accordingly. But technology is reducing the time needed to do many jobs while increasing the need for knowledge, training and experience. Whether “billable hours” continues to be right for your business or you should move to “value billing” is a question worth exploring.   The “Value” in Value Billing Value billing is based on the value of the work to the customer and not on the cost to the vendor of providing the service. The normal way to determine the cost of providing a service is to determine the remuneration needed over the year, add the overhead cost, and divide the sum by the number of hours to be worked. This calculation produces the hourly rate. However, this approach does not establish the value of the task to the customer.   Your client comes to you...

  When employers accommodate the disability, they benefit from the ability. Disability is a loaded word. Is a disability a real mental or physical impairment, or is the “disability'' a blockage to useful employment created by the failure of society to accommodate? For example, is a person in a wheelchair disabled, or has society failed to enable them by building ramps and wider interior doorways that allow persons with disabilities to be usefully employed in the first place? Seeing failure to accommodate disability as a social problem recognizes that society loses the value of the other abilities possessed by persons with impairments. Statistics Canada reports that in 2012, about 10.1% of the 2.3 million working-age (15-64) Canadians reported some form of disability. This figure jumps to 33.2% for those over 65. A report by the Royal Bank of Canada completed in 2000 estimated that (at that time) persons with disabilities possessed about $25 billion in annual spend...

  Good record keeping today can prevent CRA penalties tomorrow. We live in a digital world where everything is captured electronically in real time. Paper financial statements have become relics from the past; unfortunately, the requirement to produce evidence for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) for HST or income tax has not. The CRA accepts records in: paper format paper format later converted to and stored in an accessible and readable electronic format an accessible and readable electronic format. As explained on the CRA website, Keeping Records : “We consider you to have electronic records if you create, process, maintain, and store your information in an electronic format. You are required to retain these records in an electronically readable format, even if you have paper printouts of these records. If any of your source documents are initially created, transmitted, or received electronically, they must be retained in an electronic format. Scanned images...