Business for Life

Value Added Tax (VAT) is a tax on the final consumption of certain goods and services in the home market but is collected at every stage of production and distribution. Most business-related goods and services will therefore be subject to VAT.

There are several UK VAT rates, the standard rate being 20% from 4th January 2011 (previously it was 17.5%).

Your company should register for VAT if the value of your taxable supplies in the past 12 months or less has exceeded the current VAT registration threshold of £73,000 (from 1st April 2011. Previously it was £70,000), or the value of your taxable supplies in the next 30 days alone is expected to exceed this threshold.

This threshold applies for the 20011/12 tax year, and usually increases each tax year by £1,000 or so. It is important to remember that turnover is the amount of sales the business is making, not the profit.

Registering for VAT may be beneficial

Even if your business turnover lies below the current VAT threshold, you can still register for VAT, since there may be business benefits in doing so. It

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The broken link will remain until Southwest starts serving Atlanta next February and even then, passengers will have to stop in Austin or Houston on flights between Atlanta and Dallas. It’s all part of restrictions related to Dallas’ Love Field, the city’s secondary airport, and Dallas-based Southwest.

The Wright Amendment has been a decades-long issue in Texas, but it never really affected travel in Atlanta until Southwest’s acquisition of AirTran Airways this year.

Meanwhile, Delta and American still each have more flights from Atlanta to Dallas than AirTran’s seven daily round trips; Delta has 12 daily round trips on the route, while American has 10.

But BestFares.com founder Tom Parsons said the coming loss of nonstop competition from a low-cost carrier like AirTran translates into fares that are as much as $70 higher for Atlanta-Dallas flights.

Southwest-AirTran had to discontinue AirTran’s flights to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport because the Wright Amendment restricts Southwest’s ability to fly out of DFW while running its full operation out of Love Field.

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Did you have a long weekend? How did you spend it? Me? I reviewed the newly posted 81-page Draft Individual Fixed and/or Variable Deferred Annuity Outline. I am in the process of drafting comments, which are due to the Department on or before April 3, 2011. Let me know if you’d like me to include a comment from your company or if you’d like to discuss anything in the proposed outline. Clients in the annuity market will likely be hearing from me with thoughts on how these proposed changes could impact your products or the way you do business today. There is a lot in the outline and it is much better to talk about the issues now than when we are all under the gun with a new product that needs to get out the door.

So the Atlanta couple dumped their land line, car lease and premium cable service and paid off the balance. Now they pay their cards in full each month.

“We said, ‘If we can’t afford it, don’t buy it,’” said Robb Gray, 42, a medical imaging sales manager.

The Grays are on the front lines of what might be called the Great Deleveraging. Studies show U.S. consumers are reducing their dependence on debt. They’re also more likely to pay bills on time.

The national credit card delinquency rate — payments 90 or more days past due — is the lowest in 17 years, according to TransUnion, an information and risk management company. Credit card debt per borrower is at a near-record low, too.

However, Georgia is fifth-highest with $5,242 per borrower, TransUnion said.

In Monday’s newspaper, the AJC takes a deep look at how metro Atlantans are trimming their debt. It’s a story you’ll get only by picking up a copy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution or logging on to the paper’s iPad app. Subscribe today.

Georgia Power will be sending crews to Virginia to aid in recovery efforts from Hurricane Irene, but not to North Carolina, as originally planned.

Progress Energy in North Carolina had originally expected to need help from Georgia workers, but Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft said Sunday that the North Carolina company had released its crews.

“They had crews from other areas meet their needs,” he said.

However, Kraft said he has gotten requests from Dominion Virginia Power to send crews there.

Georgia Power is still working out the details of the assistance, and Kraft said he did not know how many crews would be needed.

“They’re recruiting resources from all over,” he said. “It’s a fluid situation.”

Personnel from many electric membership corporations in Georgia are headed to North Carolina and Maryland to help those states’ electric co-ops restore power to areas hardest hit by Hurricane Irene.

“We are eager to help our sister co-ops,” said Georgia EMC Vice President of Safety & Training Jim Wright. “Bein

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“We are a business that’s built for times like these,” Coca-Cola chief executive Muhtar Kent said on CNBC on July 19, shortly after the company announced higher second-quarter sales and profit. “No question, though: It’s tough out there.”

Coca-Cola, which does the large majority of its business outside the United States, benefited from the weakness of the U.S. dollar in the second quarter. In its home market, though, consumers were battered by weakness in the construction industry, high unemployment and higher food costs.

There is much “mist and the fog in front of the consumer in the U.S. today,” Kent said.

Delta Air Lines

Preparing for high fuel prices over the long term and bending to the slow economic recovery, Delta Air Lines will cut flight schedules more than previously planned, retire more planes and offer buyouts to employees.

Delta is assuring Wall Street that it is serious about cutting its long-term debt, much of which came with its acquisition of Northwest almost three years ago.

“We wi

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Good publicity can help to propel your small business to another level. Sadly many small businesses don’t make any effort to get any press coverage because they think it’s impossibly difficult to do so.

However, it is really simple to get free publicity for your business. In fact, the reason that many businesses get it wrong is because they try to over-complicate things. Here are the five powerful and unbreakable rules you must follow when trying to get free publicity for your business:

1. Know your target audience and deliver to it

Journalists are ultra focused on their audience. If the people they are creating content for want to know about a specific subject, that’s what they will write about.

If you turn up wanting to get publicity about something else, they won’t be interested. You need to understand exactly what your target audience is interested in, and ensure your story suggestions fit within that. Get that right and it becomes a lot easier to persuade journalists to run your stories.

2.

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