Corporate Partner Corner
Special benefits and offers from our corporate partners for NAWBO members.
2019 New Meals and Entertainment Deduction Requirements
Submitted by: Jennifer Dizon, CPA, Hood & Strong LLP
Before the The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) generally prohibited deductions for expenses related to entertainment, amusement or recreation (commonly referred to as entertainment expenses). It provided exceptions for entertainment expenses “directly related” to or “associated” with conducting business.
The IRC further limited deductions for food and beverage expenses that satisfied one of the exceptions. A deduction was allowed only if 1) the expense wasn’t lavish or extravagant under the circumstances, and 2) the taxpayer (or an employee of the taxpayer) was present when the food or beverages were furnished. The amount of the deduction was limited to 50% of the expense.
The new law repeals the two exceptions and amends the 50% limitation to remove the reference to entertainment expenses. The TCJA doesn’t address the circumstances in which providing food and beverages might constitute nondeductible entertainment, but legislative history “clarifies that taxpayers generally may continue to deduct 50% of the food and beverage expenses associated with operating their trade or business.”<
Deductible requirements:
Until the IRS publishes its proposed regulations, businesses may deduct 50% of business meal amounts if:
- The expenses are ordinary and necessary expenditures paid or incurred to carry on business,
- The expenses aren’t lavish or extravagant under the circumstances,
- The taxpayer (or an employee of the taxpayer) is present at the furnishing of the food or beverages,
- The food and beverages are provided to current or potential customers, clients, consultants or similar business contacts, and
- For food and beverages provided during or at an entertainment activity, the entertainment is purchased separately from the food and beverages or the cost of the food and beverages is stated separately from the cost of the entertainment on one or more bills, invoices or receipts.
The IRS guidance includes illustrative examples for the fifth criterion:
In the first example, a taxpayer invites a business contact to a baseball game, paying for both tickets. While at the game, the taxpayer also pays for hot dogs and drinks. The game is entertainment, so the cost of the tickets is a nondeductible entertainment expense. However, the cost of the hot dogs and drinks, purchased separately from the tickets, isn’t an entertainment expense. Therefore, the taxpayer can deduct 50% of the cost as a meal expense.
The second example employs a similar scenario, with the taxpayer inviting a contact to a basketball game. This time, though, the taxpayer buys tickets to watch the game from a suite, with access to food and beverages included. The game again represents entertainment, and the cost of the tickets is nondeductible. The cost of the food and beverages isn’t stated separately on the invoice, rendering it a disallowed entertainment expense, as well.
The final example uses the scenario above, except that the cost of the food and beverages is stated separately on the invoice for the basketball game tickets. The cost of the tickets remains nondeductible, but the taxpayer can deduct 50% of the cost of the food and beverages.
Nondeductible entertainment
- Night clubs,
- Cocktail lounges,
- Theaters,
- Country clubs,
- Golf and athletic clubs, and
- Sporting events.
Entertainment also includes hunting, fishing, vacation and similar trips. It may include providing food and beverages, a hotel suite or an automobile to a customer or the customer’s family.
Be sure to contact your tax advisor for how these rules apply to your situation.
Use Social Media to Build Credibility for a Small Business
by Roberta Kiphuth, President, Detati Digital Marketing
- Be entertaining – Humor is good, just be careful that it is appropriate for your audience.
- Being inspiring – Putting a little positive energy out there is always a good thing.
- Make it actionable – Share checklists, step-by-step guides or how-tos.
- Get personal – Let people get to know you on a personal level – but appropriately.
- Utilizing visuals and videos – Mix it up and offer visual forms of content.
NAWBO Supports DECA
NAWBO Silicon Valley is excited about working with DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) on a memorandum of understanding as potential affiliates and partners! It would allow our NAWBO members to create a mentorship program that would help local DECA high school students, who are highly motivated and dedicated to becoming the next generation of emerging leaders and entrepreneurs. Typically, 30% of over 200,000 DECA members become business owners. As women business owners, this partnership would align with our mission and goals of giving back to our community and helping young leaders succeed!
Join NAWBO National as we travel the word making connections and building bridges of opportunities for our members.
President’s Message | December 2018
Happy Holidays & Season’s Greetings
What a great time of year to Share the Joy!
We hope you can join us at our traditional NAWBO holiday luncheon at the University Club of Palo Alto with the Peninsula Symphony on Tuesday, December 11th. It will be an occasion to feel joyous and thankful for what NAWBO has accomplished in 2018, and how NAWBO has helped achieve your business success and goals. Most importantly, it’s a time to treasure the relationships we have built among our members and continue the strong sisterhood in 2019.
A highlight of NAWBO’s 2018 accomplishments:
Crystal Chair Award Gala Event
- Jennifer Dizon, Crystal Chair Lifetime Achievement
- Mary Hiland, Woman Business Advocate of the Year
- Kimberly Tucker, Business Woman of the Year
Susan Hagar Award
- Griselda Quezada-Chavez
Other Highlights
- Passage of SB 826
- Celebration of HR 5050
- Empowered & Educational Topics, Speakers & Panelists
- Member & Corporate Sponsored Workshops & Presentations
- New & Renewed Members & Corporate Sponsors
- Networking & Relationship-Building Opportunities
- NAWBO National Leadership Training & Conference
Your continued involvement and participation, whether it’s attending our events or serving on a committee, are greatly appreciated, along with the hard work and effort that our board members provide. We look forward to building upon our accomplishments to make 2019 the best version of ourselves and our Silicon Valley Chapter in our One Voice!May you enjoy this special time with your friends and family,
Silicon Valley DECA District Career Development Conference
Spend time with emerging leaders. Volunteer as a competitive event Judge.
DECA is an international organization comprised of 225,000 high school and college students interested in business, finance, hospitality, marketing, and entrepreneurship.
As a competitive events judge, you’ll sit across the table from tomorrow’s emerging leaders.
DECA’s Comprehensive Learning Program integrates into classroom instruction, applies learning, connects to business and promotes competition. DECA prepares the next generation to be academically prepared, community oriented, professionally responsible, experienced leaders.
WHAT WILL YOU BE JUDGING?
DECA has nearly 60 competitive events, from prepared business plans and market research events to on-the-spot role plays and case studies.
LOCATION
San Francisco Airport Marriott Waterfront: 1800 Old Bayshore Hwy, Burlingame, CA 94010
Signup today!
http://californiadeca.org/forms/judges.php#sv
Is Your Website Ready for 2019?
Your Small Business Website Should Work as Hard as You Do.
Create a marketing tool that generates more leads so you can make more sales in 2019.
There are lots of designers, freelancers and online job shops that offer cheap – and ineffective – website development. Unfortunately, they don’t take the time to understand your business goals, but view your site as a “project”.
Detati Digital Marketing has a team of small business experts that helps to create a site that works to reach your business and marketing goals. After all, your site should do more that just take up space on the internet, it should work for your business.
SPECIAL OFFER FROM DETATI, a NAWBO-SV Corporate Partner
NAWBO Members GET $500 Off a WordPress website.
Thinking About Joining a Board?
by Amii Barnard-Bahn, JD ACC
Ready to Serve? How to find the best Board for your credentials
At NAWBO Silicon Valley’s September event, we discussed the landmark legislation of SB 826. This legislation was designed to create more access for women and qualified candidates for public boards. That is important because the role of the board has become critical to the long-term health of a company and the protection of its shareholders and employees. Creating a larger pool of seasoned professionals to guide and govern our corporate institutions is paramount in a time of Wells Fargo, Papa John’s and Uber debacles.
A board search can take many years, so it’s never too early to evaluate and cultivate the skills and network you need to establish yourself as a viable candidate.
If you are a seasoned business professional ready to take on the responsibility of being an active member of a board, here are some things to note:
- Take your time and research the company and team to make sure it’s a good fit.
- In a well-designed board, each member contributes different skills and experience, which creates a powerful combination that helps to drive company success. Boards generally seek specific experience criteria such as finance, business development, technology, international, operations, legal/public and other areas of expertise.
- Evaluate your experience and unique contributions, and tailor your search to companies that can best use your skills.
- When you join a board, you are taking on significant responsibilities to shareholders, employees, and the public.
- Your success depends on how well you get along with others, and how well you know yourself. Working with a trained executive coach who can administer assessments and profiles to define your core competencies and gauge leadership effectiveness; can bring an increased awareness of strengths and development opportunities.
Top 5: Due Diligence Checklist Before Joining a Board
- Meet each Board member personally. Test the collegiality; inquire about board dynamics. Do you feel welcome? Do you like and respect each of them? Experience – do they serve on other company boards? Check governance ratings from orgs such as Institutional Shareholder Services to evaluate board strength.
- Meet each C-suite executive and assess their strengths and weaknesses.
- Understand how the company makes money and how they conduct business.
What’s their approach to risk, and what is your comfort level? - Review the company finances w/outside CPA, and confirm D&O insurance.
- Confirm the unique value/skills you are expected to contribute.
For more tips and strategies on how to become a board member or for executive coaching, contact Amii Barnard-Bahn.
Executive Coach and Board Advisor
Barnard-Bahn Consulting & Coaching
www.barnardbahn.com
510.301.0400
Join NAWBO-SV and get access to Launchwise 100
- 100 steps to launching a product, brand or business digital course ($599 value), which will begin in January!
President’s Message | October 2018
Dear Members:
Our October 9th event was filled with many reasons to celebrate, and we are so proud that you are part of our NAWBO history!
We honored the NAWBO architects of 30 years ago who helped in the passage of HR 5050, allowing women to qualify to take a business loan without a male counterpart. We also celebrated the signing of SB 826, requiring California publicly-held companies to have at least one woman on board or directors by the end of 2019 and a minimum of two by July 2020.
The evening was enhanced with our corporate panel experts, Ami Bernard-Bahn, Briana Brownell, and Irene Murphy who shared game changing strategies for becoming a board member. Our facilitator, Jennifer Dizon, and our members and guests had the opportunity to engage in this exciting conversation.
Our evening was also a celebration of Griselda Quezada-Chavez, who earned the most prestigious Susan Hagar Award by NAWBO National. Through Griselda’s determined efforts and hard work in making international business relations and issues at the forefront, we continue to advance our global agenda today and into the future. We are very honored to have Griselda as our International Director of Silicon Valley chapter.
As NAWBO members, we embrace SB 826 and want to create opportunities for women from all different experiences, backgrounds and education that want to be part of a forward thinking organization. Our founder, Susan Hager, believed in bringing your seat to the table, and if you don’t have a table, build one. Then bring other women with you. Simply put, we have just built an unlimited number of tables and have an open invitation for you to join us as we continue the movement of helping women business owners thrive!
Next month, we look forward to an educational and interesting topic on Money Matters: The Finance, Cash Flow and Best Practices that Increase Your Bottom Line. The program will include mini sessions such as “Savvy Cash Flow Strategies”, “Simple Tactics to Increase Your Bottom Line” and “Best Practices” from our small business financial experts. We are thankful to Bank of America for sponsoring this event, and we hope you can join us!
Many thanks for taking this journey with us in making our”One Voice” loud and clear in accomplishing great things together!
Warmest regards,
Flordelisa Harris
Congratulations Griselda Quezada-Chavez!
Griselda has been an advocate for NAWBO on the international front, holding NAWBO’s seat at2018 National Women’s Business Conference’s Impact All Year Long
By Molly Gimmel
As Americans, and as incredibly busy women business owners, we are more disconnected than ever. In between the thousands of emails, texts and calls we receive, social media posts we have to share and respond to, and the time we spend in planes, trains and automobiles traveling to and from work and meetings, the time we take to create and nourish deep connections with others and the time we set aside for solitude and reflection has grown increasingly less.
3rd Annual Girl’s Festival
The 3rd Annual Girl’s Festival was a blast! NAWBO-Silicon Valley volunteered and got to see over 2,000 girls attend 100+ activities-an interactive EXPO, Maker’s Fair, 20+ workshops, all day performances, coding classes, contests and much more.President’s Message | September 2018
We are off to a great new fiscal year, focused on achieving our 5 Star for Advocacy, helping members grow their businesses and creating our One Voice in becoming better and stronger leaders as women business owners!
Susan Ellenberg, President of San Jose Unified School District Board of Trustees, kicked off our first dinner/networking event in a lively and engaging presentation and workshop on “Civic Engagement in Times of Incivility”, helping us take our first step toward the 5 Star for Advocacy achievement.
Our September monthly event will showcase a Silicon Valley Media Panel that will share fresh media insights to grow your brand, access new opportunities and forge valuable partnerships. The panel will bring their experience from Forbes, NBC, KRON, NBC Bay Area and Valley Talks, and it is guaranteed to be a successful event.
We have so many more exciting topics and reasons to celebrate that are sure to keep you engaged with NAWBO and its members, so please look out for future communications. For October, we’ll focus on “How to Build and Join Corporate Boards”, which ties into the pending SB 826 legislation that is currently on Governor Brown’s desk for signature, requiring CA publicly-held companies to have at least one women on board by the end of 2019.
Hopefully, we will be celebrating this monumental new law in conjunction with our planned 30th anniversary celebration of HR 5050. With the instrumental help of NAWBO, the Women’s Business Ownership Act (HR 5050) was passed to eliminate bank lending discrimination against women business owners.
Although we are very lucky to have a dedicated and hardworking board of volunteers bringing together impactful and worthwhile programs and events, we encourage you to get involved and become a committee member to strengthen our sisterhood. We cannot do this on our own. By joining our leadership team, you become part of the women business owners who help make positive changes on a local, national and global level.
In closing, we want to thank Monika Miles, Robin Fisher and Mina Doshi for becoming committee members.
We look forward to our journey in creating One Voice in accomplishing great things together!
ALOM Opens Amsterdam Office to Expand Presence in Europe
“Our expanded European presence in Amsterdam benefits our customers by creating technology-driven efficiencies for delivery to suppliers and end-users across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, improving service and quality, and reducing costs.”
– ALOM President/CEO and NAWBO Member, Hannah Kain
ALOM, a global leader in supply chain management, has announced the opening of its European headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. ALOM has been doing business in Europe and servicing European customers since 2006. With this move ALOM is deepening its commitment to serving a growing number of customers and suppliers throughout the region with sophisticated supply chain services, including procurement, inventory, fulfillment, production and marketing support services, and logistics management capacity.
The Amsterdam facility represents ALOM’s 19th global location and is part of the company’s multi-year expansion that includes a state-of-the-art 120,000 square foot addition to its US global headquarters in Fremont, CA, now totaling 270,000 square feet, and its 48,000 square foot Indianapolis, IN, plant opened in September, 2017.
Luminoustudios Makes Storytelling a Good Business Decision
Reema Dutt, Luminoustudios
If you’re like most people out there, you probably describe yourself as a “visual learner.” You learn, engage, communicate and appreciate things more naturally when they are visually shown to you. That’s at the crux of how Reema Dutt and her team at Luminoustudios are helping businesses to market themselves-through high quality, strategic video production for clients across the world.
With a background in the film industry, Reema and her co-founder Sania Jhankar both started to recognize a gap that needed to be filled. “We saw all these startups that didn’t really understand video marketing,” she says. “Given our indie film background, we thought we could help those people leverage video marketing with a smaller video production, and smaller budget, but maintain that high quality.
NAWBO National Endorses Young Kim For Congress
(Washington, D.C. September 18, 2018) -The National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) is announcing its endorsement of Young Kim in her bid for election in California’s 39th Congressional District.
“Young Kim has a long history of advocating for and representing small business owners and women business owners throughout her career at the state and federal levels,” explains Molly Gimmel, NAWBO National Board Chair. “As a small business owner herself, she has a unique understanding and appreciation of the obstacles and opportunities facing women business owners. We look forward to working with her on the issues impacting our members and all women business owners.”
NAWBO National considers candidates for endorsement after they have won their primary. The selection of candidates is based solely on their history of business ownership or their voting record demonstrating their consistent support of business owners. Additional endorsements will be made by NAWBO prior to the November 6 general election.