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Preparing for the Unexpected

While you can prepare and save for many things such as vacations, vehicles or new homes, it’s not common to save in case of a health emergency. Hypothetically, if you or someone in your family was to have a heart attack or was to be diagnosed with a serious illness, would you have the money to pay for treatments and care? What about if time has to be taken off work? This is a very difficult time for many people, as money is hard to come by and taking care of the illness becomes the top priority.

Tax Savings for Sole Proprietors

Self employed individuals often struggle to find adequate health coverage that they can fit into their budget. As of 1998 self employed individuals and unincorporated companies are able to deduct premiums and other costs paid for health and dental from their income, previously this was paid for with after tax dollars.

What DSAI Coverage Is and Why You Need It

DSAI: Diagnostic and Specialist Access Insurance (DSAI) coverage. This is the easiest answer to avoiding long waits for MRI’s, CT scans and specialist consultations. With normal coverage you may find yourself waiting weeks and months to have an MRI or CT scan done, if your pain or illness turns out to be something serious these weeks and months may have gotten you closer to recovery and prevented further injury or illness from occurring.

What’s a PHSP Anyway?

Do you own a small business? Did you know that if your medical and dental benefits are administered through a third party arms-length administrator, they can be 100% tax deductible to your company?

Now, did you know that CustomCare has been a third party arms length provider of PHSP’s since 1998 following the Canada Revenue Agency approved guidelines? If you didn’t know this before, we are happy to enlighten you on what you have been missing out on.

Don’t Let Your Small Business Be a Target For Hackers

There have been countless cases of businesses suffering from information theft. While larger companies that have had their information hacked are made public, there are also many small business cases in which this also happens. While losing 300,000 clients information might seem more severe than your small business losing information for 300 clients. They can be equally disastrous. The damage done will not only affect your finances but also your reputation.

Small Business Grants For Your Business

Anyone who has ever tried or who has successfully launched a small business knows how much time, effort, and money go into the venture. What you might not have known however, is The Government of Canada has put aside 21 billion dollars for small business grants.

Small businesses can now obtain these grants to help start, expand or improve their small business. This money will be used for many different purposes including:

Tips For Starting A Small Business: Part Two

As discussed in our previous blog, the single most important component to starting a small business is to have enough money saved before you start, and then to gradually grow your business.
Some other important things to consider when starting a small business are:

- Understand how you are going to make a profit. There are plenty of great ideas that won’t necessarily generate a profit. You should be able to explain how your small business will make a profit in one or two sentences.

Tips For Starting A Small Business: Part One

Starting a small business might seem like a lot of work. However, if you have a solid idea that you believe will succeed in today’s market then you should consider starting a small business to share your idea, product or service with the world.

Take Care of Your Employees and Yourself

Small business owners are notorious for running themselves ragged trying to get the most out of their small business. Although at times your long hours and lack of sleep seems to pay off, in the long run you need to take care of yourself and your employees.

There are some main points you need to remind yourself of when you are running a small business.

The first point is to NOT run yourself of your staff too thin. When you or your staff feel overwhelmed you risk; burnout, higher staff absenteeism, higher turnover, and poor customer service.

When Employees Call in Sick

Small businesses of all sizes know the stress that is put on the business when an employee calls in sick. Regardless of what your small business is, when someone calls in sick a portion of your business cannot be conducted normally. If you must deliver your product and a driver is sick, then your product will be delayed, or someone else will have to step off of the sales floor to help.