The Ultimate Seller's Checklist to Selling Your Business

Scott Scharf is the founder of Catching Clouds an online accounting platform for ecommerce businesses. There was a time when online selling was the wild west, but the government and taxes have caught up to the industry and are targeting individual sellers. Scott shares information, tips, and insights into legally navigating the world of tax and online finance when buying, selling, and running an online business. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahGmV2Io1gM Episode Highlights:

• How online businesses need to reach out to state tax entities after the sale until their tax liability is voided.
• Bad things that can happen are audit triggers and owed taxes on zero revenue businesses.
• Scott has been a long time online geek. He and his wife decided to focus on online accounting to help online business owners.
• Catching Clouds provides outsourced cloud accounting for ecommerce sellers.
• They have just launched their online Catching Clouds training.
• What people should be doing after selling their business.
• Engage a CPA or expert before closing down the business.
• You want to understand the tax impact and any rules you need to apply.
• How it’s easier to keep your EIN when switching businesses. You can close sales tax licenses that you don’t need for that business.
• Sales tax licenses for ecommerce businesses. When selling an FBA business you need to actively close down the past sales tax licenses and file your last returns and follow-up so that they have closed the license.
• The biggest gotcha for selling an FBA business. You don’t want to be audited after the sale.
• The importance of collecting all of your business documents, payroll, EIN, vendor invoices, and where you spent your money, and all of your receipts. This will help with a sale and protect you in an audit. Save your receipts in real time.
• Using Hubdoc to collect financial statements for clients. You need all of your data saved and organized in one place.
• If you aren’t keeping track of everything you need to go back through those PDFs.
• Start now with your document collection.
• Building a complete asset list of everything that you have.
• Just because something is on a credit card statement, you still need to prove what you have.
• Back up all of your data. You can be liable for up to 10 years. Back everything up in the cloud and a physical copy or a dvd.
• Record all of your websites and logins on a password tool like LastPass. Handing over the account makes it super easy hand over a business.
• Document your standard operating procedures. Create a list of support tools, team members, and general organization chart.  
• Download your last batch of orders before a sale for sales tax purposes.
• Don’t wait until the end of the month. Call the tax entity and get your final sales tax forms filed.
• When calling the IRS and if you were given bad advice they won’t hold you accountable. With other departments call back and make sure you get the correct information.
• Always follow through and be diligent with tax authorities.
• Know your new business address and specifically change it.

Resources:

• Catching Clouds
• [email protected]
• Scott Scharf LinkedIn
• @ScottScharf2 Twitter
• Hubdoc
• LastPass
• TaxJar

Access the Ultimate Buyer's Checklist

Click here to access the checklist we use in this episode.