Whether you are working on your business part-time, operating as a sole proprietor, or starting a business with a more formal structure such as a partnership or corporation – it’s vital that you keep your business banking separate from your personal finances.

Keeping the two separate, not only provides your business with credibility, it reduces your personal liability (a must if you are incorporating your business as a distinct and separate legal entity under its own name), and helps you manage your taxes, bills and other payments.

Below are some reasons why you might want to consider a business bank account, and how to go about finding the right one for you.

Reasons to Separate Business and Personal Banking

If you aren’t convinced that you need to separate your business and personal banking, consider these reasons:

1. It Keeps Your Books In Order and the Tax Man from Your Door

From a record-keeping and cash flow stand point, co-mingling your finances can quickly get sticky even for freelancers and part-time business owners and it’s a risk most business owners or start-ups can not afford to take.

For one thing, IRS record-keeping requirements for income and tax deductions require that business and personal transactions are separate. While

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How do you greet visitors when they walk in your business door? You welcome them, ask them to take their coats off and be comfortable, and lead them to the areas in your store where they can find the products that will best serve them.

By the same token, your website should follow the same philosophy. If your website navigation does not aid your online visitors, then it detracts and distracts – and it is sure to lose customers rather than convert them.

To paint a better idea of how navigation can help you convert visitors into sales, here are a few tips:

1. Connect Your Theme – Use cascading style sheets (CSS) whenever possible to keep your website theme and color scheme unified throughout your website. Thi

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Of course you can.

If celebrity culture is teaching us anything, it is that yes, you can have lots of money and still be miserable, so miserable in fact that you ruin your life with addictions, even lose your life to them.

I recently watched an interesting movie on DVD, Meet Bill. Not a masterpiece but certainly entertaining and also thought-provoking. The guy, Bill, married into a rich family.  He works in the family business, lives a life of luxury, and you would think he has a great life – except that his father in law, his brother in law and his wife all disrespect him. He’s bored, unfulfilled, miserable, and desperately wants to make it on his own.

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Bloomberg Businessweek has posted an article about an inmate who was running a debt collection company while he was incarcerated. Lamont D. Cooper was imprisoned in October 2009 for violating the terms of his release for a drug conviction and continued to run Legal Action Recovery, his debt collection agency. He was “barred from the business” in back in April 2009 for using “threats and intimidation” when dealing with collecting debts, but it seems most of his business was directed toward people who didn’t owe any money in the first place.

Karen Freifeld, author of the article, writes that while Cooper was in prison, his employees would pretend to be law enforcement officers when they contacted debtors and tried to scare them into paying, sometimes nonexistent, debts.

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Sept. 24 () – Olam International Ltd., the owner of 67% of NZ Farming Systems Uruguay, surged on the Singapore stock exchange after confirming it is in talks with rival Louis Dreyfus Commodities.

Olam “has engaged in preliminary confidential discussions with Louis Dreyfus in relation to a possible business collaboration which may take the form of, among others, a merger,” the global supplier of food and agricultural commodities said in a statement. The talks are “preliminary” and there’s no certainty a deal will be done, it said.

Shares of Olam jumped 8.5% to S$3.20 on the Singapore stock exchange and have climbed 22% in the past 12 months. The shares

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Many believe that banner ads are on the way out. Some say they were a popular online advertising trick back in the late 1990s before the dot-com bust, but now in the world of Web 2.0, banner ads are going extinct. What’s the reality?

Banner ads are alive and well. From mom-and-pop online shops to Fortune 500 companies, banner ads are used extensively to convey branding messages to new customers. While the current growing online advertising fad is pay per click text-only ads, banner ads are still prominent in all areas of websites. Just look on the front page of Yahoo! or MSN.com, and you’ll notice paid banner advertisements on the right side. Go

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In our articles section of our website we have added a new article that discusses the factors that typically are present when Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case settles quickly.

Here’s an overview:

First, the more clear cut the violation the more likely the defendant debt collector will want to settle with you.

Second, the debt collector will want to see if your lawyer is familiar and experienced in litigating these types of cases.

Third, the debt collector will want to know what your attorney’s hourly rate is so it can calculate the risk in fighting a legitimate violation.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is your attitude towards settlement.

We hope this article is helpful to you and wish the best!