NetGain Communications

Section 179 of the tax code is set to completely expire in 2011, unless Congress extends it, possibly with enhancements.

What is Section 179?

This is a provision in the tax code that allows businesses to take huge deductions on purchased or leased equipment and software as soon as these items are put to work.

For tax year 2010, a business that spends less than $530,000 a year on qualified equipment can write-off up to $134,000 in 2010.

There's talk in Washington by the Obama Administration to enhance Section 179 with a 50% bonus depreciation, which could add even more savings to your bottom line.

Because Section 179 works differently according to how a corporation is structured, you need to check with your accountant for the specific details of IRS Section 179 and its application for your business in 2010.

NetGain will then help you implement a purchase plan that will offer the most bang for the buck, while maximizing your tax write-off.

Are you aware of when your equipment lease expires? Some leasing companies do not send out any notice when the lease expires, while others only send a simple notification that can be easy to overlook.

After lease expiration, you could be making payments for months or years after the actual term expires. The additional payments are NOT applied to the buyout of the system.

Likewise, so-called 'evergreen' clauses in network service contracts could cost you thousands of dollars. The reason: services and rates renew automatically for the same term unless you contact the carrier 90 days in advance of term expiration.

Review your contracts now and if you cannot find them, call your rep and ask when your existing equipment leases or service contracts expire and if there is an evergreen clause. Get the response in writing.

When your telephone invoice shows up at the office, it typically ends up on someone's desk and a separate set of data must be fished out of a file to determine how the costs get split-up.

After using a calculator to add up the costs for each department and sub-unit, then applying the percentages, the results go to the Accounting Department, where further manual manipulation occurs.

With iTEMize 3.0, you can automate the distribution of costs in numerous ways and to any level of granularity, all the way down to each location, business unit, cell phone or project code - even by line or service.

Using your organization's pre-defined allocation percentages, iTEMize sorts through the details and assigns the charges to appropriate cost centers. This automated process eliminates the tedious, time-consuming and error-prone chore of manually distributing these charges each month, while freeing staff for other priorities.

You decide how costs will be distributed, and changes can be made at any time. An Allocation Report is generated for Accounting, or for other executive uses, further eliminating manual processes.

The allocation capabilities of iTEMize can be one of the most important tools for managing costs. It is fast, error free, and provides easily digestible insight into the total telecom spend.

As users continue to demand instant access to information anytime, anywhere, you may have bumped into some performance problems or slow response times on your network.

Sure, you can add more bandwidth, but that gets expensive. A better way of dealing with the performance problem is by establishing a Quality of Service for each application.

The routers and switches, which control the flow of data on your network, direct data over the best paths. They can also look at a packet of information and see that it is for a phone call or a video conference and give it priority over routine data applications that are not so sensitive to delay, jitter, and packet loss.

By setting QoS you can ensure that your different types of communications will run smoothly. It's all about providing your business with more control over its communications rather than just hoping that everything will work out okay.

With the cost of mobile services consuming an ever greater percentage of telecom spend, organizations can count on yet another long list of charges every month that are difficult to substantiate and manage.

Typically, mobile costs are spread throughout the enterprise, resulting in a patchwork of budget line items that are not easily consolidated. The result is that many businesses are not able to manage one of their fastest growing expenses. The money businesses thought they were saving by carefully examining their telephone bills is now being consumed by their mobile phone bills.

It is becoming a common scenario: many organizations do not know what their mobility deployments are really costing them. In one case, the total mobile spend was found to be $95,000 per month for 1,000 devices, annualized at $1,140,000. Other findings included:

• 15% of mobile devices -- 148 -- were found to be missing a negotiated discount.
• 13% of mobile devices -- 134 -- were found to have excessive texting usage.
• 20% of mobile devices -- 196 -- were on sub-optimal plans, providing a significant opportunity for rate plan optimization.