Tax and Accounting checklist for the new year

The first business task I perform each year is to copy my checklist from the previous year and make the necessary modifications.  Here is my basic checklist for 2011.  I also have all of these items set up with reminders in Outlook.  Hopefully by having both the reminder and the checklist I won’t forget to do any of them.

Begin Date	Due Date	Done	Tax Authority	Freq.	Action
1/1/2011	1/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments for DEC Last Year
1/1/2011	1/31/2011		Federal	Annual	Federal W2 to employee (me)
1/1/2011	1/15/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Income Tax (MO1040-ES)
1/1/2011	1/15/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Q4 last year  (1040-ES)
1/1/2011			Lee’s Summit	Annual	Register Business Section 28-30
1/1/2011	1/31/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Tax Report for Q4 last year (941)
1/1/2011	1/31/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Q4 Last Year WH Report (MO941) and payment (combined online)
1/1/2011	1/31/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	File and Pay MO Unemployment ($0) Q4 last year
1/1/2011	1/31/2011		Federal	Annual	FUTA “FORM” 940 for last year
2/1/2011	2/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
2/1/2011	2/28/2011		Federal	Annual	W3 to SSA
2/1/2011	2/28/2011		Missouri	Annual	MO-W3
1/1/2011	3/1/2011		Missouri	Annual	File Annual Report (online)
2/1/2011	3/15/2011		Federal	Annual	Business Taxes Year last year (1120s).  K-1 to me
1/1/2011	3/15/2011		Missouri	Annual	MO1120s
3/1/2011	3/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
4/1/2011	4/15/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Q1 This year (1040-ES)
4/1/2011	4/15/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Income Tax (MO1040-ES)
4/1/2011	4/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
1/1/2011	4/15/2011		Federal	Annual	Individual 1040
1/1/2011	4/15/2011		Missouri	Annual	Missouri 1040
1/1/2011	4/15/2011		Kansas	Annual	Kansas 1040
4/1/2011	4/30/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Tax Report for Q1 (941)
4/1/2011	4/30/2011		Federal	Annual	FUTA (940) – $56
4/1/2011	4/?/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	File and Pay MO Unemployment
4/1/2011	4/30/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Q1 WH Report (MO941) and payment (combined online)
5/1/2011	5/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
6/1/2011	6/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
6/1/2011	6/15/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Income Tax (MO1040-ES)
6/1/2011	6/16/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Q2 (1040-ES)
7/1/2011	7/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
7/1/2011	7/31/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Tax Report for Q2 (941)
7/1/2011	7/31/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Q2 WH Report (MO941) and payment (combined online)
7/1/2011	7/?/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	File and Pay MO Unemployment
8/1/2011	8/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
9/1/2011	9/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
9/1/2011	9/15/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Income Tax (MO1040-ES)
9/1/2011	9/15/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Individual Estimated Q3 (1040-ES)
10/1/2011	10/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
10/1/2011	10/31/2011		Federal	Quarterly	Tax Report for Q3 (941)
10/1/2011	10/31/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	Q3 WH Report (MO941) and payment (combined online)
10/1/2011	10/?/2011		Missouri	Quarterly	File and Pay MO Unemployment ($0)
11/1/2011	11/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
12/1/2011	12/15/2011		Federal	Monthly	WH, MD, and SSN Tax payments
12/1/2011	1/15/2011		All	Annually	Identify tax and reporting changes for next year.

How Agile is your team compared to others?

Find out at http://www.comparativeagility.com/.

You need to change your payroll tax before the first salary payments of 2011

The Federal Government has reduced the employee portion of Social Security Taxes to be witheld from 6.2% to 4.2% in 2011.  If you are self-employed as a corporation and are paying yourself a salary you will begin withholding 10.4% instead of 12.4%.  The employer portion remains at 6.2%, but the employee portion is reduced from 4.2%.

Source: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_2011_maximum_social_security_withholding_amount

Clean up all the old versions of DLLs on your development PC

Sometimes I desire to clean up all the old copies of my DLLs from my computer in order to insure that I am testing the correct and current version.
Using the great tool “Search Everything” from VoidTools.com, I have found that I often have a lot of detritus in the following folders:
1) The Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
1a) In .Net 2.0, I could find the GAC at c:\windows\assembly and delete my files
1b) In .Net 4.0, the GAC is at C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\assembly in multiple sub-folders
2) The temporary ASP.Net file cache
2a) This is located at a folder with a name like C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files
3) If you develop with Silverlight, then you may find a history of every version of Silverlight DLL file you created at:
C:\Documents and Settings\%loggedInUser%\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly\dl3
4) Clear your browser cache
5) Look for DLLs in all of your bin and obj folders.  “Search Everything” is great for this purpose.

I clean up much of this with a batch file like this now:

cd “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files”
rd /S /Q root
rd /S /Q vs

c:
cd “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files”
rd /S /Q root
rd /S /Q vs

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\Local”
rd /S /Q temp

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\LocalLow”
rd /S /Q temp

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Designer”
rd /S /Q ShadowCache

c:
cd “C:\Users\rkraft\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio Services\5.0\”
rd /S /Q Cache

Determine your Silverlight version at www.silverlightversion.com

The simplest way to determine the version of silverlight installed in any browser is probably to navigate to this web site: www.silverlightversion.com.

Using the same Strong Name Key (.snk) file for multiple projects.

Yesterday I tried to re-use an existing Strong Name Key file (.snk) on other projects by navigating to it in the Signing tab of the project properties. When I did this, Visual Studio copied the .snk file to the local project folder and referenced it. This is not what I wanted.  I wanted all of my projects to reference the same .snk file from the same folder to make it easy to change it for all projects at once.

In order to use the same .snk file for many projects, first add the .snk as a relative Link file reference to each project. You do this by right clicking on the project, select Add Existing Item, navigate to the snk file, select the item and choose the “Add as Link” option from the Add dropdown on the right side of the Add button. Then go to the Signing tab in the project properties and select “Sign the assembly” and choose the .snk file (which you should not need to browse to).

Visual Studio 2010

IIS 5.1 on Windows XP does not a good Silverlight test server make

Today we resolved a few problems in our Silverlight application that manifested as [Async_ExceptionOccurred] and “Remote server not found” errors.  Our testing server was running IIS 5.1 on Windows XP.  IIS on Windows XP is limited to just 10 connections.  Since IE8 may be using up to 6 connections at a time, and during testing we often have multiple users, the maximum number of connections is exceeded and errors occur.  We found HTTP response code 403 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_403) in the logfiles of the IIS server.  I guess that we specifically were getting 403.9 “Too many users”, but that detail is not included in our log file.  Using Fiddler we saw some of the errors as 504 (the very same requests that IIS logged as 403).  The 504 did not seem accurate though because the failure response occurred immediately and our WCF timeouts are all set to 10 minutes.

 I thought I’d post what we found hoping it hastens others experiencing similar problems to a resolution.

Scrum is not agile!

Scrum is not an agile process.  I am saying this to get your attention, but I am also saying it because there is some truth in the statement.  Our development team has been striving for agility for years now.  When I use the term striving, I am not implying struggling, rather I am implying that I don’t think “Agile” is something to be obtained.  It is not an end goal, it is a behavior.  Once you reach a point where your development processes are finalized and no longer changing, you are no longer agile.  So if you want to remain agile, you have to keep looking for ways to improve your processes.  You will never obtain that end state of how to develop software the best way.

I know.  I know.  Scrum includes retrospectives and through the retrospectives you identify process improvements to make.  Therefore Scrum remains agile.  That is true, at least for those few (apparently few) teams that make use of the retrospective.  I think many teams don’t feel they have time for the retrospective and don’t believe they will have much value.  Many scrum masters and former project managers get tired of tinkering with the processes and just want to know the patterns to be followed over and over.  There is certainly benefit to habits and in knowing what to expect.  But it appears that a lot of teams leave out the retrospective and therefore are probably leaving out the agility.

Even worse than the teams that skip the retrospectives may be the teams that seek adherence to scrum above all else.  You know these guys from their posts on the blogs and message boards.  They have taken scrum to heart and will not suffer anyone to criticize scrum in any way.  Unfortunately it may be these people that are the least agile because they are not open to any process that is not part of scrum.  I understand how this occurs.  When a waterfall development shop seeks to improve their software development processes, they come to believe that scrum will provide such success, and they try fervently to adopt scrum.  The danger for some is that they forget the ultimate goal is to write better software, not to adhere to scrum; and if the best software can be developed without 100% adherence to scrum principles, then you should ignore those principles that don’t work for you.  Remember, the goal is to write better software.  So skip those daily standup meetings, or change their content, or allow the scrum master to also be a developer or dba, or break any of the other rules of scrum if they are not working for you.  Remember, an agile team is willing to try new things to find what works best.  You are in a constant state of discovery.  If someone tells you that you are not agile and not scrum because you aren’t doing a daily standup, just tell them that you don’t care because instead, you write great software.

My plane is not flying in a straight line

I see a lot of tension during software development between getting a feature 100% right and getting something out the door.  The merits for “doing it right” should be obvious, but some developers fail to see the merits of “not 100% right, but something we can release”.  This problem is analogous to flying a small plane around the world.  One could argue that you should take the most direct and shortest route. However, if you choose to do so, you may find that your plane has run out of fuel before you complete your journey.  To successfully navigate the globe, you must take a course that is “less than optimal” because you need to make stops at fueling stations along the way.  Your plane expends extra fuel because it deviates from the straight line to get to the fueling station, and it expends more extra fuel because it must alter course after fueling to get back to the optimal path.  In software development, sales of your software may be your fuel, or customer satisfaction may be your fuel.  Either way, there are benefits to releasing software that still has known bugs.

This scenario, like many software development scenarios, depends greatly on context.  If the software maintains a life support system and is producing errors, it may be unacceptable to ship the software.  If the error is that a caption is misspelled, then it may be acceptable.  In my own experience, the owner of the software ultimately makes such decisions.  It is the software owner that should decide if the software should be released on the promised date with bugs, or delayed to a future date in which hopefully those bugs will be fixed.  For many deadlines our software team has elected to spend our last week adding a new feature instead of fixing all the bugs in other features.  This is not to say that this decision is best for your environment, but for us it was more important to get the features out and get feedback on them than to have them 100% polished.  Some features we release are not adopted or clients desire significant changes to them to be satisfied.  In those cases, we saved a lot of time by sending out what we had instead of spending additional weeks or months to polish to perfection a feature that would not be used.

.Net Portal – Links to .Net Resources

http://www.kraftsoftware.com/portals/0/dotnetportal.htm is a simple web site that provides links to some of the best .Net resources including podcasts, videos, tutorials, conferences, books, blogs, and tools.