5 Ways to Invest Your Tax Refund In Your Business

If you're lucky enough to get a tax refund, it's a nice infusion of cash. It's easy to want to spend it on something lavish or fun. But as a small business owner, you can invest your tax refund in your business and have it compound in value. Take a look at these tax refund spending ideas that can help grow your business and your wallet.

Buy New Equipment

You can claim a tax deduction for buying qualifying equipment for business use. Yet, many entrepreneurs go year after year with the same outdated equipment. Take an inventory of the equipment you use in the course of day-to-day business. This could include computers or software.

Invest your tax refund in new equipment if your business can benefit from it. The deduction helps offset the purchase price. The new equipment and software will help your business run more smoothly.

New equipment may seem expensive upfront but just think about the gains your business can have. If you're waiting five minutes every day for your older computer to boot up, that's 20 hours a year you're wasting. And that increased productivity is also combined with the deduction at tax time.

Boost Your Online Presence

Between domain and web hosting fees and custom design and development, the costs of creating a business website can add up. If you have been putting off your website launch, tax refund time is the ideal time to complete it.

If you have leftover funds after your website launches, invest them in other online marketing strategies. This could include setting up an ad campaign or purchasing email marketing or social media management tools.

Build a Product Prototype

Are you a budding entrepreneur with an innovative product idea? Or perhaps you run a business but plan to introduce a new product? Why not invest your tax refund to build a new product prototype?

Your product could be a digital product, such as an e-book. Or, it could be a physical product, such as a handmade good. Your refund can cover at least in part the material, design, and production costs of building the prototype. You can then test and launch the prototype to the masses.

Outsource Time-Consuming Tasks

Even great leaders sometimes use outside help to handle essential tasks outside their realm of expertise. Think about whether tasks you perform, like accounting or customer support, may be better off completed by an outside professional. Spending your own time on this task versus a higher priority task could represent an opportunity cost in lost profits.

If you come into extra cash at tax refund time, invest your tax refund in outsourcing the task to a qualified professional. You'll save time and may even increase the quality of output on administrative tasks.

This could be as simple as purchasing tools that will automatically handle tedious tasks for you. This could be with tools like MileIQ for automatic mileage tracking or to invest in expense management tracking.

Invest Your Tax Refund in Your Education

Investing your tax refund in your business education can generate life-long benefits. Before you protest, "My tax refund isn't high enough to cover an MBA degree," know that there are other options.

Community colleges and "Massive Online Open Courses" (MOOCs) make getting a business education affordable. MOOC providers like Coursera and Udemy offer courses in finance, entrepreneurship and even leadership. The key is to enroll in a course that can directly benefit your business.

To view the original article, visit the MileIQ blog.