Estate Planning Tips for Small Business Owners in Kansas
Kansas Estate Planning Attorney Offers Two More Estate Planning Tips for Small Business Owners
After you have tackled the tasks of creating your will and succession plan, there are additional estate planning tasks that you can do to further protect the security and longevity of the business you worked hard to build. Here are two more ways to plan for your business’s future through the estate planning process.
Your will enables your executor to run your business in the event of your death, but death isn’t the only reason that a business owner must hand over the reins of their company. An injury or sickness that renders you temporarily or permanently unable to manage the day to day operations for your business is a genuine possibility. Fortunately, it is a possibility that you can address through the estate planning process by creating powers of attorney. Your attorney can help you draft one or more powers of attorney, legal documents that give the decision-makers that you identified in your succession plan the legal rights that they will need to effectively manage your business when you are no longer able to do so yourself. When you are creating your powers of attorney, think about who will need which types of rights and access to things like the business’s financial assets, collecting and disbursing funds, processing payroll, and every other business-related task that someone who is not you would be legally unable to do absent your permission for them to do it. While there is a default plan built into the law for the court to appoint a guardian for your business if you become unable to manage it, powers of attorney are the best way to ensure that the company gets led by people that you have selected yourself, not by whoever gets appointed by the court.
As you run your business, you know how to access all of the records that you need to complete all of the tasks that you need to get done. From the customer accounts to payroll, vendor accounts, your business plan, tax documents, and insurance policies, there are many types of business records involved in the ownership and operation of a business. While you may know where each type of document used in your business is stored, how it is organized, and how to use it, the people named in your powers of attorney may not know those things. Part of ensuring that your business is prepared for your sudden, unexpected departure is ensuring that your business records are organized and accessible to those who will need to use them and that instructions are written out detailing the organization, use, and maintenance of your business’s records. Organizing your documents and preparing those instructions may seem tedious and time-consuming, but it is essential to the business’s future success. As a bonus, you’ll always know where to find everything and, if you need to take a sick day, it will be easy for you to talk your substitute through the things they’ll need to do because they will be able to find and access items easily.
If you have estate planning questions related to a personal estate or a small business, please call the law office of J. Joseph Weber, P.A. today, for an initial consultation. Our location in Wichita is open weekdays, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. We sometimes offer weekend or evening hours by appointment, and the opportunity to connect with us online through our website.