Healthcare Business Books Cleanup A table, then the miles

The table is not a box of gloves

Gloves, paper, and a bottle of sanitizer are used up. A treatment table, an imaging device, or a computer the clinic will still own next summer can be equipment. Coding the table as supplies because the bill was paid from the operating account does not decide the tax treatment. The election to expense equipment under section 179 is made on the return, for a tax year, inside a ceiling the IRS prints.

For a taxable year beginning in 2026, Revenue Procedure 2025-32 sets that limit at $2,560,000. Past $4,090,000 of section 179 property placed in service, the $2,560,000 limit starts phasing out. A sport utility taken into account under section 179 cannot exceed $32,000. Those are the figures. A clinic that placed a table in service, and only a table, is nowhere near the phaseout, and the useful question is whether the table is equipment at all, and whether the clinic wants the election this year. We do not make that election by editing a bill in the books.

The mile changes in July

Business mileage for 2026 is 72.5 cents through June 30 and 76 cents from July 1, under IR-2025-128 and Notice 2026-10 for the first half and IR-2026-29 and Announcement 2026-11 for the second. A charity mile is 14 cents before July and still 14 cents after July. In July, medical miles step from 20.5 cents to 23.5 cents, and moving miles that the instructions still allow take the same step. Those rates are printed on the IRS standard mileage rates page.

A log that keeps 72.5 cents after June 30 misstates the second half. The drive from home to the clinic is commuting, and it stays out of the log. Miles between clinic locations, or to a patient seen away from the clinic, are the miles the log is for. A month of gas-card charges, with no log, is not a mileage deduction. It is a stack of receipts waiting for a log.

Course fees, without a board's hour count

A fee the clinic paid for a course the clinician needed can be a cost of the year it belongs to, when it is ordinary for the practice. Each licensing board sets its own hour count, and those counts are not the same from one state to the next. We do not print one board's number on this page. What we record is the fee, the date it was paid, and the year it belongs to. A certificate that arrives in March for a course taken last November does not move the fee into the new year by itself.

If the only record is a credit-card line that says "education," the line stays open until the clinic can say what the course was. We will not label it from the merchant name alone.

Keep going.