Painting Biz Owners: Formalize Your Advisory Board to Strengthen Support and Cut Taxes.

to take advantage of this, you got to make sure you identify who your board is, document that in your operating agreement or in your minutes or both. From there, it's just updating your minutes as you have these quarterly or annually with who was there, what was talked about. You should be able to deduct these meal costs and travel costs.

You don't need to file anything with the state or with the IRS to form a board of directors. When you are forming your corporation, you can put their names in the corporate documents, or when you're forming your LLC, you can put their names in the operating agreement. If you didn't do that when you first started, you can do it really at any time. Each year you're going to be updating these documents anyway. Add an addendum to your operating agreement or your corporate docs showing this board of directors, this is how we do it legally. You don't need to get a lawyer involved if you don't want to. You could, if you want it to be a little bit fancier, but you can pretty much do this at any time. Just make sure that it's put down in writing and everything is documented.