The One Big Beautiful Bill created 4 major changes, one with a deadline, that affect your business taxes.

The One Big Beautiful Bill passed on July 4, 2025. For a growing company doing $5M to $50M, it did four separate things to what the company pays in tax. I think the one that mattered was the one almost nobody tracked, because it was the only one of the four with a deadline attached.

That window shut on July 6, 2026, twelve weeks before this post went out.

Section 174 passed in 2021 and took effect in 2022. It forced domestic R&D to come off the tax return slowly, in five equal annual slices instead of all at once.

Think about a company that spends $5M on research in a single year. The money is gone. Payroll is paid, contractors are invoiced, equipment installed. Under the old rule you get a fifth of that back in each of the next five years.

It does not change what the company reports as profit. R&D gets written off in the year it is spent either way, so the spread only showed up in the tax the books say you owe and the cash you actually send. A 2024 model handled it as a line on the tax schedule and moved on.

Spreading a deduction across five years is a five-year loan from the government at roughly a 5% annual cost, one you did not ask for and had no end date on. It is a working capital event, not a tax event.

Section 174A puts the whole deduction back in the year you spend it, for tax years beginning after December 31, 2024.

Under the old rule, $1M a year for five years. Under 174A, $5M in year one.

At a 25% blended rate, which is a placeholder that moves with your state and taxable income, that is about $1.25M less tax in the first year against $250K less a year for five. The five-year total is identical. The timing is off by a million dollars, all of it in the year you would most want it.

If you raised, or had a strong year, or you are pulling cash out to owners or into a buyout conversation, the year you most want the tax savings is the year you have cash to pay the tax bill with. The old rule makes you fund that gap out of the operating account.

The obvious objection is that a CPA handles this, and a good one does. 174A is not subtle, and if the company spends nothing on domestic R&D it is worth zero.

That's right about the going-forward return. It's wrong about what actually got missed.

A return is a filing against the rules as written. But the retroactive election was not a filing line. It was a decision, and it had to be made before July 6, 2026. Small taxpayers, $31M or less in sales, could go back and take the R&D deduction in full for 2022, 2023, and 2024. If you filed those years under the old rule and nobody raised the election, that cash is gone and I don't have an appeal path.

A missed deduction is a number that comes out too big. A missed election is a window, and a window closes whether or not you were watching.

The 1099 reporting threshold went from $600 to $2,000 for tax year 2026. It lands in accounts payable: fewer W-9s to chase, fewer forms to reconcile.

100% bonus depreciation is now permanent rather than temporary. If the company buys equipment, the whole cost comes off in the year of purchase. That one belongs in capital planning, not tax.

The state and local tax cap went from $10K to $40K. For a business owner in a high-tax state that is the largest number in the bill, and it is not a business tax. It lands on the owner personally.

Equity compensation you can exclude from tax went from $10M to $15M, with new three, four, and five year tiers at 50%, 75%, and 100%. This one mostly does not apply to you. It is built for stock the company itself issued, and at $5M to $50M most operators are diversified past where it bites.

The SALT cap is worth reading as precedent. Created in 2017, raised temporarily, allowed to lapse and reinstated, and this bill took it to $40K. The provisions that lead a tax bill are rarely the ones that move a business's cash. The ones that move a business's cash arrive in a section with a subscript.

A tax statute is the only contract a business signs without reading, and it gets rewritten in one sitting, four sections at a time.

What I don't have is a count of how many operators took the election. What I'd like to know is how many 2024 and 2025 models still spread R&D across five years on the assumptions page. A missed month-end entry gets caught in the bank reconciliation. A missed change in a tax statute doesn't get caught by anything.

The 2024 model isn't wrong. It was right, for a rule that no longer exists, and no review of the model would have caught it. That is the boring part, and the part that costs money.

I think by the 2027 filing season nobody will be asking about Section 174. They will be asking why the tax on the return does not tie to the cash their model said was available, and the answer will be sitting in an assumptions tab.