What kind of taxes do I need to pay for an LLC service company that provides cleaning services in NYC?

yes. As long as your main place of work is your home/office.

Yes you should be reporting the capital contributions. Under the old Form 5472 rules, it's true that only items that impacted taxable income would be reportable transactions. So, a capital contribution by you to the corporation would not be reportable, unless the equity contribution was somehow below or above a fair value contribution in exchange for services that you might provide for the corporation - essentially an imputed reportable transactions. When the IRS changed the Form 5472 rules to require non-U.S. owned single member LLC's, they expanded the reportable transaction definition to include virtually everything. The term “transaction” is defined in Treas. Regs. Section 1.482-1(i)(7) to include any sale, assignment, lease, license, loan, advance, contribution or other transfer of any interest in or a right to use any property or money, as well as the performance of any services for the benefit of, or on behalf of, another taxpayer. So, for example, contributions and distributions would be considered reportable transactions with respect to such entities. These amounts can be reported on Lines 12 and 25 with an explanatory footnote that clarities the amounts are capital contributions and not amounts that impact taxable income.

NIcole is right. When I first started my business I thought I was saving money by doing my own bookkeeping. It took me much longer than it would take a bookkeeper - all time that I was not spending on marketing or billable activities. And in the end I made errors which made the initial work of the bookkeeper longer. I now have a consistent routine. My bookkeeper picks up all my material monthly and does my books in less than 2 hours. Very worthwhile.

I think differently about this, because of two reasons: 1) I've always (and only) been involved in bootstrapped startups; and 2) I've been lucky that those startups grew organically and fast (enough) which minimized our need on marketing spend. Instead of deciding on a specific budget for this, I would instead look at your current priorities (in terms of budgeting and re-investment into your team): 1. Build a great team. 2. Build a great product. 3. Craft incredible customer experiences. 4. Spend money on marketing. If you've already hit all 3 top priorities and you can't reinvest any further into those, then you should start spending money on marketing. If you don't have revenues today and you are hoping to generate revenues through marketing spend, you're on slippery slope (says the bootstrapper). Whilst not wrong, this is tricky and you'd need to take a realistic look at your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and how much you can invest into acquiring new customers.

Cash money should be treated separately than sweat equity. There are practical reasons for this namely that sweat equity should always be granted in conjunction with a vesting agreement (standard in tech is 4 year but in other sectors, 3 is often the standard) but that cash money should not be subjected to vesting. Typically, if you're at the idea stage, the valuation of the actual cash going in (again for software) is anywhere between $300,000 and $1m (pre-money). If you're operating in any other type of industry, valuations would be much lower at the earliest stage. The best way to calculate sweat equity (in my experience) is to use this calculator as a guide: http://foundrs.com/. If you message me privately (via Clarity) with some more info on what the business is, I can tell you whether I would be helpful to you in a call.