All business owners who read this column should consider, if they haven’t done so already, two major federal tax issues:

■ How to maximize the incredible 20% annual federal income tax deduction potentially available to them if their businesses are taxed as “pass-through entities — i.e., as sole proprietorships, partnerships or S corporations; and

■ If they haven’t already done so, whether they should establish for themselves and their employees (if they have any) federally tax-favored IRA or 401(k) retirement plans (which I’ll refer to here jointly as “qualified plans”) and make contributions to these plans.

The rules governing qualified plans vary widely from plan to plan, but all of them provide the same principal benefit: The growth of the funds you contribute to them will grow tax-free on a compound basis as long as you hold your contributions in them until you withdraw the funds in your plan — which will usually be in the years after your retirement.

Thus, for example, if, with your bank or investment adviser, you establish an IRA and contribute $5,000 a year to it for 30 years (a not unusual scenario), the dollar amount of the investments in your qualified plan account, , assuming an average 5% annual stock market growth during those years, will amount to about $332,194 — not a bad retirement account.

To obtain section 199A deductions, you don’t have to make any contribution or make any other expenditures in the relevant taxable year; you just have to own a pass-through business and earn income from it. And your section 199A deduction each year will generally be 20% of your “qualified business income’’ — as I’ve said, a truly amazing deduction. (For many privately owned companies, their “qualified business income” will simply be their net business income.)

But to maximize your section 199A deductions, you must maximize your net business income; thus, you must avoid any expense in the relevant taxable year that will reduce this income.

This may mean that you shouldn’t pay yourself any compensation for your services to your company, since this compensation will be deductible from your net business income. Rather, you should pay yourself for your services to your company with distributions from your share of its profits, since these distributions won’t reduce your net business income. But it may also mean that you shouldn’t make any contribution to your qualified plan in the relevant taxable year, since these contributions will reduce your net business income.

Thus, if your business is profitable, you have to address a potentially complex question: How much of your income from it should you contribute to your qualified plan, since, the more you contribute, the less will be your net business income and thus the less will be your section 199A deduction?

The answer to this question will vary widely from one business owner to another. But here are some broad guidelines that may be useful to you:

■First, estimate as best you can your net business income for the coming taxable year.

■Second, determine how much of your net business income you need to devote to your non-business needs — e.g., your housing, food, clothing, entertainment, charitable contributions and cash in your savings account.

■Third, contribute to your business as much of the remaining balance of your net business income as you think your business will need in order to grow in accordance with your business plans. Many owners of business start-ups will want to reinvest all of this balance in their business if they believe that this reinvestment will yield greater long-term benefits for them than contributions to their qualified plans are likely to yield.

■Finally, to the extent that you do not reinvest the above balance in your business, make contributions from it to your qualified plan to the maximum extent permitted by the rules governing your plan. You may not be able to take advantage of these contributions for many years. But when you do, they plus their compound growth may be huge.