What Your CPA Wants You to Know
A podcast for entrepreneurs! We are a husband and wife team running our CPA firm together. We know just how difficult it can be to take your business dream to a reality. Our mission for this podcast is to guide, empower, and educate entrepreneurs in an easy-to-understand way! We want business owners to have the information that they need when they need it, AND without the hefty accounting invoices from a CPA! Follow along for practical advice, tips, and tricks from a CPA who knows what it is like to run a business, and strategies to keep your business thriving from an MBA! We will also show you how to run a business while keeping your family and sanity intact along the way!
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What Your CPA Wants You to Know
80. Accepting New Clients! The Benefits of a Monthly Accounting Plan
What if you had a personal trainer for your business finances? In this episode, we introduce our Monthly Accounting Plan, designed to help business owners stay ahead of their accounting and tax duties, and budget for accounting services!
This monthly accounting plan is a proactive, year-round CPA service. With consistent monthly consulting calls and annual tax projections, this membership-based service is here to provide ongoing support and strategic guidance, ensuring better financial health for your business.
We focus on how this structured approach can lead to significant cost savings and more informed financial decisions. If you're a business owner looking to transform your financial management, this is your chance to learn how to secure one of our limited client spots!
Reach out to us at: carson@sandsco.net
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Right, and this is a way of Think of it kind of like a monthly membership with a personal trainer at the gym, because there's people that can go and work out and keep up with that on their own and they don't need motivation, they don't need help, they don't need as much guidance. Welcome to what your CPA Wants you To Know.
Speaker 2:Tax and accounting help can be expensive, so we've created this podcast to help guide you through it all and make you feel like you have a CPA in your back pocket.
Speaker 1:I'm Carson Sands.
Speaker 2:And I'm Taryn Sands.
Speaker 1:I'm a CPA with over 10 years of experience helping people start and grow their businesses.
Speaker 2:And I'm an MBA with a specialization in marketing and entrepreneurship. Taxes suck and we want to make sure you don't pay more than your fair share.
Speaker 1:We're here to share everything your CPA wants you to know in a fun and easy to understand way. Let's get started.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Let's get started, let's do it.
Speaker 2:If you've listened to this podcast for a while now, you've probably heard us talk about the fact that we are not taking on new clients and we get messages all the time to be added to our waitlist, which we started a couple of years ago, and so that kind of led us thinking like what can we do to pivot a little bit and maybe take some people off of this waiting list, try to help as many people as possible?
Speaker 2:Because we're just kind of at that point in our business where we've grown a lot we are almost a decade in and we're just trying to think outside of the box and I really think that's how we started our business in the first place was thinking outside of the box because we had been in these traditional settings of these large CPA firms and we wanted to do things differently. So here we are, years later, we're trying to think like that again, so that we can give all of our clients the most value and take on a few listeners, people that have been following us for a while and been sitting on our waiting list. So today's episode is all about what we came up with. There should be a drum roll or something.
Speaker 1:Drum roll please. So we're just calling it the monthly accounting plan.
Speaker 2:So that's what today's episode is going to be about is our new monthly accounting plan, but we really want to explain what it is and why we think it's so important. This is by no means a money-making scheme for us, just trying to up our revenue or anything. That's really not where we're coming from. We haven't been wanting to grow for a while, but we just felt like we needed to find a way that we can help business owners and take on a little bit more volume without overboarding us, but also providing really great service. Like how can we still take on new clients a few of them and make sure that they're getting what they need out of a CPA? We don't just want to keep adding numbers to our list and seeing you once a year and then you're not getting any value of working with the CPA.
Speaker 1:So the best way to do that is for us to be able to know exactly how many people are added and even have a preset schedule for when we'll be meeting with them on a monthly basis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, planning for those consulting meetings is key, because if you take on a bunch of clients, you might not hear from one of them until tax season, or you might have a new client that needs a lot of help and is scheduling a lot of meetings every single month.
Speaker 2:So it's just really hard to know from our standpoint. The other thing that we looked at whenever we were thinking of doing some sort of membership was that a lot of times business owners just put accounting on the back burner and when this happens, we always say this we can't care more about your business than you do. And that happens so many times. Not only do those clients get really behind with things, things get messed up, they just forget to focus on these types of really really fun things, but they're very hard to work with. That's not the type of new client we want to onboard, because we don't want to talk to them once and then say, hey, these are suggestions, and then not respond, and then when it comes tax time, they're surprised by their tax bill because they didn't do anything we suggested.
Speaker 1:Right and this is a way of think of it, kind of like a monthly membership with a personal trainer at the gym, because there's people that can go and work out and keep up with that on their own and they don't need motivation, they don't need help, they don't need as much guidance, and we have some clients that are that way with their accounting. They need us for the tax return and some of that expertise, but the rest of it they're doing a really good job of keeping up with everything on a monthly basis and setting aside money for taxes. So this plan is not for them. They're doing great. This is for people that need that extra motivation. The person that's not going to go do their workout more than once a week maybe not even that that's never going to show up. This is a way to encourage people to keep up with the accounting and tax side of their business on an ongoing basis by joining this monthly accounting plan.
Speaker 2:So we will talk about the pricing and all of that and more about how it works. But first and foremost, what does this include? If you were to do a monthly membership? And what it's going to include is one call per month with us, so a consulting call, and it's also going to include a projection. And it includes a projection because that is so important. If you own a business Now, you don't have to do them multiple times a year. Some people do them quarterly. This is going to include one, so this forces you to do that projection, which means we go through everything that you could possibly do to save taxes before the year ends and there's nothing to be done.
Speaker 1:And this is so important because a CPA for your taxes is most valuable before the end of the year. Before the end of the year, there's so many things you can do. You could make an S election to save an inordinate amount of taxes on your self-employment taxes an inordinate amount of taxes on your self-employment taxes. You can purchase things that you were planning to purchase in January anyway, but you purchased them a little bit early to go ahead and offset some income for this year. There's so many options, but once you get to the end of the year, we start to get very reduced in the number of ways that we can save you on your taxes, because at that point all we're reporting is history.
Speaker 2:So this membership will ensure that you are talking to your CPA monthly and it will also ensure that you are doing a tax projection. So, if not anything else, you will know at the end of the year about what your taxes owed are going to be, instead of being surprised in April. So that's a huge thing for most people.
Speaker 1:And you'll also know that you'll be paying the minimum amount that is legally possible to pay, because we'll be making sure of that all through the year. That's going to be part of the plan.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, and another big component of this whole thing was that we wanted business owners to be able to budget for accounting services, because it is not cheap to work. Something comes up and they need help. So this will help business owners budget for those accounting fees. And the best part of all of this is that if you are doing a monthly plan with us, it is going to be at a reduced hourly rate. So right now we charge $250 per hour and the monthly membership is going to be $200. So you're getting those calls at a reduced price $50 less an hour, and you're getting that projection. So we really wanted there to be a bang for your buck here and we wanted to provide something that would be so valuable to those using it.
Speaker 1:Right, and those tax projections are something we also charge for separately and that is included. So that's also kind of a free service you get as part of this accounting plan.
Speaker 2:And the reason we're doing that. Like Kirsten said, we charge $300 now for a tax projection and, if you don't know, a tax projection is like doing a tax return, so it is a lot of work on our part. But if we've been checking in with you every single month, we know what's going on in your business, we know the purchases you've made. We know all of this For one, the tax projection is going to be much easier on us, so it'll be a win-win for both. You will get the tax projection, which is so needed at least once a year, and it makes the tax projection easier for us because it's not the first time. We've talked to you all year since tax season.
Speaker 1:And on top of all of that, it's likely that your tax return will actually be cheaper this way, and it's not a specific discount or anything like that. It's just that it never fails people that we don't keep up with them throughout the year and then we get all of their stuff in time to do the tax return. You know there the year and then we get all of their stuff in time to do the tax return. There's always a lot of adjustments and corrections that need to be made in the books, and so you end up paying a pretty big chunk of what you'll be paying anyway, just as additional fees on top of your tax return for the cleanup work.
Speaker 2:Yes, that is a good point, because a lot of times people don't do their bookkeeping correctly and things need to be adjusted, and then we just charge time for that whenever we're doing the tax returns. So this will definitely help with that as well. Now we were just thinking about okay, if you're making a call every single month with your CPA, you'll be able to make those consulting calls. What can you actually talk about in those calls? And I'm sure that that would come up. But we definitely want you to really benefit from those calls and them to be very, very helpful. So, of course, you can call and say you know, this is what I've been struggling with in my business and kind of work through things with us. But there's a lot of other things that you may not think of off the top of your head, that could be covered in those calls, and it may be things that you're paying for along the way.
Speaker 1:Anyway, One tip I would give you, though, is to make sure that your books are as up to date as possible before each meeting. Now, maybe in January or February, that meeting that we have on the phone is going to be a is to help you get your books caught up and to teach you how to do bank reconciliations and make sure that your QuickBooks is up to date and everything like that, and that's totally fine, but, moving forward, you'll get more bang for your buck, we feel, if your books are already in good order, so that when you call, we have something to look at. We can start looking at metrics and numbers compared to other people in your industry and see maybe your payroll is too high, maybe you need to cut an employee or something, maybe your cost of goods sold is too high, so you need to look at a different vendor. There's so many things we can look at, but we have to have the numbers in there to be able to look at that.
Speaker 2:And another thing that would be great to go over in that call is if you have a QuickBooks issue. So generally those are not urgent, it's just something that needs to be done so that you can go ahead and do your reconciliation. So a lot of people will book those and just have Carson help them sort out the issues that they can reconcile. So it would be great to just make a list of things that you want to go over in that call, but bookkeeping, I would say, would be top on that list because whether you just bought something and you want to get the loan in there in QuickBooks or there's just an issue that you haven't been able to resolve, those calls will be perfect for that, because we can jump into your QuickBooks, get that fixed and then also look at your P&L or any other numbers that you want to review in that. And, of course, any other questions that have popped up, like, say, you want to make a purchase and you're going to trade in a vehicle, like how is that going to affect your taxes, anything like that that comes up in your business, of course you can talk about.
Speaker 2:So this is really just up to you how those meetings go, the only one. That is specific is just that tax projection meeting, which we will be reminding you to do and making sure you do that by the end of the year. So that will usually be in the fourth quarter that we're doing those. But another thing we talked about is that we do recommend doing more projections sometimes depending on the type of business and how much things fluctuate all that. So if you did want to make one of those calls about a projection, we could certainly walk you through the numbers and look at what your taxes are an estimate then. So it doesn't mean you can't do a projection. So if you want to do some numbers and do that, you could also do it, let's say, for your July meeting. So it is very flexible. It's just basically forcing you to meet with your CPA to go over these things and not put them on the back burner 12 times a year.
Speaker 1:Which is a good idea.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And you know, if you're that type of person I certainly am I have someone that tells me what to do when I work out and I need that, and if I leave it up to myself it doesn't get done. So it's worth the money to go ahead and do that for me and I can budget for that. It's just like a monthly expense. So if you're that type of person, you're listening to this episode going, yep, that's exactly what I do. I just think, oh, yeah, I'll get to that in the summer, and then I'll get to that, oh, in quarter three, and then you just never do. This is definitely something to consider.
Speaker 1:So, to summarize, the benefits of this are that you're getting meetings at a lower cost than you would normally get, you're getting a tax projection for free, you're forcing yourself to keep up with your accounting and plan for taxes when you might not otherwise would be able to do that, and you get an expert on business looking over your numbers and giving you suggestions for things that might help you make more money.
Speaker 2:And if you're a current client and you're a frequent flyer on our Calendly, you should definitely look into this, because you're basically prepaying for 12 meetings and you're getting a discount. So if you are not a current client, we are still opening up just a few more business spots and we're looking at all of those on an individual basis. We want someone who is taking their business seriously and is really easy for us to work with and that benefits them and that benefits us, but it also benefits them because we can't help the people who don't take our advice seriously or don't check in with us and aren't on top of their things.
Speaker 1:Or at least we can't help them nearly as much.
Speaker 2:Right. So if you're listening now and you're thinking this sounds like something that would be really great for you and your business, and maybe you've been on the wait list for a while, or you've messaged us here on Instagram saying that you need a new CPA, now is the time to reach out to us. We are opening up a few more spots until the end of the year and once those are full, we'll be closing the doors again. So now is the time to reach out if this interests you. So if you're not a current client but you've listened to this and you want to do the monthly membership, then we will absolutely onboard you as a full client and provide all tax services, meaning we can still do your tax return as well. So we will be taking on just a few more business clients this way. We will be taking on just a few more business clients this way and just to reiterate just a little bit, it is $200 a month and you get a monthly phone consultation with us that you can go over whatever you like in that meeting. Also, you do get a yearly tax projection, which we will reach out to you, and make sure that you get that done before the end of the year so that you can make any changes needed and know about how much you're going to owe in taxes, based off what your business did that year. So, because our hourly rate is actually $250 an hour and we charge $300 for a projection, you're actually saving almost $1,000 doing it. This as opposed to if you were a client and you're just booking the meetings and then paying for that projection. So it's a really great deal.
Speaker 2:If this is something that sounds like would be a good fit for you, please email us and I can put the email in the show notes. But if you want to jot it down right now, that email address is carson at sansconet and just send us an email and we can send you a little bit more information about this and how to get started. Well, that is all we have for this episode today. We are really excited about this because we think it'll be so beneficial for our clients and it will be a great way for us to make sure that we help our clients stay on top of things all year long. So until next time. Thank you so much for listening to what your CPA Wants you To Know. Podcast.
Speaker 1:This podcast is intended to provide accounting and tax information for educational purposes only. All tax situations are unique and should be handled with the assistance of a tax professional.