Uncategorized
Free Money Hiding, Check Your Working Capital
Before you cut a single expense, look at how many days your cash is stuck in the business. DSO, DPO, and DIO measure how long customers take to pay you, how long you take to pay suppliers, and how long inventory sits before it sells. Together they set your cash conversion cycle, and every day…
The Controller Is the Hire Everyone Skips
Most scaling companies reach for a CFO when the hire they actually needed was a controller. The controller is the backbone of a finance function. Someone owns the close, owns accuracy, owns the controls, and makes sure the number you’re about to make a decision on is real. Skip that seat and everything above it…
The S-Corp Election Is Arithmetic, Not a Strategy
Every owner has been told to elect S-corp and save on taxes. Almost none of them have been shown the arithmetic. The only real saving is self-employment tax: the 15.3% you stop paying on the slice of profit you take as a distribution instead of as W-2 wages. On the other side of the ledger…
Your S-Corp Salary Isn’t a Guess. It’s an Audit Risk
If you own an S-corp and someone asked you to justify your salary to the IRS tomorrow, could you? Reasonable compensation is one of the most scrutinized numbers on an S-corp return, and most owners set it by feel: a round number, prior year plus a little, whatever’s left after distributions. The IRS doesn’t grade…
What the QBI Deduction Being Permanent Actually Changes
For years, Section 199A planning came with an asterisk. It was set to disappear, so nobody built long-term strategy around it. That asterisk is gone. The QBI deduction is now permanent, and it comes with a new $400 minimum deduction for owners who barely cleared the old thresholds. Permanence changes the math on decisions you…
AI Is Great at Categorizing. That Was Never the Hard Part.
The AI coded the transaction correctly, and the financials were still wrong. A client’s $14,000 payment to a contractor got booked to repairs and maintenance, which is exactly what the description said and exactly what the model learned from the last twenty similar payments. It was a building improvement, a capital asset depreciated over years,…
Your Employees Get the Tax Break. Your Payroll System Gets the Headache
Everyone’s celebrating the new tax break on tips and overtime. Almost nobody’s talking about who has to do the extra work to make it real. The deduction belongs to the employee — but the reporting burden lands squarely on the employer. Payroll now has to separately track and report qualified tip income and qualified overtime…
The Accountant Shortage Is Real
If it feels harder to get your accountant on the phone this year, it’s not you and your CPA didn’t get worse. The profession is short hundreds of thousands of people, and fewer students are entering the pipeline every year. Firms are absorbing more clients with fewer hands, so response times slip and the relationship…
Your Employees Get the Tax Break. Your Payroll System Gets the Headache
Everyone’s celebrating the new tax break on tips and overtime. Almost nobody’s talking about who has to do the extra work to make it real. The deduction belongs to the employee — but the reporting burden lands squarely on the employer. Payroll now has to separately track and report qualified tip income and qualified overtime…
Commingling Isn’t a Bookkeeping Problem. It’s a Legal One
The Amazon order with dog food and printer paper on the same invoice isn’t a bookkeeping problem. It’s a legal one. The whole point of an LLC is that the entity is separate from you, and commingling is exactly the fact pattern used to argue it never really was. Courts don’t disregard the entity because…