When most small business owners picture an accountant, they’re really thinking of an annual tax preparer. They plug your bookkeeping data into tax forms and send you on your way. For very small or very new businesses, this is fine! It’s cheap and may suit your needs.
However, as your financial activity grows and becomes more complex, it’s a poor choice to stick with annual tax prep alone. Here, I’ll tell you about the dangers you’ll avoid (and the benefits you’ll gain) by switching to monthly accounting.
At CSI Accounting & Payroll, we’ve provided monthly accounting to small businesses for nearly 60 years. That means we’ve answered these questions thousands of times:
- Why do annual tax preparers provide limited business insights?
- Why do annual tax preparers charge extra for limited advice?
- Why can’t annual tax preparers provide a complete tax strategy?
Limited Business Insights
Annual tax preparers give you financial statements once per year. Since these statements reflect the entire past year, everything is already set in stone. You didn’t get any opportunities throughout the year to make informed changes.
If you worked with a monthly accountant instead, you’d get financial statements every month. That means you get many opportunities to pivot your business strategy or to make more informed decisions.
Plus, a monthly accountant can advise you through changes at any time! I’ll talk about this more in the next section.
Limited Advice, Extra Fees
Annual tax preparers meet with you annually to talk about filing your taxes. Outside of that, it’s difficult to reach them – and if you do, they’ll charge by the minute to answer your questions.
On the other hand, you can meet with a monthly accountant regularly, and they’re easy to reach with unlimited, one-off questions at no extra cost.
Advice is a huge part of tax strategy, and only monthly accountants can support you through it all year long. Let’s talk about it in the next section!
Incomplete Tax Strategy
Taxes are the main focus of annual tax preparers. However, even this is limited since they don’t work with you year-round. They can’t estimate or minimize what you might owe in taxes, and unless they know your business very well, they also can’t properly recommend credits.
Monthly accountants specialize in complete, year-round tax strategy to minimize what you owe (and you’ll know what you might owe ahead of time). Plus, your business tax preparation is included in a fixed monthly fee, so nothing extra is due at year-end.
Get the Most Out of Your Accountant!
Now that you know about the limited business insights, extra charges for limited advice, and incomplete tax strategies of annual tax preparers, are you ready to check out monthly accounting services?
If so, please consider CSI Accounting & Payroll! To see if we can be a good fit for your business, click the button below for a free consultation:
Not ready to talk? That’s okay! First, take this short quiz to see which solution is best for your business by clicking the image below:
