PC Financials
Book intro →
PC Financials
Book intro →
Federal and state filings, year-round planning, sales-tax filings across jurisdictions. Same CPA who runs the books — so the return isn't a translation exercise.
PC Financials runs tax as a full-year engagement — federal and state filings, quarterly planning calls and estimates, and sales-tax filings — handled by the same CPA who runs the books, so the return isn't a translation exercise.
Tax done well doesn’t compress into the eight weeks between January 15 and April 15. By the time most operators start thinking about the return, the decisions that would have moved the bill the most — entity structure, owner compensation, capex timing, qualified retirement contributions, state-nexus posture — are already locked in by the calendar. The return becomes a recording exercise, not a planning exercise. The cost of treating tax as a tax-season transaction shows up as numbers on a 1120 or 1120-S that didn’t have to be that high.
The engagement is structured to fix that. We run quarterly planning calls — usually 30–45 minutes — where we review the year-to-date position, project the year-end estimate, and walk through any decisions in front of the operator that have a material tax impact. We adjust estimated payments after each call so the operator isn’t surprised in March, and so the year doesn’t end with an unexpected refund (which is a free loan to the federal government) or an unexpected balance due (which is a real cash-flow problem).
By the time we sit down to file in February or March, the return has very few moving parts. Most of the work has already been done at the four planning calls. Tax season is preparation and review, not discovery.
The structural problem with hiring a tax preparer separately from the bookkeeper is translation cost. The tax preparer asks the bookkeeper for a year-end packet. The bookkeeper exports what they have. The preparer reads it, has questions, sends them. The bookkeeper answers, often with context the preparer doesn’t have. The preparer adjusts. Another round of questions. Another round of answers. The return that gets filed reflects whatever survives the back-and-forth.
When the same firm does both, the translation cost goes to zero. The CPA who closed the December books is the CPA who files the return. Questions don’t get asked because they don’t need to be — the context already lives in the firm. The return is faster, cheaper to prepare, and more accurate because nothing got lost in the handoff.
This is also the structural argument for why the engagement is annual. It’s not priced as a tax-season transaction because it isn’t one; it’s a year-round line of work that produces a return as one of its deliverables.
A meaningful share of the engagements we take on have entity structures that were appropriate when the business was smaller and are no longer optimal now. The most common patterns: a sole-proprietorship that should have elected S-corp status three tax years ago and is paying SE tax it doesn’t have to; an S-corp paying owner compensation at a level that isn’t defensible; a multi-entity structure designed for one purpose that’s now serving a different purpose with the wrong elections; a single-entity structure where two would make sense.
Structure isn’t reviewed every year because it doesn’t need to be. We do a thorough review at onboarding and again any time the business changes shape — a new line of business, an investor round, a meaningful change in revenue mix, a change in jurisdiction. The review takes a couple of hours of CPA time and either produces a recommendation to change the structure (with the cost-benefit) or a confirmation that the current structure is right. Most reviews confirm the existing structure, which is the most underrated outcome — the operator stops worrying about it and goes back to the work.
Sales-tax compliance has gotten harder every year since Wayfair. Most growing businesses owe filings in more states than they realize, often retroactively. The engagement covers the analysis (which jurisdictions you have nexus in, when nexus was established, what’s owed for prior periods), the registration where needed, and the ongoing filings.
For volume engagements we run Avalara or TaxJar with the GL feed wired in; for lower-volume engagements where the tool overhead would dominate the work, we file manually. The decision is operational, not ideological — whichever produces correct filings on time at the lowest total cost.
The most important part of the engagement on sales tax is what happens before nexus is established. Operators planning expansion — physical, employee, marketplace — get a heads-up call before the move, not after, so the registration and filing cycle is built in rather than corrected retroactively.
Every January the firm files 1099s for every vendor on the engagement that’s reportable. The work is mostly done by the prior November, because the vendor onboarding work in §5 (or the vendor cleanup we do at onboarding if §5 isn’t running) puts the W-9, address, and TIN in place when the vendor is added rather than chased in January. The filings ship through the standard channels with the e-file confirmation archived for the operator’s records.
Three things, and the reason for each:
Personal tax returns for individuals not connected to a firm engagement. Personal returns for the owners of a business we’re already running the books for are routine — the data is already in the firm and the work is incremental. Standalone personal returns for an individual who’s not connected to the business engagement are a different shape of work, and there are good shops more focused on that case.
International tax. Cross-border issues — transfer pricing, foreign-entity income inclusion, FBAR/8938, treaty positions — sit far enough outside our routine work that the right answer is to bring in a specialist. We partner with a firm that does this work and stays current on it, and we coordinate with them when the engagement requires it.
Audit representation. If a return we filed is examined, we participate. But audit representation as a standalone engagement — taking over a defense for a return another preparer filed, defending an issue we didn’t underwrite — is a separate scope and usually a separate fee, because the work shape is different.
The engagement as written is scoped per client. Multi-entity returns, complex state filings, and structure work that requires modeling all factor in; the scope and its cost are agreed in writing before the work starts.
If we're a fit, you get a written scope within the week. If not, we'll point you somewhere that is.