Your Most-Asked Questions About Our Accounting Services

Many small and mid-sized businesses fail to adequately measure and manage their finances, even though poor financial management is a major cause of business failure. If you don’t have good financial practices in place, your business could suffer in a number of ways: 

• Lost revenue 

• Insufficient tax planning 
• Missed financial opportunities 
• Penalties and fines 
• Closing your doors 

If you’re doing your own accounting, read about if your self-prepared statements are up-to-par. 

Our monthly accounting process starts with receiving your source documents. Our staff compiles the information and reports back to you with the following to help you take back control of your finances: 

• Make monthly profit and loss statements 
• Make monthly balance sheets 

• Perform regular account reconciliation 
• Offer advice based on your financial statements, tax planning, and your business’s situation 

We also include the following services: 

• Business tax work 
• Sales tax filings 

• Audit representation 

Read more about what our meetings look like and the advice we can offer you. 

Our customer service sets our firm apart. We make it our priority to reach out to clients on a consistent basis because we care about the success of your business. Our experienced team of accountants also provide proactive business advice and tax planning, allowing you to maximize your profits. 

Need to reach out? No problem! Other accountants will bill you by the minute, but a unique benefit that we offer is allowing our clients to contact us as much as they’d like – at no additional cost.  

Still not convinced that we’re different? Read our Google reviews here. 

If you are looking for an outsourced accounting solution based on price alone, annual accounting may be enough for you. However, if your business is the right fit for monthly accounting services, they provide substantially more value than an annual service.  

If an accountant only sees your numbers once a year, it’s too late to offer advice that would have helped to make that year more profitable - and definitely too late to lower your tax liability for a year that is already over with. Read about the benefits of tax planning and tax projections, two things that an annual accountant can’t provide you. 

You can also read about why you don’t need to work with an annual accountant if you have a monthly accountant.  

Please note that while we can handle your personal taxes as well if you are a business client of ours, many of our clients still choose to have an annual accountant do their personal taxes. Read more about having CSI do your personal taxes (as a sole proprietorship and separate business/personal entities) here. 

There are a variety of pros and cons for every accounting service, and we know that we aren’t the best solution for everybody. When you don't know the differences between outsourced accounting options, it's difficult to make the best decision for your business.  

If you trust other local vendors to help with your operations, why not trust a local accounting firm? Don’t automatically go for a name you recognize or the lowest price without doing your research first. 

Read about the differences in online accounting services' and local accounting firms' customer service, partnership, services, price, and local expertise. 

Trust your gut. If you’re already thinking about leaving your current accounting firm, then you’re ready to move on. Read more about these fears that disrupt business growth: 

• What if I’m making the wrong decision? 
• I’ve got too much going on right now. 
• I don’t want a new accountant to know that my books are a mess or my taxes have fallen behind. 
• I can’t afford a different level of service. 

Don’t forget the necessary steps to move forward once you make your decision. If you’d like, we can help you with the process. Read more about these steps to change accounting firms: 

• Find a new accounting firm. 
• Inform your current accounting firm. 
• Set goals with your new accounting firm. 

We primarily use two systems: Xero and QuickBooks Online. That being said, we will work with other systems depending on your preferences and needs.

However, depending on the software you use, your subscription fee may be included in your monthly accounting fee. Read more about your accounting software subscription coverage.

CSI will file multiple years of back taxes for you at once when you come on board. In fact, if you haven’t been filing your taxes, we require this.  

If your taxes are not up-to-date, then your accounting won’t be accurate. We want to provide a quality accounting service for you, so we will need to start with a clean slate. After your accountant has the information that they requested from you in your initial strategy sessions, they are dedicated to getting your records caught up and accurate, as well as getting your financial statements and tax returns done. 

We do back taxes for payroll too! You or your payroll specialist need to be paying taxes and filing payroll returns. If this hasn’t been done, you’ll need to get your payroll back taxes done. Our software helps us file your old payroll returns. Plus, when we make amendments to your W2s, we can print them and have the final product in your hands as soon as they’re done. 

Read more about filing multiple years of back taxes here. You can also read about how long it takes to get back work done. 

Pricing for our monthly accounting services varies by your company’s needs. It is not based on the size of your company, rather your company’s accounting activity and the complexity of your financial statements.  

Our average accounting fee comes out to about $675 per month. Depending on these factors, your fee can range between $500 to $1,000+ per month. We will work with you to arrive at an affordable, fixed monthly fee.  

Read about what monthly accounting costs for our clients here. 

To efficiently help you with your business goals, we require access to your online accounts and source documents, either in electronic or hard copy form. Common documents include, but are not limited to: 

• Business bank and credit card statements 
• Sales systems (POS) 
• Accounting software 

• Inventory 
• Accounts payable and receivable 

We recommend having you handle the day-to-day aspects of your business that need immediate attention, such as paying your bills, and we'll handle the monthly accounting and bookkeeping.  

Some owners want to continue to handle the bookkeeping portion internally. CSI allows this, although we don’t necessarily encourage it. Before we even consider this option, we would like you to have a professional bookkeeper on staff. Doing your own bookkeeping may hinder you more than it helps you if mistakes occur.  

Read more about accounting tasks that you can do yourself here. 

Yes. Audit representation is included in your monthly accounting fee. The only time that we would charge for audit representation is if the audit is for a time period during which you were not our client. 

CSI offers agent-level support, meaning that we deal with the IRS agent directly in the case of income tax audits. Almost all of these issues are resolved at the agent level and never need to go to tax court. If we’re preparing your monthly sales tax returns, we will also represent you in a sales tax audit.  

Read more about how CSI will support you in the case of an audit here.