An Accountant for Your Small Business, Built Around the Tax Return

"I need an accountant" usually means one of three very different things, and buying the wrong one is the most common way small businesses waste money on accounting. A bookkeeper cannot fix a tax-planning problem. A tax planner cannot fix books that do not reconcile. And a CFO engagement on top of messy books is forecasting with bad inputs.

The sequencing matters more than the labels. Clean books are the raw material for everything else: your tax return starts from them, your quarterly estimates are computed from them, and any planning recommendation is only as good as the numbers underneath it. So if your books are behind or unreliable, start with bookkeeping for small business even if the pain you feel is a tax bill. If the books are already solid and the tax bill still stings, go straight to small business tax planning. And if you mainly need the whole function handled together, our full-stack accounting service combines the layers in a single engagement.

We are a strong fit for owner-led businesses that are past the hobby stage and want the accounting function handled, not just recorded. In practice that looks like:

• Revenue from roughly $100,000 to $10 million. Below that, DIY software plus an annual tax return is often genuinely enough, and we will say so. Above that, you may need internal staff with outside CPA oversight, which we also support.
• Any operating entity type. Sole proprietorships, single and multi-member LLCs, S corporations, partnerships, and C corporations. Multi-entity owners (an operating company plus rentals, for example) are a specialty, not an exception.
• Complexity signals that reward professional help: owner payroll and an S corp election to defend, contractors and 1099s, multi-state customers or employees, inventory or job costing, or a mix of business and investment income on one personal return.
• Owners who want one accountable firm. The most expensive accounting failure we see is the seam between a bookkeeper and a tax preparer who have never spoken. We remove the seam.

Every Taxstra engagement is built from explicit deliverables. Which ones you get depends on the layer you engage, and each layer has its own detailed page:

The deliverables are described in depth on the service pages: bookkeeping, business tax returns, tax planning, and fractional CFO services. What ties them together is that the same firm produces all of them, so your December tax projection is built from November's actual close, not from a guess. Service businesses can benchmark the KPI reporting layer against our service business KPI dashboard template.

Step 1: Free initial consultation and scoping.

A 30-minute call covers your entity, revenue, current bookkeeping state, and what is actually bothering you. You leave with a recommended service layer and a fixed quote. If the honest answer is "you do not need us yet," you get that answer instead.

Step 2: Onboarding (typically two to four weeks).

We collect prior returns and the depreciation schedule, take over or set up QuickBooks Online, connect bank feeds, build a chart of accounts that matches how your business actually earns and spends, and establish secure document workflows. You keep owner-level access to everything; we work in your file, not in a black box.

Step 3: The recurring cadence.

Bookkeeping clients get a monthly close with financials delivered by the 20th of the following month. Planning clients add quarterly projection and estimate reviews timed to the estimated-tax calendar. Questions in between go to a named contact, not a ticket queue.

Step 4: Year-end handoff to the return.

Because the books and the return live in one firm, year-end is a handoff, not a scavenger hunt. The reconciled books flow into the business return, K-1s flow to the owners, and the planning decisions made during the year are already documented for the preparer, because the preparer was in the room.

Accounting pricing looks opaque because most firms quote after they see your file. The inputs are actually simple. Four factors drive nearly every quote we issue:

• Transaction volume: how many transactions cross your accounts each month.
• Account count: bank accounts, credit cards, loans, and payment processors to reconcile.
• Entity and state complexity: number of entities, payroll, and states you file in.
• Current condition of the books: clean books start at monthly pricing; behind books start with a one-time cleanup.

At Taxstra, monthly bookkeeping starts in the $400 per month range for a straightforward single-entity business and scales with the factors above. Business tax return preparation and tax planning are quoted as fixed fees after the consultation. On average, a bookkeeping-plus-tax engagement for an established small business lands in the mid three figures to low four figures per month. We do not bill hourly for core services, and the quote you accept is the price you pay.

Want a number before you talk to anyone? The bookkeeping cost calculator estimates a monthly range from your transaction volume and account count, and the CPA cost guide covers what the wider market charges for each service level.

We do not publish handpicked quotes here; read what clients say directly on our Google reviews. The pattern you will see repeated is the one this page is built around: one firm, current books, and a tax return that stops being a surprise.

A small business accountant who knows your industry catches things a generalist does not: the depreciation strategy a landlord should be running, the trust-accounting rules a law firm cannot get wrong, the entity setup a physician's side income deserves. These are the niches where Taxstra goes deepest: