No lobby required
CPA El Paso Alternative on checking a firm that is not on your street.
Judge the work by the close, the limit, and whether a person answers. A lobby is the weakest of the tests.
Start with the booksYou can inspect the books from anywhere.
Owners are used to believing that the right help sits within a short drive. The belief is understandable and it is a weak test. A room nearby can still leave March open until the following spring. A person two time zones away can still close the month on the tenth. What you can inspect is the month itself. Does the bank match. Are the open items named. Does payday agree with the provider who already runs it.
Name the boundary before the talk wanders into a price. The short list that needs a license is an audit, a review, and a compilation. Everything an owner usually wants, the books, the close, payday setup, the return, the plan while the year is open, can be done without that license. A firm that will not say this plainly is hoping you will not ask.
Ask what the first letter will name. It should name the months, the entities, the fee, and the work that is outside the letter. A letter that says full service and then surprises you in November is not a letter. It is a mood.
How a remote month actually runs.
Your files remain where you already keep them. We see them because you shared them, not because someone drove over. A video call is the meeting. The close has a day on the calendar, and that day does not drift because someone was on the road. When a month will not tie, you hear it that week, while you can still find the missing deposit.
The same pattern works for a shop, a clinic, a contractor, or a firm of one. The industry changes the categories. It does not change the test. If the cash accounts do not match the bank, nothing downstream is trustworthy. We start there, every time, and we do not skip ahead to a pretty report.
You can run this test on us and on anyone else. Bring one set of books. Listen for whether we refuse to read them while they are still open. That refusal is the signal that the rest of the work will be honest.
A second test is the vocabulary, and it takes about two minutes. Ask them to describe the last close without a slide. The honest description has a bank, a list of items that have not cleared, and a sales total that agrees with the deposits. A description that opens on a dashboard color is a description of a screen. You are hiring the person who closes the books, and a dashboard is not that person.
A third test is the refusal, and you should bring a month you already know is open. Ask for a number a lender could use this week. The right answer is a no, said before any letter is drafted. A confident yes means the number will sit on a month that does not tie. You can thank them and end the call. That no is the only advertisement that matters.
Write the answers in their words, not in a summary you clean up later. Your own summary will sand off the vague parts, and the vague parts are the finding. If you cannot stand to read the notes back, the fit is already wrong, and you have spent an hour rather than a year. The same hour works on a firm across town and on a firm in another state. Geography is a comfort. The notes are the evidence. Date the notes. A conversation you remember fondly a month later is a weaker record than the sentence you wrote while it was still awkward, and awkward is information.
Name the books you trust.
One set of books is enough. Say whether the bank already matches them.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.