From founder doing it all to a real financial foundation

The owner

A founder running a growing creative agency in the Pacific Northwest. Seven figures in revenue, a small team of contractors, and clients she was proud of. The business was working. The finances were not.

The problem

She had been doing her own books in QuickBooks since year one. It started simple: a few clients, a few invoices. But as the agency grew, so did the mess. Transactions were miscategorized. Reconciliations were months behind. Her tax preparer only heard from her once a year, filed the return, and moved on. No one was looking at the full picture.

She was an S‑Corp on paper, but no one had walked her through what that actually meant for her salary, distributions, or quarterly estimates. She was overpaying in self-employment tax and did not know it. Her personal return and her business return were filed by different people who never talked to each other.

The thing that finally pushed her to make a change: she wanted to hire her first full-time employee and had no idea whether she could afford it. She opened QuickBooks, looked at the numbers, and did not trust any of them.

What we did

Got the books clean first

We reconciled eight months of backlogged transactions, recategorized expenses that had been dumped into generic accounts, and rebuilt her chart of accounts so the financial statements actually reflected how the business operated. We moved her from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online so everything was integrated and accessible.

Set up a real bookkeeping cadence

Monthly close, reconciliations, and financial statements delivered on a predictable schedule. She stopped guessing what was in the bank and started getting reports she could actually read: income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow, every month.

Filed her personal and business taxes together

We prepared both her 1120‑S and her 1040, so the S‑Corp distributions, salary, and estimated payments were coordinated from the start. Her previous setup had her business CPA and her personal tax preparer making decisions in isolation. We eliminated that gap.

Built a tax plan

We reviewed her S‑Corp election, restructured her reasonable salary to optimize the self-employment tax split, set up quarterly estimated payments based on actual performance instead of last year’s numbers, and identified deductions she had been missing: home office, health insurance, and retirement contributions through a Solo 401(k).

Answered the hiring question

With clean books and a clear cash flow picture, we modeled what a full-time hire would actually cost: salary, payroll taxes, benefits, and the impact on her take-home. She made the hire three months later with full confidence in the numbers.

The result

Within six months, she went from not trusting her own QuickBooks to having a financial foundation she could actually use to make decisions. Her books were current. Her taxes were coordinated. She had a tax plan that saved her over $18,000 in the first year. And she made her first real hire knowing exactly what it would cost.

She did not need a big firm. She needed one CPA who could see the whole picture, personal and business, and manage it all in one place.

In her words

I went from Googling tax questions at midnight to just texting Ali. Everything is handled. I don’t think about my books anymore. I just use them.