astraelraen

I am a CPA with 20+ years of experience. I laugh at the lawyer/accountant/medical analogies, not because they aren't true, mostly for people who insinuate medical professionals should work for free or are obligated to work for free because medical is sacred?

I have no problem telling clients these days, if you don't want to pay me for my knowledge/skill/experience, I will go home and spend time with my family or doing something I enjoy. My time is not yours unless we both agree you will pay for it or I give it to you for free out of my own choice. You do not own my time and you do not own your medical professional's time either.

PS: To the person who said you can willingly go to the open market and find professional "X" somewhere in this thread. Good luck. CPAs, lawyers, any professional with experience is in such high demand its hilarious. We name our price and chose the clients we want to work with these days. I know people in my industry from a variety of locations across the US, same problem everywhere. If you don't want to pay for experience from any professional industry, go ask ChatGPT or spend half your day watching Tiktok or Youtube videos, good luck. Not saying it to be pompous, it's reality and has been for ~5 years.

The Founder and the Force Multiplier is a good read (and quick too) - it's real estate related but has a lot of good tips/guidance on the questions you are asking.

Be very explicit with expectations and be willing to follow through with firm guidance on missed goals. You can get lost in being nice or forgiving missed goals because reason X. Reason X can become a crutch and an outlier becomes the normal.

Trust is a key measure. It sound simple... it's not. Trust is hard. Especially at the CEO level.

I am not locked in to Intuit nor justifying their cost increases because it hits all users (wholesale/retail) but their eco-system when taken as a whole makes accounting and payroll generally simple for the small business owner. Of course this is a generic statement and there are outliers that don't fit into their model for reason X or Y. This does not come without a cost, they are definitely moving into the premium offering sphere and away from "DIY" users. There will be user pushback and they will lose users, but I'm sure they have an army of financial analysts that have run the numbers and say they will make more with less users under this model.

I have experience working with QB (many variations), Freshbooks, Xero, various Sage products and some specialized vendor software in the Construction and Wholesale space and probably a few others I am forgetting.

Freshbooks is mediocre, overall their integrations are poor and without proper setup you end up with poor results, they dont offer payroll and require you to use third party services. This is fine, but just leads to more setup/sync problems which many users are not capable of doing and don't know if the answer is wrong. (PS not all users are tech saavy or know what the end result should be) Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.

Xero is alright, I wouldn't say it's significantly better or worse than QB except they have less scale and throw their weight around less (for now) than Intuit does. Sage products have a steep learning curve but have a ton of functionality depending upon which one you land with.

Many proprietary industry specific Accounting packages have great modules but from my experience, their core accounting system is not the best (putting it lightly) Most of these seem to have built their success around an industry specific pain and then realized they needed accounting on top to make the package sellable.

All that said, an accounting package should be useful for recording, categorizing and utilizing your financial data. That means different things to different people and there is no one size fits all approach - no matter what Intuit or other vendors tell you.

If your professional works best with product X, that may be in your best interest to use product X if you value your professional's input to your business not just from a tax reporting but also financial reporting perspective. If you don't, don't use product X. It's really that simple.

Sure all these open source products are great for IT nerds and people who love doing accounting (even CPAs!) but if one person (you) is the only one who knows what the software says and the output does not make sense to third parties then it is easily deemed unreliable. You will have a whole host of more complex problems than dealing with Intuit if your financial data is unreliable, let's start with audit or bank problems and expand from there.

Source: Am a small biz CPA, have seen (almost) it all including the napkin accounting method.

Most US taxpayers that this will "help" are small businesses that utilize the cash basis of accounting. There is no deferral for cash basis taxpayers and the accounting is simply you get cash, you have income.

Does that mean small business shouldn't track their gift cards? No, they should have some way to track them because they are outstanding liabilities.

Financial reporting and accrual basis taxpayers have a different answer. The difficulty in accounting for gift cards applies to this group of business owners, which is probably a lot smaller than most people realize.

From an engineering standpoint it seems like it is just a weight and packaging problem to me.

The Pacifica PHEV weighs about 5,000lbs depending on configuration. I think the only deficit it really has to the Model X is drag co-efficient but Chrysler was working with a given shape. Given a unique platform not shared with a gas variant they could design for a specific co-efficient as needed.

I don't really know the specs of the Model X, however Google says it weighs maybe 300lbs more than the Pacifica. Those aren't unsurmountable differences - especially if the price range is going to be 80k+.

I think the biggest difference is that Tesla knows it won't sell enough vans to make it worth their development time :)

It does pure-EV. Advertised range in pure-EV is about 30-36 miles. We have only owned it since October 2017. The actual range we get in pure-EV has been about 20ish give or take a few miles either direction.

My comment related to the gas engine is under cold temperatures. Chrysler doesn't let you control any aspect of how the gas engine turns on or is utilized. From what I understand most the PHEV give you the ability to somewhat override the car. Ie set a preference for the gas engine to come on or tell the car that you want "max EV range." The Pacifica does what it wants to do in terms of gas/electric hand-off. It seems to be heavily temperature dependent. I'm sure Chrysler programmed it to use gas when its cold as its more efficient to warm up/heat the cabin when cold using the gas engine. I would say based upon one winter's experience. Anything much under 35/40F will result in significant usage of the gas engine no matter the electric charge.

When it was in the mid-20s here (not uncommon) my wife could drop the kids off at school and make her round trip commute (11 miles) and it would use the gas engine significantly during that trip to warm up the van.

That being said, we just did errands over the weekend and it used 100% EV until the battery was depleted - the temperature was 50+ outside the entire time.

We own a 2018 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid (PHEV) Cost after 7500 tax credit was comparable (slightly higher) than gas only variants with dealer discounts. Winter mpg(e) was fairly unimpressive, about 24mpg(e) combined. Chrysler programmed (?) the car to run heavy on the gas engine when temperatures drop. There are no settings or overrides like the Volt (my only other PHEV experience)

As it is warming up mpge is climbing up to 34mpge, however we havent owned it for a summer or long enough during the warm season to comment on long term warm mileage. Overall we are satisified. Our utility rates are about 11 cents per kWh. We came from an Odyssey that could barely manage 19mpg around town, so 34+ all the while utilizing cheaper electric rates as fuel makes me happy. We don't drive much highway other than roadtrips. The one we have taken resulted in about 27mpg, which was slightly better than our Odyssey could do, but nothing earth shattering.

Driving in pure electric is interesting and even though the electric motor alone produces nowhere near the horsepower as the V6 it still performs well.

I almost feel sorry for the automakers though in making PHEV vehicles. They are complicated and I assume yield alot of complicated questions at the dealer level. If Tesla made a van, I would have strongly considered it, however the model X didn't meet our needs.

This is a really bad idea from a tax and legal perspective. As a CPA, I don't deal with silicon valley startups. However, I do deal with people who want to start small businesses fairly frequently as well as their needs for legal advice (which varies). For most of America, a Delaware C-Corp is a horrible idea for any person starting a business.

Paying Delaware state fees (which are likely not necessary) at best are just another administrative and cost burden to a new startup and at worse, are just another function you have to hire out to an advisor, which will then cost you even more money.

Fun story, I had a client starting a new business (whom I had partially advised) take a few extra steps we had not discussed. One being going down to a bank to open a checking account. The client was attempting to do step 5 before step 2 (proverbially speaking) The client did not have an EIN yet and the bank of course, could not open the business a checking account without an EIN.

The BANK applied for the client's EIN at the branch and effectively advised the client on entity structure by choosing their entity type for them during the EIN selection process. I'm sure the bank has some sort of BS policy where they can disclaim liability in that they made the client chose the entity type. I can tell you with 100% certainty, this client did not have any idea what the entity type was.

And to top it all off, after the bank account was setup. The bank provided no documents letting the client know what entity choice "the client" (ha!) had chosen.

Business is complex, I understand people are hesitant to pay (what seem to be) exorbitant fees to start a business. However, I've found that (nearly) 100% of the time when you start a business and ask the wrong questions you will always get the wrong answer, which is always more expensive to fix at a later date (if its possibly without severe tax or legal issues).

Some areas in the US can't support fig wasps due to the temperature. There are fig varieties that do not require fig wasps. I have two in my backyard.

If you discount all the hypothetical environmental costs that at best guess are just that, guesses. And, if you were to consider this penalty in a somewhat satirical manner, it would have been cheaper for VW if they would have been killing the consumers of their cars.

I understand the punitive nature of the penalty and its amount, but the amount seems somewhat egregious given the fact that all VW did was violate regulations of a government body. Uber is constantly praised for skirting or directly violating state or local government laws and regulations, yet is seen in an overall positive light for the supposed benefit they are providing society. This is the government's heavy hand making an example of VW and it's violation of regulation.

1991 Master Tax Guide versus 2012 Master Tax Guide https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1510099/linked/MasterTax...

I am a CPA and unless you have dealt with the IRS over the long-term, I think most of America has no idea how incompetent the IRS is.

You would be frightened if they prepared your taxes for any more than the simple return, ie some W2s. I would not even want the IRS to automatically prepare taxes for "simple" forms such as 1099-Int/1099-Div or 1099-B for stock sales.

And I do not say that from a "job security" perspective for the tax work we do.

The solution isn't government prepared taxes, it is less taxes.

I love the articles and commentary comparing US gun laws to other countries in the world. There is no comparision and the US will never have gun laws similar to other nations. Any discussion on banning weapons is moot considering that the 2nd amendment exists and has been upheld by the Supreme Court numerous times in numerous ways. Given the high requirements to repeal a portion of the constitution that will never happen.

I even wonder if another "assault weapon" ban would hold up if challenged considering the Supreme Court overturned both DC's and Chicago's handgun bans?

The previous assault weapons ban was a joke anyway just labeling certain features as evil and banning them if you had too many evil features on a gun.

Maybe limiting magazine size could do some "good" but I find it hard to believe changing magazines takes any significant amount of time if the shooter has any experience with the weapon.