Star Financial Services
Bookkeeping, Accounting, Payroll Consulting and more
Practice Areas
Business Tax
Being a small firm we can send out reminders of upcoming tax report due dates keeping you in compliance with state and federal guidelines. We can process your payroll tax forms such as your TWC quarterly reports, 940/941's, end of year W-2/3's, 1096/1099's, sales and use and employment taxes.
Quickbooks Setup and Upkeep
We can address any of your QuickBooks needs such as setting up a new company on QuickBooks, fixing issues in your current books, getting you caught up on a backlog of work, day-to-day QuickBooks help, bank account and credit card reconciliation, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable Etc., training, coordination with your accountant, consulting on more sophisticated projects such as:Warehouse managementMigrating from one accounting software to another.
Payroll Consultation & Tax
We will file your tax forms related to payroll such as TWC quarterly reports and 940/941's as well as help in your end of year W-2/4, 1096/99 preperations. If you prefer to not do in house payroll, we offer many recommendations on payroll solutions such as referals.
There are a lot of little things in payroll that can easily be over looked such as child support withholding orders, creditor and IRS wage garnishments.
There are many reasons small businesses should outsource payroll but the main reason is Liability. Payroll is fraught with liability: any mistake in calculation, filing or payment can trigger actions from your employees, the IRS or your sate. The IRS reported that 40% of small businesses pay an average penalty of $845 per year for late or incorrect filings. This in itself is quite worrisome, but think of what employees lawsuit could cost if your mistakes caused them financial harm.
Accounts Payable
You first need to break down the process into multiple steps and decide who will responsible for each of the steps. Here’s a typical process:
The invoice arrives in the mail or email.
The invoice gets aggregated with other invoices in some form of a holding tank: a inbox tray, a folder, a shoebox (!), a computer folder, an email folder, etc… This function can be performed by you, by an admin or by the bookkeeper.
The stack of invoices gets passed onto the person who will enter the invoices into QuickBooks, typically, the bookkeeper. If the bookkepeer operates remotely, you will either need to scan and email the data to the bookkeeper or simply put it in an envelope and snail mail it to the bookkeeper.
The bookkeeper enters the invoices into QuickBooks. They will now show as an “accounts payable” in your books. On a regular basis (typically weekly, but no less than monthly), the process of selecting the invoices to be paid kicks in. In some businesses, this can be a fairly mechanical process and it can be done by the bookkeeper, mainly if the bookkeeper is given clear instructions such as “pay all the bills a week before their due date”. However, this is quite rare. Most of the time, selecting which invoices to pay is a process that requires judgment and a deep understanding the business: e.g. “let’s postpone this payment.
The vendor trusts us and we are likely to hit a cash crunch next week because we expect revneu from Client X to be delayed”. If this is the case, the business owner or someone with high level authority needs to take care of the process of selecting the invoices to be paid. A hybrid solution that we often employ with our clients, is the following: the bookkeeper selects all the invoices that “should be paid”, and puts them in the “To Print” queue. The business owner can then review the queue and remove the payments that should be delayed from the queue.Cutting and signing the checks. This one step in which we STRONGLY recommend not to use your bookkeeper for. This is were most of the fraud happens. We, at Star Financial, trust our bookkeepers enormously, but why open the door for fraud? As a rule, business owner should not give access to the stock of blank checks to anybody except for senior management.
The process of printing checks takes a couple of minutes. Even if it is menial and mechanical, we encourage to leave this task to a senior person in the company. As they say” better to be safe than sorry”.If you are using online bill payment instead of printing paper checks, the same logic apply. Don’t give the trigger to payments to anybody other than senior people in the company. In larger companies, they call this “control”. In larger companies, “control” takes different forms (such as double signatures on checks). With small business, “control” means that you don’t let junior employees or contractors (such as you bookkeeper) have access to your money.
Reconciling statements: some vendors may send you statements of all the invoices you incurred and the payments to be made. It’s a good idea to give this statement to your bookkeeper as well and let her make sure that what’s in QuickBooks matches the vendor’s statement. If it’s a vendor with whom your work a lot, it’s easy for you or the vendor to get out of synch of which payments to apply to which bills.If you implement the process correctly, the bookkeeper will save 90% of your time spent on accounts payable. 100% is unfortunately not possible, because, for security reasons, the business owner or decision maker has to stay involved with a couple of the steps.
Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is not just about data entry. Good bookkeepers will ensure that your books are structured correctly to achieve two key objectives: Facilitate tax preparationHelp you run your business.
The first function is tactical and a necessity. The second function is strategic and an opportunity.
Facilitating tax preparation: Accurate and timely bookkeeping will make sure that all the data required by your CPA or tax adviser is recorded properly and in a way that will make it a cinch to create the tax returns. If your CPA ends up having to extensively massage and restructure the data that you give to him/her, it will cost you additional billable hours from the CPA and it defeats much of the purpose of having a lower cost bookkeeper on the front-end.
Helping you manage your business: this is an aspect often overlooked by business owners. Taxes and compliance with the IRS should not be your only motivation to keep up with your bookkeeping functions. QuickBooks can be an extraordinary business tool if you manage it well. It can give you great insights into the performance of your business and it allows you to manage your clients/customers, your vendors and your inventory with much improved efficiencies. That’s when you can turn bookkeeping from a lowly tactical function into a very strategic activity. That’s also when you can see the biggest difference between good bookkeepers and bad bookkeepers. Bookkeeping services are not just about data entry and bank account reconciliation. They can be so much more than that… and it shouldn’t have to cost you a penny extra, if it’s setup correctly up front.
Individual Tax
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We specialize in many financial areas. Customer satisfaction and compliance with regulatory laws are our top priorities.
