Your business has changed. Has its tax strategy kept up?
A business rarely stands still. Owners come and go, it grows into new states, it hires, it buys, it restructures. The strategy that fit a few years ago quietly stops fitting, and the cost of that gap usually isn’t discovered until the return is prepared, when the decisions are already behind you. The point of an advisor is to catch those moments while there’s still a choice on the table. For many of the businesses William D. Briggs works with, that starts with the numbers themselves: financial statements prepared by someone who also sees the tax picture.
The businesses Bill works with are the ones a town actually runs on: auto repair shops, restaurants and bars, dental practices, dry cleaners and upholstery cleaners, plus the family firms behind them. Many have been with him for decades.
“Bill Briggs is a top drawer CPA. He provides ‘Big Accounting’ experience and expertise to all his clients regardless of size or complexity. His attention to detail and personal service is exemplary.”
Financial statements prepared by the person who does your taxes.
Most small businesses have a bookkeeper who keeps the general ledger. Few have someone who turns that ledger into financial statements a bank, a lender or the IRS will accept. That is Bill’s work.
He takes the general ledger your bookkeeper maintains and prepares financial statements from it. Monthly, quarterly or annually, depending on what the business needs. For clients whose bank or circumstances call for it, he prepares full compilations under professional standards, with the accountant’s report lenders expect to see.
Either way, the statements are prepared the way you need them as the owner, and the way federal and state rules require. The same person prepares the statements and the tax return, so nothing gets lost between the two.
Bill works with dozens of small businesses through the year on exactly this. A dental practice that needs quarterly statements. A family company whose bank wants a compilation every year.
- Monthly, quarterly and annual financial statements
- Full compilations when your bank or lender requires them
- Year-end statements prepared for the tax return
- The tax picture behind the numbers
Does any of this sound like your year?
- Seeing your financial statements once a year, at tax time?
- Not sure what the business actually earned last quarter?
- Bank or lender asking for financial statements you don’t have?
- Adding an owner, or buying one out?
- Wondering whether you’re still operating under the right entity structure?
- Taking both salary and distributions from an S corporation?
- Hiring employees, or relying more and more on independent contractors?
- Buying significant equipment or other business assets?
- Expanding into another state?
- Preparing to buy, sell or transfer a business?
- Thinking about the next generation, or what happens to the business if something happens to you?
- Making decisions now that could substantially change this year’s taxable income?
Each of these carries a tax consequence far easier to shape beforehand than to fix afterward. If more than one rings true, that’s usually the sign it’s time for a conversation.
Family business and continuity planning.
A family business carries questions an ordinary business never has to answer. How the next generation comes into it, and on what terms. How a founder steps back with the business, and the family, intact. What the business is worth to the family when it changes hands, and what that means for everyone’s taxes. And underneath all of it, what happens to the business and the people who depend on it if the one person it runs on is suddenly out of the picture.
Much of Bill’s work over the years has been with tightly held family businesses, and he has sat in a good many small conference rooms where these questions got answered. He helps families work through them while they are still planning questions rather than crises: succession, ownership, valuation, the timing of a transfer and the tax consequences of each choice, shaped in advance rather than discovered afterward. It is the kind of work that is invisible if done in time and expensive if not.
The best time to ask is before the decision, not after.
Bill’s work is the thinking that happens before the forms, the difference between a return that simply records what happened and one shaped by decisions made on purpose.
(847) 615‑1520