Abacus Vs other CPA

I'm looking elsewhere as well.

 

When I get back to the truck I'll give you some advice on this. Just have to much to say about this topic to type out on my phone. Should be back in the truck in about 2 hours.

 

So, Abacus is a CPA I would not use! I spent an hour with them asking them questions about taxes, write offs and how my LLC should be sent up. They didn't know jack ####z.

I'll start from the begining with them. I leased a truck from Success January 2015 and was told at that point I needed to get my LLC to lease the truck. So they sent me to abacus to get it set up. I asked them many times over while setting it up, is there going to be any issues with the Missouri LLC they are setting me up with since I live in Washington State. They said many times over, nope won't make a difference at all because you are single member LLC and for tax purposes it's just a pass through entity. This isn't my first time getting an LLC and from all my previous research, I never did talk to a CPA before about LLC's until I spoke with abacus, but everything I read said I needed to have my LLC in my state of residence or operations. For me that would be WA state. Abacus kept telling me no, it doesn't matter where your LLC is based. Well, this year I got my own authority and during that process I learned Abacus doesn't know anything about LLC's or individual state tax laws. I was a small business owner that lived in WA and needed to be registered as such in the state of WA, not MO.

So when I went to get my authority, my MO LLC wouldn't work because I lived in WA. I had to get a new LLC in WA state, register as a business like I was suppose to last year in WA state (which Abacus said I didn't have to do), and then I could get my base plates and IFTA account set up. This just showed me how incompetent they are at Abacus.

WA state has what is called a B&O tax and PUT tax, both of which I should have been paying last year. WA doesn't have a state income tax at all, but if you run a business or are an independent contractor you need to pay the B&O and PUT tax.

Now my recommendation is don't use Abacus or any CPA firm for that matter. I do all my own bookkeeping and taxes. I use a software called frontaccounting for tracking my numbers and turbotax to file my taxes. For a lease op at Prime, all you really need to do is keep track of your income and expenses, that's all Abacus does for you anyways. I am a firm believer that you need know how to do the bookkeeping yourself before you start paying someone to do it, that way you can tell if they know what they are doing or are they just scrwing you out of money. Same thing with taxes, especially since most tax preparers really don't know all the tax exceptions we have in the transportation industry. When it comes to tax time, I'll be reviewing all the IRS publications with regards to transportation industry and making sure I have my ducks in a row when I fill out my 1040 and schedule C.

This is YOUR business and no one, I MEAN NO ONE, is going to care about it's success as much as YOU!

For the bookkeeping side of things, if you set yourself up so you put everything in the right categories, it'll make life easier when you do your own estimated quarterly taxes and the taxes at the of the year. Here is a pdf file from Kevin Rutherford's profit gauges website that I used to set up my categories. It made doing taxes a breeze this last year. Not all the categories will apply to you as a lease op at Prime.

I've also attached a very helpful pdf on basic accounting principles. This is great information and doesn't require a college degree to understand. As a business owner you should know the basic accounting principles so you can understand how to read a cashflow report or a profit and loss report. By the way, those two reports are how you tell if your business is successful or on life support. Those are two reports you don't get from Abacus. A good CPA firm that is doing your books, should be sending you those reports at least once a month. How else will you know if you're about to go out of business or need to make a course correction in how you run your business?

Find yourself a good accounting program, quickbooks is pricey and has way more features than a typical lease op at Prime will need, but the software will grow with you. I use frontaccounting, it's web based and I am a techy kind of person so I know how to make some of the simple programming changes to the software to meet my business needs. There is plenty of opensource accounting software out there that is free and very good, just might be a learning curve on how to use it. Find yourself accounting software that works best for you, learn it, and use it to run your business.

For my taxes at the end of the year, I have used TurboTax and it works great for me. It goes through and asks you step by step questions about your business and does give you most of the correct forms you need. Usually the per diem is the one that I have to go find in their software every year, but if you can't find it, you can enter it manually in the 1040.

The big thing I keep coming back to is, this is a business and you need to run it as such. You need to learn the basics about accounting and taxes so you don't get taken to the cleaners like Abacus does to everyone that signs up for their services. If you can do basic addition and subtraction, you can do your own accounting and taxes.

If anyone has any questions about accounting or taxes, I'll try and help as much as I can.

When I do a goole search for "trucking CPA" I get quite a few CPA firms that show up. If you decide you really need a CPA firm, my recommendation would be to find someone that is local to where you live though. You really do want to be able to put your eyeballs on them at least once a year to go over your numbers.

 

Do you live in the state of Missouri? If not then you would need to set up an llc in your home state as a foreign llc plus all the other business stuff for your state.

Your settlement statement is your receipt. They just need proof of the purchase if you get audited. Remember to also download a copy of your logs every month or 2. You'll need those records as well.

Do you have phone at home? If you do then you can claim your cell phone for work. If not, you can claim a portion of your cell phone bill for business.

Tax people make it sound like they have some secrete book of deductions that only they can use and you have to pay for that.

Deductions are very simple and TurboTax does a good job of pointing out the ones you can qualify for.

As for itemizing, you take that list of categories I posted and those are what you itemize. It's just all your business expenses you itemize on the schedule c. Then if you had any personal expenses like loan interest, mortgage, stuff like that you would itemize that on your personal tax return.