You’re building a company and a life at once. We plan for both.
Running a company means making decisions a once-a-year preparer never sees. How you’re structured. How you pay yourself. What to do with profit, and how all of it serves the life you’re building. We work it with you all year, and keep it lined up with everyone else who advises you.
What we see
Before any advice, we read the whole picture. Your books, your entity, your goals, and years of tax records. Then we name what’s actually there. A few of the things we routinely turn up in an owner-run business:
Entity & the S-corp question
What this is. How the business is structured, and how you pay yourself, sets your tax treatment for years. An S-corp election with a sensible salary split changes what you owe in self-employment tax.
Why it comes up. Plenty of profitable businesses are still taxed the way they were set up on day one.
R&D credit & §174
What this is. Work that improves a product or process can qualify for the R&D credit, now tangled up with the §174 rules that changed how that spending is written off.
Why it comes up. If you pay people to build, you may be expensing as ordinary cost what could be earning a credit.
A retirement plan that fits an owner
What this is. Owner-friendly plans, a solo 401(k), or a defined-benefit plan in a strong year, let you move far more pre-tax than a regular IRA.
Why it comes up. Profit that lands in big, uneven chunks often has nowhere tax-advantaged to go.
How we plan
We build the plan around your business and your life, what to do, in what order, and which version fits your cash flow and how much change you want at once. There’s usually more than one good way. We show you the trade-offs; you choose.
Working with your other professionals
You’ve probably already got a bookkeeper, maybe an attorney and a banker. We coordinate with them directly, so the books, the legal structure, and the tax plan agree. You’re never the one relaying messages between everyone.
Nothing leaves our hands without your say-so.
Where things stand, all year
Once the plan’s in motion, you can see where everything is, what’s done, what’s underway, what’s next, without re-explaining your business every spring. The work builds on itself instead of starting over.
Tell us how you got here.
Reach out and we’ll talk through where you are and where you’re headed. We get to know your business along the way, but the real work is about you. We help what you’ve built keep growing without changing who you are. The Gnomon Diagnostic is where it starts.