No. Finairi Carr can read spreadsheet type information that you can typically download from your bank and credit card companies. This information contains transaction details but not account numbers. There is typically a time limit for how far back you can get this spreadsheet type information, usually around 18 months. If you need to go back further than that, or your bank doesn't supply it, we can read statement information from PDFs you can download, for an additional fee per statement due to required clean up. Your account number will be on these statements, but you will not be giving your bank any authorization for us to do anything with it. This works well for annual processing, and sometimes, for quarterly processing of a small number of accounts, but most clients consider it to be too cumbersome for more frequent reporting or larger numbers of accounts. In that case, we use a widely-used third party service to supply transaction information to us from your bank account and the third party will need read-only access to your bank account, but does not give us access. Note that the third party services will sometimes not be able to access your bank, causing information to be missing. We will also request read-only access to your bank statements or account balance to verify the balance matches to ensure no transactions were omitted. Additionally, the third party service can only go back about 60 days. If you want us to go back further than that, spreadsheet download or PDF statements will be your only option.
Finairi Carr's regular bookkeeping services take up to 30 days to process the first full tax year from the time you provide us with all the necessary information. Rush service takes up to two weeks. After the first full year, subsequent years usually take up to three weeks, with rush service taking up to a week and a half. If you are on a quarterly reporting plan, the quarterly report will be finished about ten days after the quarter ends. Monthly reporting plans typically finish about a week after the month ends. Note that if we have connected your accounts as noted above, you'll be able to see deposits made and checks paid in real time, it is only the reports that take time to process.
We find the quality and security to be higher for US based staff. People from out of the country tend to ask basic questions ("what does Whole Foods sell") that ends up with you doing much more of the work and mistakes getting overlooked. Additionally, it is difficult to do an accurate background check on people out of the country, and little fear of prosecution in the US when the perpetrator is in a different country and would need to be extradited to be prosecuted. This invites shenanigans.
Cash accounting records an accounting transaction when cash changes hands. This makes it easier for us to build automated tools. Accrual accounting records an accounting transaction that corresponds to use, instead of just cash. This makes it closer to what is actually happening financially in the business.
For example, your annual liability insurance premium in cash accounting is a single entry on the date you paid the bill, which is easy, but generates a high amount of expenses in the month it is paid. Accrual accounting records the payment as an asset that is used 1/12th per month, and then records 12 entries in each month the premium applies to draw down the asset by 1/12 used each month. Accrual accounting then causes 12 small expenses to appear each month instead of a single large one, aligning the expenses with the use of the insurance asset.
Accruals can get much more complicated when it comes to income. If you start working on a project that gets billed out in March, the invoice itself is recorded as revenue and a liability to perform the work, and once paid, the amount of work performed is then used to draw down the liability and earn the money corresponding to the work performed so far. Several transactions are incurred to record this properly. At each of several checkpoints, the liability is drawn down and earnings increased until the entire liability is fulfilled. If the client never pays the invoice, a charge against bad debts is used to cancel the liability. Now compare that to an unpaid invoice under a cash accounting system, which generates no accounting transactions at all as no cash ever changes hands. It is a much simpler system to implement.
Finairi Carr allows you to bring your own tax professional or use ours. We don't recommend doing business taxes yourself, but you'll have access to everything you'd need to do so, except the tax law education you get from a professional.
No. Our patent pending software is included in the monthly charge. You don't need to learn anything but we do offer a log in to a customer portal to our software that allows you to view your transactions, and view and print reports. We walk you through using it the first time and have made it easy to use. It works like anything else you use on a day to day basis.
No. Finairi Carr is a profitable company and has no outside funding of any kind. Our profitability at these prices is simply the result of a lot of experience, enabling us to know exactly what to do in nearly every situation, so we don't need to spend a lot of time figuring out what to do.
To get started with Finairi Carr, you can select your business type on our homepage and use our pricing estimator. This will give you an initial idea of costs. You can then contact us for a more detailed discussion about your specific needs and how we can tailor our services to your business.