Safe Harbor is the CPA near you (in San Francisco). Not necessarily physically, although we are right here in San Francisco, but mentally as well. We know and love taxes and – like you – we hate paying taxes. We do everything legally possible to minimize your tax bill.
That’s right. We love taxes in the sense that we love working with and around the law so that we can find legal loopholes for our clients in order that they never pay a cent more in taxes than the law requires.
We also hate taxes because we don’t like paying them any more than you do. (We won’t get into politics here, but let’s just say that all taxes could be a lot lower if the money was spent wisely).
But anyway, our job is to understand every last sentence of all of the many laws governing both state and federal taxes, and to keep up to date with the many changes that occur. Who knows? A small change in this law or that law could mean that our clients might finish up paying a lot more tax unless we find a workaround. Or there might be a small change which means that a client in a particular industry could suddenly avoid paying a certain tax.
This is what we mean when we say that we work with you and not just for you. No two clients are ever in precisely the same situation, so what might work for one client may not work for another. They could both be in the same type of business – a retail shop, for example, selling clothing. You might think that both would pay the same amount of tax relevant to their turnover, but that is by no means necessarily the case.
A Small Change Could Make a Big Difference
They might be able to save on taxes by importing stock from a particular country, or by changing the way that they trade from LLC to sole trader. Or the other way around! At Safe Harbor CPAs, we are always on the lookout for the way that these changes could affect an individual client.
So, we don’t just “do sums” at the end of your financial year. Working with you involves a lot more than that. So, when there is some change in the law we need to be thinking “Ah! Now that could benefit client A”. In which case we would take whatever action is necessary to keep you in the loop. It might not be months until your next tax payment is due, but if you make a certain change now it could reduce your tax bill. That is working with you and not just for you.
