Unfortunately, we live in an era of declining customer service. Nowadays, you can go into a Safeway or Lucky’s grocery store here in San Francisco, and literally not interact with a single person. You can use self checkout, and bag your own groceries, interacting not with a checker but with a machine. Similarly, you can use an app to summon an Uber or Lyft, and you can hop in, and ignore the driver. Uber and Lyft both are keen to create self driving cars, so in the not-too-distant future is possible that you will use the Uber app to hail a self driving car and, like your self-checkout at Safeway, not have to interact with the human being.
Is this progress? Well, it is and it isn’t. We live and work in San Francisco, which is the center of the technology revolution. We are not against technological progress! However, as the top rated boutique CPA firm in San Francisco, we like to think of ourselves as being old-school when it comes to customer service. We think of ourselves as putting the “P” in personal tax accountant. What do we mean by this?
The “P’s of Personal Tax Accountants in San Francisco
First, we mean that the “P” in personal tax accountant means personalization. When you come in for a consultation or if you decide to become a client we will do a thorough top to bottom review of your income and assets, with an eye to personalizing your tax strategy so that you pay the minimum in California and Federal income tax in the long term. Every person is unique and every person needs a unique personal tax accountant, one who will optimize the tax strategy based on the personal characteristics of that person. Are you young or old? Are you married or single? Do you have a business? Or, do you work at a startup and receive stock options? Do you own a home? There are many questions which we will ask in order to personalize your tax strategy.
Second, unlike the big-box chains, we are a small boutique tax accounting firm in San Francisco. You won’t see a horde of nameless persons in a cubicle farm in our office. We don’t pop up around tax season and pop down the rest of the year. We are here in our San Francisco offices day in and day out. We are part of the San Francisco community. You will get to know our employees on a first name basis, and we will know you on a first name basis. The “P” in personal tax accountant means that you are a person and we are persons. And we will work together to minimize the tax bite. Uncle Sam, after all, isn’t a real person. He’s a black hole who would like to suck all of your income into taxation.
Third, we could say that the “P” stands for perpetual. While the big-box personal tax accountant chains pop up and pop down in San Francisco around tax season, we are perpetually available. We do not work with our clients just for a few months at the beginning of the year. Rather, we work with our clients throughout the year to personalize their tax minimization strategies. This perpetual effort yields results. Our clients tend to pay the least possible legal tax, and we work hard as personal tax advisors to help them throughout the year.
Whether or not self driving cars will come, is an open question. Self checkout has made it to the grocery store, but we can’t say that we love it. We miss those days of personally knowing our checker at Safeway, Lucky’s, or other grocery stores here in San Francisco. As for the accounting industry, all we can say is that no computer and no self checkout can substitute for the personalized service that she will get you choose Safe Harbor as your personal tax service here in San Francisco.
