Outsourced Accounting

In short, outsourced accounting is squarely what our firm does, and the answers below explain the specifics.

The Reed Corporation offers a full range of CPA services NYC business owners and individuals need, from tax return preparation and tax planning through bookkeeping, payroll, and IRS representation. When people search for CPA services NYC they usually want to know whether one firm can handle everything or whether they will have to stitch together a tax preparer, a bookkeeper, and a payroll vendor. We handle all of it under one roof, which means the person who plans your taxes is the same team that keeps your books, so nothing falls between the cracks.

Here is the breakdown of what the work covers. On the tax side we prepare individual returns on Form 1040, corporate returns on Form 1120 and 1120 S, and partnership returns on Form 1065, and we do the planning that lowers the bill before year end rather than just reporting it after. On the accounting side we keep monthly books, reconcile bank and card accounts, run payroll with full tax compliance, and produce financial statements a lender or investor will accept. When the IRS sends a notice, we represent you. That spread of CPA services NYC means a growing business does not outgrow us. A sole proprietor who incorporates next year and hires three people the year after needs more from their accountant at each step, and we already do all of it. You are not shopping for a new firm every time your business changes shape. We add payroll when you make your first hire, switch you from a Schedule C to an 1120 S when the entity changes, and pick up the new compliance that comes with each move, all without you having to find and vet a new provider mid stream.

Worked example. A Manhattan agency came to us using three vendors. A tax preparer who saw them once a year, a bookkeeper who did not talk to the preparer, and a payroll service that misclassified a contractor. The misclassification triggered a payroll tax exposure of about 9,000 dollars. Because our CPA services NYC team runs payroll, books, and tax together, we caught the next misclassification before it posted, corrected the worker setup, and built the quarterly estimate so the owner was never surprised. One team, one set of numbers, no finger pointing between vendors.

We see this every year. Owners assume a tax preparer and a bookkeeper coordinate on their own. They do not. The preparer gets a shoebox in March and reconstructs a year that should have been clean all along, and real planning never happens because by filing season the year is already over. Full service CPA services NYC fixes that by keeping the books current all year, so the tax plan is built on real time numbers, not a March reconstruction.

The standards behind the work come straight from the IRS. We prepare returns to the rules in the IRS guidance on deducting business expenses, and we keep the records the IRS expects, described in its recordkeeping guidance. Clean records are what let us defend every deduction and survive an exam without drama. When the books are reconciled monthly, there is no scramble to reconstruct receipts at filing time, because the documentation already sits behind every number on the return.

One edge case. A business that is just forming needs entity selection and setup before it needs ongoing accounting, and the wrong entity choice in year one costs real money for years. Our CPA services NYC start at formation through our entity formation and structuring service, then continue through tax compliance as you grow. To see the full menu, visit our services page or reach us through the new client inquiry page.

Our CPA services NYC practice helps small to midsize businesses, professional service firms, real estate owners, and high earning individuals who need both tax work and ongoing accounting from one team. We are built for the owner who has outgrown doing it themselves but is not large enough for an in house controller and a separate tax department. If you run a business in the city or earn enough that your personal return has real complexity, you are the client our CPA services NYC practice was designed for.

Here is who we work with most. Service businesses like agencies, consultancies, and law and design firms. Real estate owners juggling depreciation, passive activity rules, and 1031 exchanges. Restaurant and retail operators with payroll and inventory. And individuals with K 1 income, equity compensation, rental property, or multistate filing obligations. The common thread across our CPA services NYC clients is complexity that a do it yourself app cannot handle and that a once a year preparer will miss. They have moving parts that interact in ways an automated tool was never built to read.

Worked example. A real estate investor owned four rental units and self prepared for years. They were not taking bonus depreciation, they mishandled the passive loss rules, and they missed a 1031 exchange opportunity that would have deferred about 60,000 dollars of gain. Our CPA services NYC team rebuilt three open years, claimed the depreciation they had left on the table, and structured the next sale as a 1031 exchange. The depreciation alone recovered roughly 14,000 dollars across the amended returns. That is the kind of client we are built to help, where the rules are too dense to work through alone. The investor had been leaving money on the table every single year, not through any fault of their own, but because the depreciation and passive loss rules reward people who plan and punish people who guess. Once we had the structure in place, every future year ran cleaner and cheaper, because the hard setup work was done once and the savings repeated annually. That compounding is the real reason complexity belongs with a CPA rather than a tax app.

We see this every year. Someone earns 400,000 dollars, runs a side business, owns a rental, and still files with consumer software because it worked when they made 60,000 dollars. The software does not know about the qualified business income deduction interaction or the net investment income tax at their level. Our CPA services NYC work catches the items software ignores, and the fee is almost always smaller than the tax it saves.

We anchor the work to IRS rules at every step. Business clients follow the business expense rules, and we keep the documentation the IRS describes in its guidance on what records to keep. For individuals, we plan around the federal figures that change each year, confirmed against current IRS releases rather than last year’s numbers. For 2026 that means the standard deduction of 16,100 dollars for a single filer and 32,200 dollars for a married couple filing jointly, and a 401k contribution limit of 24,500 dollars, figures we apply to the planning rather than guessing from memory.

One edge case. A client with foreign accounts or foreign income has reporting obligations like the FBAR and Form 8938 that carry steep penalties for a missed filing, and many preparers overlook them entirely. Our CPA services NYC practice screens for those obligations at intake. Whether you are a business or an individual, start with our individual tax returns service or our corporate returns service, or tell us about your situation through the new client inquiry page.

Our CPA services NYC engagements run on flat monthly or annual fees for ongoing work and a fixed quote for one time projects, so you know the cost before we start rather than watching an hourly meter. The hourly billing model punishes you for asking questions, and we think that is backward. When you search for CPA services NYC you deserve a price you can budget against, and that is how we structure every engagement, with the scope and the fee agreed up front.

Here is how it works in practice. Ongoing clients pay a monthly fee that bundles bookkeeping, payroll, financial statements, and the tax planning and preparation that go with them. The fee scales with complexity, the number of accounts, the payroll headcount, the entity count, not with how many emails you send. One time projects like an entity formation, a tax strategy study, or an amended return get a fixed quote after a short scoping call. Across our CPA services NYC work, the goal is no surprises on the invoice.

Worked example. A consulting firm with eight employees came from an hourly firm that billed 14,000 dollars one year and 22,000 dollars the next with no change in their business, just more questions answered at the hourly rate. We quoted a flat 1,600 dollars a month, which covered books, payroll, quarterly planning, and the year end returns. That is 19,200 dollars annually with everything included and unlimited questions. The firm could finally budget the cost, and they stopped rationing their own questions to save money, which is the worst way to run a relationship with your CPA. Under the old hourly arrangement they had quietly stopped calling about a contractor versus employee question that later cost them a payroll correction. Had they felt free to ask, we would have flagged the misclassification in five minutes for no extra charge. The flat fee is not just about budgeting, it is about removing the financial penalty for getting advice when you actually need it, which is the whole reason you hire an accountant.

We see this every year. A business avoids calling their accountant because every call adds to the bill, so problems compound in silence until they surface at filing season as something expensive. Flat fee CPA services NYC remove that disincentive. You call when something happens, we fix it while it is small, and the fee does not move. That is the entire point of the model.

The deductibility helps too. Fees you pay for business tax preparation, bookkeeping, and payroll are deductible business expenses under the IRS business expense rules, so part of what you pay comes back at tax time. We keep the records the IRS expects, per its recordkeeping guidance, which makes the fee easy to substantiate as a deduction. The monthly invoice itemizes the bookkeeping, payroll, and tax work, so at year end the deductible amount is already clear and supported. There is no reconstruction needed, because the record of what you paid for is built into how we bill. That is one more reason the flat fee model is cleaner than hourly, where the bill is a wall of time entries that nobody can map to a deductible category.

One edge case. The tax preparation fee on the personal portion of an individual return is generally not deductible for most taxpayers under current law, while the business portion on a Schedule C remains deductible. Our CPA services NYC engagements split mixed work so the deductible share is clear. To get a fixed quote for your situation, start with our client accounting services or our tax strategy consulting service, or reach us through the new client inquiry page.

Yes, IRS representation is a core part of our CPA services NYC practice, and we handle everything from a simple CP2000 notice through a full field audit. As CPAs we have the authority to represent you before the IRS, which means we deal with the agent directly so you do not have to. When a notice lands in your mailbox and your stomach drops, the value of CPA services NYC that include representation is that someone who speaks the IRS language takes it off your plate that same day.

Here is how the work runs. We start by reading the notice for what it actually says, because most notices are narrow. A CP2000 is a proposed change from a document matching mismatch, not a bill and not an audit. We pull your records, reconcile them against what the IRS thinks happened, and respond by the deadline with documentation. If it escalates to an examination, we manage the whole exchange, set the scope, and limit what the agent reviews to the items in question. Our CPA services NYC representation keeps you out of the room and keeps the audit from sprawling.

Worked example. A client received a CP2000 proposing 11,000 dollars of additional tax because a brokerage reported gross proceeds of 80,000 dollars with no cost basis. The IRS computer assumed the entire 80,000 dollars was gain. We provided the basis records showing the actual gain was 6,000 dollars, and the proposed 11,000 dollar assessment dropped to about 900 dollars. The notice looked terrifying and was almost entirely a basis reporting gap. That is the most common notice we resolve, and it rarely means what the dollar figure first suggests.

We see this every year. People panic at a notice and either pay an amount they do not owe or ignore it until it becomes a real problem. A notice is a conversation, not a verdict, as long as you answer it by the deadline. Ignoring it is the only move that turns a fixable notice into a lien or a levy. Our CPA services NYC team answers every notice on time and documents the response. The deadline on the notice is the one number that genuinely matters, because missing it forfeits your right to dispute the proposed change before it becomes a formal assessment. Once an assessment is final, your options narrow and the process gets slower and more expensive. We calendar every notice deadline the day it arrives and build the response with time to spare, so you keep every avenue open. The taxpayer who answers on time almost always pays less than the one who waited.

The records are what win these cases. The IRS resolves a dispute in your favor when you can prove your numbers, which is why we keep the documentation the IRS describes in its guidance on what records to keep and on its broader recordkeeping page. A deduction you cannot document is a deduction you can lose in an exam, so the bookkeeping and the audit defense are the same job. The work we do to keep your books clean during the year is the exact same work that wins a dispute later, which is why our accounting clients almost never lose an exam over missing documentation.

One edge case. A notice about canceled debt from a Form 1099-C often overstates your tax, because exclusions for insolvency or bankruptcy may apply that the IRS computer does not know about. Our CPA services NYC team checks those exclusions before paying a 1099-C notice. If you have a notice in hand, get our IRS audit and notice assistance service or our tax compliance service, and reach us fast through the new client inquiry page.

You choose a full service CPA services NYC firm over a standalone tax preparer because a CPA does tax planning and representation, not just data entry, and because keeping your books and your taxes under one team means real strategy instead of a March scramble. A seasonal preparer fills in forms with numbers you hand them. CPA services NYC that combine accounting and tax actually lower your bill, because the planning happens during the year when you can still change the outcome.

Here is the difference in concrete terms. A tax preparer is reactive. They report what already happened, in April, after every decision that could have saved you money is locked in. A CPA firm is proactive. We watch your numbers monthly, so when your income is running high in October we can accelerate deductions, fund a retirement plan, or adjust your entity strategy before December 31. CPA services NYC that include the books are the only way to plan, because you cannot plan around numbers you only see once a year.

Worked example. An S corporation owner used a seasonal preparer and took a 40,000 dollar salary against 200,000 dollars of profit. That salary was unreasonably low for the work performed, an audit risk, and the owner was also missing a retirement plan that could have sheltered income. Our CPA services NYC team reset the salary to a defensible 90,000 dollars, opened a solo 401k, and contributed the 2026 maximum, which sheltered another large slice of income at the owner’s marginal rate. The seasonal preparer never raised either issue because they never saw the business until the year was over.

We see this every year. A business pays a preparer 800 dollars, feels good about the low fee, and never learns about the 8,000 dollars in planning they left on the table. The cheap return is the expensive one. CPA services NYC cost more than a storefront preparer and save multiples of the difference, because the value is in the strategy that happens before the return, not the typing that happens on it. The fee comparison people make is the wrong one. The right comparison is total dollars out the door, fee plus tax, and on that measure the cheap preparer almost always costs more because of what they never told you to do. We have reviewed plenty of returns prepared for a few hundred dollars that missed retirement contributions, entity elections, and credits worth ten or twenty times the fee. The price on the invoice is not the price of the return.

The planning leans on current IRS figures, which is why using last year’s numbers is a costly mistake. We confirm retirement contribution limits and deduction amounts against current IRS guidance, and we hold deductions to the standard in the IRS rules on deducting business expenses. We also keep the documentation the IRS expects under its recordkeeping guidance, so every planning move survives scrutiny. The reasonable compensation rule for an S corporation owner, the contribution limits on a solo 401k, and the timing of a deduction all turn on current figures and current law, and getting any of them wrong turns a smart plan into an audit risk. We confirm each one before we act on it.

One edge case. A business that has been self preparing for years often has open years worth amending, where a missed deduction or credit can still be recovered, usually within three years of the original filing. Our CPA services NYC team reviews prior returns for those recoveries at intake. To move from a preparer to a real CPA relationship, start with our tax strategy consulting service or the services hub, and reach us through the new client inquiry page.