A.J. Spring

I would like the record to show that I enjoy working with 98% of my clients, you're just not going to see much of it on here because "I had a client call today and it went fine" just doesn't make for good Twitter

Dammit I am stupid, commercial is 39, residential is 27.5, y'all knew what I meant

For the 1000th time, your tax pro is asking you questions because theyre trying to HELP you If I ask about your $50k office reno and I get details, I'll expense what I can and depreciate the rest But if you say "we redid our office" then that whole thing gets 39.5 yr depreciation

(For the record I did play golf this morning but I was able to do that pretty much whenever I wanted at my previous job too. Like I said, it's great but it would be really shortsighted of me to make that my reason for being a Business Owner)

decisions that I get to make. Some are big, some are small, some are decisions that I don't even want to make, but the point is that if you think playing golf on a random Thursday is THE reason to make the leap, I ask that you carefully reconsider your "why" before doing so

Was talking about my new firm today and consciously realized something that was rattling around in my brain: A lot of people think that the "freedom" around owning your own business is that you're your own boss, and you can work whenever you want, etc, and that's true but...(1/x)

Always fun when you get the accusatory "why does this notice say I owe when you said I would get a refund?" and can meet it with a simple "well evidently you didn't make the payments you said you did, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

@JosephLaMagna What about shooting the lowest score? No one's talking about that

Based on what I’m seeing from the touts, it looks like this week will be the type of major where you need to drive it long and straight, hit precise iron shots, have a solid short game, and make putts

Also to anyone who's ever "moved on" from their tax preparer to get a bigger refund, we know why you did it. I know you probably don't care, I just want to make sure you know that we know

Just once I'd love to have a client replace the "we've decided to go in a different direction" email with "we want bigger refunds so we're going with someone who believes the tax code is merely a suggestion"

@LoganGrafTax Getting butthurt about someone not responding to your cold email is…definitely a strategy

The state of LinkedIn. These are recent replies to one of my posts.

I wish I knew enough people at my post office to get a pool going on how long it’s going to take to fix the automatic sliding door We’re currently at three months and counting

@bsuecannon There's this catch-22 where the only way for taxpayers to protect themselves against fraud is to go through a process that, if fraudulent, would compromise their identity until the end of time Absolute "if you're not laughing, you're crying" material

I have turned into tech support helping clients set up accounts with irs.gov. I never signed up with be a tech support person. Lord, grant me patience.

Amazing how many of Outlook's grammar suggestions are absolute crap. This suggestion saves exactly two letters so is hardly "more concise" and it'll make you sound like a weirdo: "I have to leave early today" vs "I must leave early today" Ok sir Lancelot, talk to you next week

@BradRunsFar Always a good idea to explicitly ask the client to look at the return, I also find it helps to push the meeting out at least 3-5 days bc people are much more likely to look at it than if you schedule the meeting for the next day or two

@ArthurJSpring YUP. That's where I push back and ask them to come back to me with specific questions. Many are the simple "what can I do to lower my tax liability" while some are the detailed bullet points.

The biggest hazard of "walk me through the tax return" is that most clients don't look at the return before the walkthrough, and as soon as it's done, they consider the return reviewed and sign it as-is, which is nearly indistinguishable not reviewing the return at all

@going_concern When I entered the workforce in 2010, $50-55k was the norm for large firms to offer starting associates in Charlotte This equals about $76-84k in 2025, and from what I understand a lot of starting CPA offers are below that, some by $5-10k or more

@going_concern Can't remember where I saw the article, but someone convinced me the shortage is made up because basic economics says if there was a shortage of accountants salaries would be rising quickly, whereas in reality salaries are barely keeping up with inflation

Rough out there these days

Notice response is one of those things it's good to have a template response bc it gets exhausting to find polite ways to say "if you had actually read the notice this could have been resolved in less time than it took you to email me"

I'm just gonna throw it out there that I value accuracy in communication and "it looks like" implies uncertainty, therefore the two phrases do not mean the same thing In most of these cases, there is no uncertainty, I'm just pretending there is to avoid hurting their feelings

Sometimes I look to my years of experience to answer complex tax questions... And some days I lean on that experience to know that saying "it looks like you sent docs for the wrong year" yields a more positive client interaction than "you sent the wrong year"