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By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor ASC compliance and review-readiness rest on one quiet foundation: clean, well-kept books. An ambulatory surgery center faces more outside scrutiny of its finances than most businesses — a CPA financial audit, lender covenant reviews, buyer due diligence, and the financial-records side of Medicare certification and accreditation surveys. Every one of those reviews assumes the surgery center can produce accurate, complete, and org

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor ASC financial statements are how an ambulatory surgery center sees itself clearly — how profitable it really is, what it owns and owes, and whether cash is actually flowing. Yet many surgery centers run on incomplete or non-standard reports that hide as much as they reveal. In this fourth part of our ASC series, we step back from the individual mechanics of revenue and expenses and look at the finished product: the three core fi

ASC revenue recognition is the accounting rulebook that decides when and how much revenue an ambulatory surgery center puts on its books. In our first article we walked through the revenue cycle — how a surgery center's money moves from billed charge to collected payment. This guide goes a layer deeper, into the accounting standard behind that cycle: whether a surgery center should use cash or accrual accounting, and how the ASC 606 revenue recognition model applies to a surg

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor ASC revenue recognition is the accounting rulebook that decides when and how much revenue an ambulatory surgery center puts on its books. In our first article we walked through the revenue cycle — how a surgery center's money moves from billed charge to collected payment. This guide goes a layer deeper, into the accounting standard behind that cycle: whether a surgery center should use cash or accrual accounting, and how the ASC

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor For an ambulatory surgery center, the single biggest source of bookkeeping confusion is revenue — and specifically, the gap between what you billed and what you will actually collect. ASC revenue cycle bookkeeping is not like a retail business where a sale equals cash. A surgery center bills an insurer one amount, gets paid a contracted amount that is often far lower, and waits weeks or months for the money to arrive. If your bo

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor If your law firm is taxed as an S corporation, reasonable compensation is one of the most important tax issues you will ever face — and one of the easiest to get wrong. Many attorney-owners hear that S-corp distributions avoid self-employment tax and decide to pay themselves a tiny salary while pulling most of the money out as distributions. The IRS is very clear that this does not work. An S-corp shareholder who performs real s

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Attorney compensation is one of the most sensitive subjects in any law firm, and it is also one of the most misunderstood from a bookkeeping standpoint. This guide is not about how much an attorney should pay themselves — that depends on each firm's situation and is a conversation for your tax advisor. It is about how compensation is recorded once those decisions are made. Partner draws, salaries, bonuses, profit sharing, and eq

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Opening a new law firm is exciting, but the financial setup is where many new attorneys feel lost. Law school teaches you how to practice law, not how to structure a firm's bank accounts, set up an IOLTA trust account, or build a chart of accounts that keeps you compliant. The good news is that getting the money side right from day one is mostly a matter of working through a clear checklist. This guide walks a new law firm throu

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Getting a State Bar trust account notice in the mail can make any attorney's stomach drop. Before you panic, the first thing to understand is that not every notice means you are in trouble — and the right next step depends entirely on which kind of notice you received. Some are routine, some are time-sensitive, and some are serious. What they all have in common is that they turn on your records: clean law firm bookkeeping and a

By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor When a law firm first reaches out about law firm bookkeeping, the conversation almost always sounds the same. The attorney is not sure whether they need a full cleanup, they are uneasy about their IOLTA account, and someone has probably told them their books are 'fine.' Over years of working with law firms, we have heard the same honest questions again and again — about start dates, IOLTA reconciliation, how long catch-up takes,

Clio Accounting can take a law firm's most tedious bookkeeping tasks — categorizing transactions, matching deposits, printing checks, and reconciling trust accounts — and turn them into a fast, repeatable, audit-ready system. For many firms, bookkeeping is still a pile of manual entry and month-end stress, but Clio Accounting is built to remove that friction with rule-based automation and compliance-focused tools. Unlike a generic accounting program, Clio Accounting is design

Knowing how to create an invoice in Clio is one of the most important skills for getting your law firm paid on time. Clio Manage turns your tracked time and expenses into a clean, professional invoice in just a few steps — but only if you follow the billing workflow correctly. This step-by-step guide walks you through exactly how to create an invoice in Clio, from opening the Billing section to sending the finished bill to your client. One quick note on terms: Clio calls invo