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IOLTA Bookkeeping in Texas: A Complete Guide to Trust Account Compliance
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Texas attorneys handling client funds have been required to participate in the state's IOLTA program since 1989, and IOLTA bookkeeping Texas carries requirements that differ in real, specific ways from other states' programs. Getting the details wrong is not a paperwork inconvenience — Texas disciplinary authorities are direct about it: process failures, not intentional misconduct, drive the vast majority of trust account violat
Aug 166 min read
Three-Way Reconciliation for Law Firms: How It Actually Works, Step by Step
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Every state bar in the country requires attorneys handling client trust funds to reconcile their trust accounts regularly, and nearly every one of them expects something more rigorous than a standard bank reconciliation. That standard is three-way reconciliation: confirming that three separate numbers — the trust account's bank statement balance, the firm's internal trust ledger, and the sum of every individual client's ledger b
Aug 136 min read
Per Diem or Actual Expenses: Which Travel Reimbursement Method Actually Fits Your Architecture or Engineering Firm
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor An architecture or engineering firm sending staff to job sites regularly has to decide how travel meals and incidentals get reimbursed: a flat per diem rate for each day away, or actual receipts submitted and reimbursed dollar for dollar. Most firms never make this decision deliberately — they default to whichever method the first office manager happened to set up — and the wrong choice for a given firm's travel pattern creates
Aug 125 min read
CTAPP Compliance for Family Law Firms: Why Retainer and Support-Payment Trust Accounting Looks Nothing Like a PI Firm's
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Most of what has been written about CTAPP compliance in California focuses on personal injury firms — settlement disbursements, advanced case costs, contingency arrangements. A family law practice handling client trust funds under the same CTAPP regulation faces an entirely different set of money-flow patterns, and applying PI-style guidance to a family law trust account misses exactly the situations that actually trip up family
Aug 115 min read
Net Income Isn't What a Buyer Looks At: Preparing Your Dental Practice's EBITDA for a Sale
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor A dental practice owner preparing to sell often points a potential buyer or DSO acquirer to the bottom line of the P&L — net income — as proof of the practice's value. But that is rarely the number a buyer actually cares about. Buyers and their advisors value a practice based on EBITDA, and the gap between a practice's reported net income and its true adjusted EBITDA can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference in wha
Aug 105 min read
Depreciating Your Hotel's Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment: What Section 179 Can and Can't Do
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor A hotel renovation can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in new furniture, mattresses, televisions, and kitchen equipment in a single year. How that spending gets recorded — expensed immediately, depreciated over several years, or some combination of both — has a real effect on the property's taxable income and on how healthy the balance sheet looks to a lender. Getting hotel depreciation wrong is one of the most common and
Aug 95 min read
Why a Bank Wants a Pro Forma Income Statement Before Giving Your Staffing Agency a Line of Credit
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor A growing staffing agency eventually hits the same wall: it needs a line of credit to bridge the gap between paying caregivers or temp workers weekly and collecting from clients on net-30 or net-60 terms. But before a bank extends that credit, it wants to see a pro forma income statement — a forward-looking projection of the agency's revenue and expenses, not just a look back at what already happened. Most agency owners have nev
Aug 65 min read
Starting a Veterinary Practice: Getting Your EIN and Business Structure Right From Day One
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor Before a new veterinary practice sees its first patient, two decisions already shape everything about how the business will be taxed, financed, and grown: getting an EIN number and choosing the right business structure. Most new practice owners treat these as quick administrative boxes to check, when they are actually foundational choices that are expensive and time-consuming to unwind later. Getting veterinary practice startup
Aug 55 min read
The Billing Mistake That Quietly Costs Architecture and Engineering Firms Real Money: Reimbursable Expenses
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor An architecture or engineering firm can bill every hour of design time accurately and still leak real money every month — not through the hours themselves, but through travel, printing, permit fees, and consultant costs that were supposed to be billed back to the client and never were. This is one of the most common and least visible mistakes in architecture firm bookkeeping, and it has nothing to do with job costing or work-in-
Aug 45 min read
Why Home Care Agencies Run Out of Cash: Medicaid Billing Delays and Caregiver Payroll
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor A home care agency can be fully staffed, serving every client on its roster, and still come dangerously close to missing payroll. The reason has nothing to do with how the business is run day to day — it is a structural mismatch between when caregivers get paid and when the agency actually gets paid itself. Caregivers are paid weekly, often biweekly at the latest. Medicaid and many long-term-care insurers, by contrast, can take
Aug 36 min read
Why an Interior Design Firm's Books Rarely Show the Truth: Client Deposits and Vendor Markups
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor An interior design firm can be fully booked with clients and still have no reliable idea of how much money it is actually making. The reason is structural: a design firm routinely holds large sums of client money for furniture, fixtures, and materials it hasn't purchased yet, and it marks up the goods it procures on the client's behalf — two mechanics that, recorded incorrectly, make interior design bookkeeping look nothing like
Aug 25 min read
Why a Nonprofit's Books Can't Just Show One Bank Balance: Restricted vs. Unrestricted Funds
By Tammy Hoang, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor A nonprofit organization can have a healthy bank balance and still be in serious financial trouble — because not all of that cash is actually available to spend. A grant restricted to a specific program, a donation earmarked for a building fund, and unrestricted operating cash all sit in the same bank account, but they are not the same money. Treating them as one undifferentiated pool is one of the most common and most consequen
Jul 305 min read
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