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Accounting Services

Written by Jason Watson, CPA Senior Partner, WCG CPAs & Advisors | Author of Taxpayer’s Comprehensive Guide to LLCs and S Corps | 20+ years helping small business owners build financial clarity through smart bookkeeping, reporting, and advisory. Last updated: June 2026

Here’s something we tell every new client – your tax return is only as good as your books. Period. Full stop. We can run the most elegant tax strategy in the world, but if your QuickBooks is a dumpster fire of miscategorized transactions and mystery transfers, none of it matters. The tax return becomes a guess. Your financial statements become fiction. And you end up making business decisions based on numbers that are… wrong.

That’s why we built a full accounting services practice. Not because we woke up one morning and thought, “You know what sounds fun? Reconciling bank statements.” We built it because we kept seeing the same problem – business owners showing up at tax time with twelve months of neglected books, no idea what they actually earned, and a shoebox of receipts that may or may not include a Taco Bell wrapper. We needed a better system, and so did you.

Whether you need monthly bookkeeping, a complete books cleanup, outsourced accounting, a virtual CFO to help you actually understand your numbers, or specialized rental property bookkeeping – we handle it all. And because we’re also your tax advisors, everything we do on the accounting side feeds directly into tax strategy. No handoffs. No telephone game between your bookkeeper and your CPA. One team, one set of books, one coherent plan.

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Who Is This Page For?

This page is for business owners, self-employed professionals, and real estate investors who know their books need work – or who want to stop doing it themselves. Specifically:

  • You’re running a small business or S Corp and you’ve been doing your own bookkeeping in QuickBooks Online, but it’s getting messy, you’re behind, or you just hate it
  • You’re a sole proprietor or freelancer and your “bookkeeping system” is a spreadsheet, a prayer, and a panic attack in March
  • You’re an S Corp owner and your CPA keeps asking for reports you don’t know how to run – profit and loss, balance sheet, owner draws versus distributions, that sort of thing
  • You own rental properties and you need someone who understands Schedule E, security deposits, property-level tracking, and the difference between a repair and an improvement (hint: it matters more than you think)
  • Your books are a disaster and you need a cleanup before you can even think about filing your tax return or making a business decision based on real data
  • You want a CFO-level perspective but your business doesn’t justify a $200,000 salary for a full-time hire
  • You’re growing and need real financial reporting – not just a bank balance check every Tuesday morning

If any of that sounds familiar, keep reading. We built these services for people exactly like you.

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Key Takeaways

  • Your books feed everything else. Tax strategy, financial reporting, business decisions, and even loan applications all depend on accurate bookkeeping. Garbage in, garbage out is not just a cliché – it’s the number one problem we see.
  • Bookkeeping and tax preparation should be coordinated. When your bookkeeper and your CPA are in different firms, things fall through the cracks. When they’re the same firm, your books are built for tax season from day one.
  • Cleanup is not shameful – it’s practical. If your books are behind or messy, getting them fixed is one of the highest-value things you can do. We clean up books every week. No judgment, just solutions.
  • Rental properties need property-level tracking. Your Schedule E reports each property separately, your tax strategy varies by property type, and your basis calculations require clean records. Lumping everything together is a recipe for problems at sale time.
  • S Corp owners must run payroll. There’s no workaround. Reasonable compensation processed through a proper payroll system is a compliance requirement, not a suggestion. We handle this through ADP so you don’t have to think about it.
  • Financial reports are only valuable if someone reads them. Monthly P&L and balance sheet reports should inform decisions – not collect dust. Our outsourced accounting and virtual CFO services turn data into conversations.
  • A virtual CFO is not a luxury – it’s a growth tool. For businesses doing $250,000 or more in revenue, having someone who reviews your numbers, forecasts cash flow, and pressure-tests decisions is worth every dollar.
  • Payroll, bookkeeping, and tax strategy are connected. Your salary affects your tax savings. Your distributions affect your equity. Your bookkeeping affects your reporting. We manage all of it together.

Why Accounting and Tax Should Live Under One Roof

Most business owners have a bookkeeper over here, a CPA over there, and maybe a payroll company in a third zip code. Everyone’s doing their job in isolation. And then tax season rolls around and the CPA opens your QuickBooks file, makes a face (we’ve all made the face), and starts asking questions nobody can answer. Who set up this chart of accounts? Why is there a $14,000 “Ask My Accountant” balance? What happened in August?

Sidebar: The “Ask My Accountant” category in QuickBooks is a cry for help. If your bookkeeper is parking transactions there, someone has given up.

When your bookkeeping, tax preparation, and tax strategy all live in one firm, the benefits are immediate. Your books are maintained the way your tax return needs them. Transactions are categorized correctly the first time – not reclassified during tax prep. Owner compensation, distributions, loan repayments, and retirement contributions are tracked properly throughout the year, not reconstructed after the fact.

This also means we catch problems in real time. If your S Corp salary hasn’t been processed in three months, we know about it in April – not the following February when it’s too late to fix. If your rental property expenses are running way over budget, we can flag it before year-end instead of writing a sad footnote on your tax return.

Having said that, we’re not trying to replace every bookkeeper on the planet. If you have a great bookkeeper who keeps your QuickBooks pristine, wonderful. We’ll work with them. But if you don’t – or if “bookkeeping” is something that happens in a frenzy every March – then yes, we should probably talk.

Our Approach to Accounting Services

We use QuickBooks Online. Not because it’s perfect (it’s not), but because it’s the most practical platform for the small business owners and real estate investors we serve. It’s cloud-based, it integrates with bank feeds, and it gives us real-time access to your data without anyone having to email backup files back and forth like it’s 2007.

Every client engagement starts the same way. We look at your current books – what software you’re using, how transactions are categorized, whether your bank and credit card accounts are reconciled, and whether the balance sheet actually makes sense. You’d be amazed how many balance sheets we see where retained earnings are off by $40,000 because someone coded a distribution as an expense three years ago. That’s not a small oops. That’s a structural problem.

Once we understand where things stand, we either clean up what exists or build a new chart of accounts from scratch – designed specifically for your business type, your entity structure, and how your tax return needs to be filed. If you’re an S Corp, your chart of accounts should reflect that. If you own rental properties, each property gets its own class or location tracking. If you’re running a consulting practice, we don’t need 47 expense categories – we need about 15 good ones.

From there, the ongoing work is monthly. Transactions categorized. Accounts reconciled. Reports reviewed. Questions answered. Nothing flashy – just the discipline of keeping good books so that when a decision needs to be made, the numbers are there and they’re right.

Bookkeeping Services

Monthly Bookkeeping

This is the core of what we do. Every month, we categorize your transactions, reconcile your bank and credit card accounts, and make sure your books are clean, current, and accurate. We work directly in your QuickBooks Online account, so you always have access to your own data.

What does “clean, current, and accurate” actually mean? It means your profit and loss statement reflects reality. It means your balance sheet balances (yes, we’ve seen ones that don’t). It means owner draws are tracked separately from business expenses. It means the numbers you look at when you’re deciding whether to hire someone or buy equipment are numbers you can trust.

Let’s say you’re a marketing consultant running an S Corp. You earn $180,000 a year, pay yourself a $70,000 salary, and take distributions for the rest. If your bookkeeper is coding your salary as a “contractor expense” and your distributions as “miscellaneous,” your profit and loss statement is lying to you. Your tax return is going to be wrong. And your S Corp is going to look like it has problems it doesn’t actually have. We fix that. And then we keep it fixed.

Monthly bookkeeping typically ranges from $300 to $800 per month depending on transaction volume and complexity. S Corp owners with payroll and rental property investors with multiple properties tend to be on the higher end. Solo consultants with straightforward revenue tend to be on the lower end.

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Bookkeeping Cleanup & Catch-Up

Maybe you’re not starting from zero. Maybe you’re starting from worse than zero – you have a QuickBooks file that someone set up two years ago, transactions have been auto-categorized by the bank feed (yuck), nothing’s been reconciled since last summer, and there are duplicate entries everywhere.

We get it. No judgment. This is one of the most common things we do.

A bookkeeping cleanup is exactly what it sounds like – we go through your existing books, fix the categorization errors, reconcile every account, clean up the chart of accounts, and get your financial statements to a point where they actually mean something. Depending on how far behind things are, this might take a few days or a few weeks. We’ve cleaned up books that were three years behind. It’s not pretty, but it’s doable.

Here we go – common things we find during cleanups:

  • Transfers between accounts coded as income (inflating revenue by $20,000 or more)
  • Owner contributions coded as revenue (making the business look profitable when it’s actually being subsidized)
  • Credit card payments coded as expenses (double-counting every purchase)
  • Payroll transactions categorized as generic “expenses” instead of broken out by wages, taxes, and benefits
  • Rental property expenses dumped into one giant category instead of tracked by property
  • Loan payments coded as expenses instead of split between principal and interest

After the cleanup, we transition you to monthly bookkeeping so it doesn’t happen again.

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Outsourced Accounting & Virtual CFO

Outsourced Accounting

Some businesses need more than bookkeeping. They need someone reviewing the numbers, spotting trends, flagging problems, and helping translate financial data into decisions. That’s outsourced accounting.

This isn’t just categorizing transactions – it’s understanding what those transactions mean. We review your monthly financial statements with a critical eye. Is revenue trending up or flat? Are your margins tightening? Is your cost of goods sold creeping higher because a vendor raised prices and nobody noticed? Are you spending more on subcontractors than last quarter, and if so, is that because you’re growing or because you’re losing efficiency?

Outsourced accounting is the bridge between “I have a bookkeeper” and “I have a CFO.” It gives you financial oversight without the overhead of a full-time hire. For most of our clients – businesses doing $250,000 to $2 million in revenue – this is the sweet spot.

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Virtual CFO Services

For business owners who want strategic financial guidance, our virtual CFO service goes deeper. This is for the business owner who doesn’t just want accurate books – they want someone to help them use those books to make better decisions.

What does a virtual CFO actually do? Here we go –

  • Cash flow forecasting – When will cash get tight? When can you invest? We model it out so you’re not guessing. See our cash flow management page for more on how we approach this.
  • Budgeting and variance analysis – What did you plan to spend versus what you actually spent? Where are the gaps?
  • Scenario planning – What happens to your bottom line if you hire two people? What if you raise prices 10%? What if that big contract falls through?
  • KPI tracking – We build dashboards around the metrics that actually matter for your business, not vanity numbers
  • Tax-integrated planning – Because we’re also your tax firm, every financial decision is evaluated through a tax lens. Salary adjustments, retirement contributions, equipment purchases, estimated tax payments – all coordinated

Sidebar: “Virtual CFO” has become a big sexy term in the accounting world. Everyone offers it. Very few firms actually deliver it. What we mean by virtual CFO is regular, structured financial conversations with someone who understands your numbers, your tax situation, and your goals. Not a dashboard you never look at. Not a quarterly report nobody reads. Actual conversations about your business.

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Rental Property Bookkeeping

Rental property bookkeeping is its own animal. It’s not just small business bookkeeping with a different label – the rules are different, the reporting is different, and the mistakes people make are different.

Every property needs to be tracked separately. Income, expenses, mortgage interest, insurance, property management fees, repairs, improvements – all at the property level. Why? Because your Schedule E reports each property individually. Because some properties might generate passive losses you can deduct and others might not. Because when you sell a property, you need clean, property-level records to calculate your basis, your depreciation recapture, and your gain or loss.

Let’s say you own four rental properties. Two are long-term rentals and two are short-term (Airbnb). The long-term rentals are passive income under IRC Section 469 unless you’re a real estate professional. The short-term rentals with average stays under seven days might qualify as nonpassive – which means losses could offset your W-2 or S Corp income. Huh? The point is, these properties need to be tracked differently because they’re taxed differently.

We set up QuickBooks Online with class tracking or location tracking so every transaction ties to a specific property. Rental income, security deposits, cleaning fees, maintenance calls – everything in its place. We reconcile your property management statements against your bank feeds so nothing slips through the cracks.

For real estate investors who are scaling – five properties, ten properties, more – this becomes critical. The bigger the portfolio, the more important it is that your books are clean at the property level. Otherwise you’re flying blind, and that’s not a great look when the IRS asks you to substantiate a $28,000 loss on Property #3.

We also work closely with our tax team on real estate-specific strategies – cost segregation studies, bonus depreciation, the short-term rental loophole, 1031 exchanges – all of which require accurate books as a starting point. Elegant tax strategy built on top of sloppy bookkeeping is just expensive fiction.

Financial Reporting & KPI Dashboards

Good bookkeeping produces good data. But data sitting in QuickBooks that nobody looks at is just clutter. The point of keeping clean books is to produce financial reports that help you make decisions.

Every bookkeeping client receives monthly financial statements – at minimum, a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet. For S Corp owners, we include an equity rollforward so you can see exactly how owner contributions, distributions, net income, and prior-year balances flow through. For rental property investors, we provide property-level P&L reports so you can see which properties are performing and which ones are quietly bleeding cash.

KPI Dashboards

Beyond standard financial statements, we build custom KPI dashboards for clients who want to track the metrics that actually move their business. What those metrics are depends on your industry –

  • Service-based businesses – revenue per client, average project value, client acquisition cost, monthly recurring revenue
  • Contractors and trades – gross margin by job, labor cost as a percentage of revenue, backlog, estimate-to-actual variance
  • E-commerce – cost of goods sold percentage, average order value, return rate, inventory turnover
  • Rental property investors – occupancy rate, net operating income per property, cap rate, cash-on-cash return, maintenance cost per unit
  • Medical and professional practices – revenue per provider, overhead ratio, collections rate, accounts receivable aging

The dashboards pull from your QuickBooks data and are updated monthly. We review them with you as part of the outsourced accounting or virtual CFO engagement – because a dashboard nobody discusses is just a pretty picture.

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Payroll & ADP Onboarding

If you’re running an S Corp, payroll isn’t optional. You’re required to pay yourself a reasonable salary, and that means running actual payroll with tax withholdings, W-2s, and quarterly filings. No shortcuts. No “paying yourself as a contractor.” The IRS is very clear on this.

We process payroll through ADP – one of the most established payroll platforms in the country. ADP handles the direct deposits, tax filings, W-2 generation, and compliance reporting. We handle the setup, the onboarding, and the ongoing coordination with your bookkeeping and tax team.

What ADP Onboarding Looks Like

Getting started with ADP payroll is straightforward but detail-oriented. Here’s how we walk you through it –

  • Determine reasonable compensation – Before we set up payroll, we establish your reasonable salary based on your role, industry, geography, and business income. This is one of the most scrutinized areas for S Corp owners, so we document it properly.
  • ADP account setup – We set up your ADP account, configure your pay schedule (most S Corp owners run semimonthly or monthly payroll), and connect your bank account for direct deposit.
  • Tax registrations – Federal EIN, state withholding accounts, unemployment insurance – we make sure all registrations are in place before the first payroll runs.
  • Ongoing processing – Each pay period, we review and approve the payroll run. ADP calculates withholdings, processes deposits, and files your quarterly payroll tax returns (Form 941) and annual returns (W-2, W-3).
  • QuickBooks integration – Payroll transactions sync into your QuickBooks so your books always reflect accurate payroll data – wages, employer taxes, benefits, the whole picture.

For a deeper dive into payroll services, how we approach compensation planning, and what to expect from ADP, visit our small business payroll and payroll plan review pages.

Sidebar: Some clients ask why we use ADP instead of running payroll through QuickBooks. Short answer – reliability and compliance. ADP’s payroll tax filing engine is battle-tested across millions of employers. QuickBooks Payroll works fine for simple situations, but when you’re coordinating payroll with S Corp tax strategy, multi-state filings, and year-end planning, we want a platform that doesn’t hiccup. Having said that, if you’re already on another payroll platform and it’s working, we can usually work with it.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What bookkeeping software do you use?

We use QuickBooks Online for all of our bookkeeping clients. It’s cloud-based, so both you and our team have real-time access to your data. It integrates with bank and credit card feeds, making transaction categorization more efficient. If you’re currently on a different platform – Wave, Xero, FreshBooks, a spreadsheet – we’ll help you migrate to QBO as part of onboarding.

How far behind can my books be for a cleanup?

We’ve cleaned up books that were three or more years behind. The timeline depends on the volume of transactions and the severity of the issues, but we’ve yet to encounter a mess we couldn’t untangle. A typical cleanup for one year of neglected books takes two to four weeks. Multi-year cleanups take longer but follow the same process – reconcile, recategorize, and rebuild the financial statements.

Do I need monthly bookkeeping if my business is simple?

It depends on your definition of “simple.” If you have fewer than 50 transactions per month, one bank account, no payroll, and no inventory, quarterly bookkeeping might work. But if you’re an S Corp owner, monthly is strongly recommended because payroll transactions, distributions, and owner equity need to stay current. The cost difference between monthly and quarterly is usually small enough that monthly is worth the peace of mind.

Can you do my bookkeeping if I’m not a tax client?

We can, but honestly, the biggest advantage of our bookkeeping service is the integration with tax preparation and planning. Bookkeeping without tax coordination is fine – you’ll still get clean books and accurate reports. But you’ll miss the compounding benefit of having one firm that sees the whole picture. Most of our bookkeeping clients are also tax clients, and that’s by design.

What’s the difference between bookkeeping and outsourced accounting?

Bookkeeping is transactional – categorizing, reconciling, and maintaining accurate records. Outsourced accounting adds a layer of analysis and oversight. We review your financial statements for trends, flag potential issues, and help you interpret what the numbers mean for your business. Think of bookkeeping as keeping score and outsourced accounting as coaching based on the score.

How does your virtual CFO service work?

It starts with understanding your business, your goals, and the metrics that matter most. We build a custom reporting framework, set up KPI dashboards, and schedule regular review meetings – typically monthly or quarterly. During those meetings, we walk through financial performance, discuss cash flow, evaluate upcoming decisions, and adjust forecasts. It’s not a software subscription. It’s a relationship with a financial advisor who knows your numbers intimately.

Do you handle payroll for businesses with employees beyond just the owner?

Yes. While many of our S Corp clients are single-employee operations (the owner), we also process payroll for businesses with additional W-2 employees. ADP handles multi-employee payroll, benefits tracking, and compliance filings across all 50 states. Visit our small business payroll page for more details.

How do you track bookkeeping for multiple rental properties?

We use class tracking or location tracking in QuickBooks Online to assign every transaction to a specific property. Rental income, mortgage interest, insurance, repairs, management fees – everything is tagged at the property level. This gives you property-by-property profit and loss statements and makes Schedule E preparation seamless at tax time.

What does ADP payroll onboarding cost?

ADP pricing varies depending on the number of employees, pay frequency, and state filings required. For a single-employee S Corp, you’re typically looking at $50 to $100 per month for payroll processing. We don’t mark up ADP’s fees – you pay ADP directly for the payroll platform, and our coordination and setup work is included in your bookkeeping or advisory engagement. More details on our payroll plan review page.

Can you help me understand my financial statements?

Absolutely – and frankly, that’s the whole point. We don’t just hand you a report and walk away. Every bookkeeping and outsourced accounting client gets access to our team for questions about their financial statements. What does this number mean? Why did my gross margin drop? Is my business actually profitable or am I just living off last year’s cash? These are the conversations that turn bookkeeping from a compliance chore into a competitive advantage.

Small Business Payroll

How we handle payroll processing through ADP for S Corp owners and small businesses with employees.

Partnership Tax Preparation

Cash Flow Management

Our approach to forecasting, managing, and optimizing cash flow for small businesses and real estate investors.

Multi-State Individual Tax Filing

Payroll Plan Review

A structured review of your payroll setup, compensation, and tax withholdings to make sure everything is dialed in.

S Corp Election Overview

Understand when S Corp status makes sense and how it connects to payroll and bookkeeping requirements.

Reasonable S Corp Salary Theory

How we determine the right salary for S Corp owners – one of the most important inputs for your payroll and tax strategy.

Rental Property Bookkeeping Services

Rental Property Tax Support

Our knowledge base for rental property investors, covering everything from depreciation to the short-term rental loophole.

Schedule a Consultation

If you’re trying to figure out which accounting service level makes sense — whether that’s taking bookkeeping off your plate entirely, setting up rental property tracking, launching payroll, or just getting your QBO configured correctly — let’s talk it through. We typically start with an Accounting Assessment to understand your current setup and tailor a scope of work that actually fits.

The tax advisors, business consultants and rental property experts at WCG CPAs & Advisors are not salespeople; we are not putting lipstick on a pig expecting you to love it. Our job remains being professionally detached, giving you information and letting you decide within our ethical guidelines and your risk profiles.

We see far too many crazy schemes and half-baked ideas from attorneys and wealth managers. In some cases, they are good ideas. In most cases, all the entities, layering and mixed ownership is only the illusion of precision. As Chris Rock says, just because you can drive your car with your feet doesn’t make it a good idea. In other words, let’s not automatically convert “you can” into “you must.”

Let’s chat so you can be smart about it.

We typically schedule a 20-minute complimentary quick chat with one of our Partners or our amazing Senior Tax Professionals to determine if we are a good fit for each other, and how an engagement with our team looks. Tax returns only? Business advisory? Tax strategy and planning? Rental property support?

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After almost 6 years with this CPA group, there is NO ONE else we would trust to do our taxes.

L. Matisek

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We've worked with multiple bookkeepers and accountants over the years and WCG has completely blown us away.

N. Sellden

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As a novice business entrepreneur they provided me with the tools to both structure and tax my business efficiently

Mayon Hight

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They've made my taxes a breeze and are worth every dime I pay them for the peace of mind their services provide.

Lynn Shannon

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The good folks at WCG have impressed me, as being highly competent, patient & friendly.

Fred LeBlanc

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They've made my complicated business life simple and I'd recommend them to anyone with a slightly complicated-to-overwhelmingly complicated tax strategy!

Nic J

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For nearly nine years, I have had the privilege of working with WCG and their team of exceptionally knowledgeable and experienced CPAs.

Alex Hickman

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Amanda - WCG CPA - You guys have been invaluable in helping us get this business and tax planning setup properly and executed correctly.

Lance Dodd

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WCG is extremely knowledgable, timely and attune to the unique aspects of our businesses.

Carl Protsch

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WCG CPAs are professional and a pleasure to work with.

Nakapan P.

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They go beyond the call of duties to assist me not only with Tax return matters but with any questions on other personal and company tax matters.

Juan Mayorga

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I've always dreaded tax season, but WCG has made things so easy, even as we changed to an S corp. So happy we found them!

Paige de Kock

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It was great to find an accounting firm eager to take on new clients, answer initial questions in depth, and support our “keep it simple” philosophy.

Stuart B.

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Working with WCG was so easy, shout out to Sally Rhoades who handled my complicated tax situation this year wonderfully and was available for all my questions.

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I am so thankful to be a client of WCG CPAs & Advisors.

Carol Kersten

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It's a wonderful and rare treat to find a company like WCG these days with their high level of service, personal approach, and deep knowledge of accounting.

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Such a great firm. Great communicators, great attention to detail and overall great people.

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