The mechanism is simple and the obstacle is not.

A high earner whose income exceeds the limit for direct Roth contributions makes a nondeductible contribution to a traditional IRA and then converts it to a Roth IRA. There is no income limit on conversions, which is what makes the route available.

What ruins it — and what clients almost never know about before they act — is the pro-rata rule.

The Pro-Rata Rule Is the

Audit quality is largely determined before fieldwork begins, and the window in which it gets determined is May through August. A firm that plans in June has a different autumn from one that starts when the client says they are ready.

Most of what follows is not glamorous and none of it can be compressed into October.

The Two Weeks After the Tax Deadline

Do this while the season is still fresh enough to remember accurately.

Debrief

Passing all four sections does not make you a CPA.

It is a reasonable assumption and it costs candidates months. There are typically three to five steps remaining, at least one of them takes considerably longer than the exam did, and several candidates discover a requirement at this stage that they could have satisfied a year earlier.

What Remains

The experience requirement, which is usually the longest remaining item and the one that derails

Our post on CPE requirements by state makes the case that state CPA continuing education is difficult mainly because every element varies by board.

Enrolled agent continuing education is the opposite. It is federal and uniform — one rule, one set of requirements, applying identically to every enrolled agent regardless of where they practise. That is genuinely simpler, and it has one ...

Sales and use tax is the area where automation is most necessary and most defensible, and the reason is structural rather than fashionable.

The volume is enormous — thousands of taxing jurisdictions with rates, boundaries, and rules that change continuously. The frequency is high — monthly filings across many states. And critically, most determinations are rule-based rather than judgmental at the transaction level: given a product, a ...

Certified payroll is one of the few payroll areas where a reporting error carries criminal exposure, and contractors treat it as a weekly form to submit. That mismatch is the reason this work generates the findings it does.

For a CPA advising a contractor, the useful contribution is narrow and valuable: establishing which regime applies, getting the classification and fringe computations right, and being clear about who certifies what.

First, Establish Which

The most useful thing to understand about ratios is that a ratio is a question, not an answer.

Its entire value is comparative — against the same company over time, against a peer, or against a covenant threshold. A ratio computed once, for one period, with nothing to compare it to, tells you essentially nothing. Which means the analytical work is in the comparison and the decomposition, not in the arithmetic.

The Four Families and What Each

Our post on S corporation deadlines covers the pass-through deadline mechanics — the due date, the automatic extension, the per-shareholder penalty, and the state pass-through entity election traps. All of that applies here.

This post covers what is different about a partnership, and the differences are substantial: the capital account reporting, the allocation rules, and an ...