For seven or eight years I had a CPA firm. $3,000 a month on retainer, $36,000 a year, and the corporate tax on top, $5,000 to $8,000 depending on the year. Last year the tax alone was $8,000. They were expensive, they had employees, and they had hundreds of clients.
This year I did the tax myself, with the agent. Not to save money. I was so mesmerized by what it could do that I wanted to see it run.
I went into QuickBooks and downloaded everything. The PDFs, the spreadsheets, the CSV files. Ten years of financial transactions, line by line, item by item. Every time somebody swiped a company card, every payroll, every trip. Tens of millions of lines. Then I let the agent audit every year's tax return against them.
It held all ten years in its memory at the same time and looked at them at once. Can any CPA do that? The best accountant in the world, can he see ten years of transactions simultaneously? It is biologically impossible.
Ten years of books, every return, one agent. What did it find?
Issues. Overpaid tax, more than one year of it. And then the number that hurt more than the tax. I had been paying these people thousands of dollars a month and getting one percent of their attention, because I was not their only client. I was one of hundreds. Now the agent could do all of that job for me. So why do I still have to pay them? I asked the class the same question.