What Working With CSI Looks Like

For 60+ years, CSI Accounting & Payroll has provided trusted, customized financial services to thousands of small businesses. Whether you need help catching up on records, organizing your books, or minimizing your tax liability, we're here to support you every step of the way. 

Our journey began in the 1960s when Al Clausnitzer founded CSI to provide bookkeeping, consulting, and tax services for small businesses. Today, under the ownership of Brian Paulson, we've grown in size and expanded our services to include payroll, recognizing the close relationship between accounting and payroll. 

We value transparency, confidence, and growth. We believe in open communication, so you always know what we're doing and how we can help you. Our accurate insights help you make confident decisions, freeing up your time to focus on growing your business.

Our services are not the best solution for every business, much like how not every business is an ideal client for us.

Accounting Service Good Fit

You’re a good fit to work with CSI for accounting if:

• You are a small or medium-sized business.
• You are based in and operate in the United States.
• You will have only one regular point of contact with us (typically the owner of your business).
• You are in any industry except for manufacturing or non-profit
  
• You are financially stable and willing to grow (typically with revenues between $500,000-$5 million+).
• You want to outsource and receive monthly financial statements and advice.
• You value great communication, accuracy, and timeliness.
• You see the value in year-round tax strategy.

Please note that our accounting service offers more value to established businesses. However, we don't rule out startups automatically; We just investigate your business's situation more closely to make sure you get the right value out of a service like ours.

Payroll Service Good Fit

You’re a good fit to work with CSI for payroll if:

• You are a small or medium-sized business.
• You have 1-50+ employees as an average client (although we will consider taking on new clients with up to 500 employees).
• You are based in and operate in the United States.
• You will have only one or two regular points of contact with us.
• You operate in any industry.
• You have good cash flow.
• You value outsourcing your payroll and staying in compliance.

When you’re passionate about your small business, you care about its profitability and growth. If your current services are unaffordable or aren’t meeting your needs, then it’s time to start looking for an alternative. Not all professional services are made equal.

CSI Accounting & Payroll is truly the small business owner's one-stop shop. Our clients love us for the time we save them, our service and responsiveness, our upfront quotes, and our ongoing efforts to inform them of current events that affect their businesses. Let’s cover the services we offer:

• Accounting. This includes bookkeeping, monthly financial statements, advice, and tax services.
• Payroll. An assigned specialist provides a complete payroll service, including electronic employee payments, tax payments, and tax filings.
• Other services. Examples include consulting, HR packages, timekeeping, employee retirement plans, workers’ compensation insurance, and more.

Learn more about our services.

CSI is different from other firms in many ways, including:

• Service range. CSI is more of a one-stop shop for small business financial needs. Our service offerings reduce the need to bridge communication with other providers.
• Experience & low turnover. We’ve been in business for much longer than other providers, which we hope reflects highly of our satisfied clients and steadily growing client base. We don’t stretch our service side as thin as other providers, either. Our team grows at a rate that doesn’t compromise on the quality or quantity of work we put out. 
• Small business focus. By limiting our client base to only the best fit, we can offer a more efficient service while minimizing fees. Many accountants will accept any client, but we focus on small business owners to avoid getting bogged down with other projects.
• Communication & advice. While we offer an add-on consulting service for large projects, unlimited one-off questions and communication are included in our standard monthly accounting service. Our payroll specialists are always available to answer questions, too!

Outsourcing your payroll is a great alternative to managing it in-house. While DIY payroll software provides the necessary features to comply with regulations, it lacks the intuition and expertise that only a trained payroll specialist can offer. And if you're already outsourcing your payroll, there are many pros of outsourcing with a small firm instead of a big-name provider.

There are also many benefits to bundling accounting and payroll with one provider. Communication issues can arise frequently when you juggle multiple providers, but with CSI, you get one dedicated payroll specialist and one dedicated accountant who work under the same roof, saving you time and money while ensuring your financial needs are handled.

Bookkeeping and annual tax filing are the bare minimum when it comes to accounting. For a service that allows you to make more informed decisions year-round and focus on growing your business, look at monthly accounting. 

Get monthly reporting and bank reconciliation, expert financial help, and year-round tax strategy. Track your financial performance and identify any fluctuations in your cash flow throughout the year. Avoid a range of risks, including cash misappropriation, accounting errors, inaccurate financial and tax reporting, loss of deposited funds, and penalties.

Perhaps the biggest selling point is the variety of advice that monthly accounting allows. You’ll benefit from ongoing support from your dedicated accountant throughout the year, not just at tax time. Not to mention, audit support is a major perk that not many other services offer. Peace of mind should be a major factor in selecting an accounting service!

No! If you use our monthly accounting service, then your tax strategy, meetings, and tax filings are included. There's no need to use an additional service to get your taxes done each year.

If you work with CSI, you can choose to keep working with your annual tax accountant, but we don’t recommend this option. Continuing to work with your annual tax accountant will cost more and risks the consequences of splitting a service between different providers.

You may be used to setting aside a chunk of change for the cost of filing your taxes. However, with CSI, your monthly fee means there's nothing due at year-end for your business taxes. The personal taxes of our business clients are the only thing charged separately, as the amount of work (and, therefore, the fee) varies significantly. Individual taxes are where the tax savings are.

Payroll Software

For payroll, we use iSolved People Cloud.

Accounting Software

For accounting, if you’re interested in working with CSI, it doesn’t matter which accounting software you’ve been using up until now. We use both QuickBooks Online and Xero, and we’re happy to help you switch to either.

However, if you choose to switch to Xero, there’s one more perk: we cover the software’s subscription fee for you! There are three reasons for this:

• It is a cheaper subscription than QuickBooks.
• It is the tool we use to produce financials.
• It also allows you to see your financial information.

Otherwise, if you want to use QuickBooks Online, that’s totally fine - but the responsibility of paying the subscription fee will fall onto your shoulders.

A major selling point of monthly accounting is the audit trail it provides, which means that monthly accountants are able to uniquely support their clients in the case of an audit! Audits are no fun for business owners and, even in a best-case scenario, can just take up a lot of your time.

When you work with CSI, we’re so confident in our work that we offer agent-level support for income tax audits at no extra cost to you! Nearly all of the time, agent-level support is all that’s needed. It means that we deal with the IRS agent directly for income tax audits, and we get power of attorney to appeal if we feel they incorrectly made a determination.

If you want to work with CSI but are currently going through an audit, we can still help if you come on board! However, since the audit would not be a result of any work that we performed, we would charge a fee for audit support.

The advice portion of monthly accounting is where you’ll likely find the most value. Whether it’s addressing the past, present, or future, there are a variety of advice topics that are uniquely offered by monthly accounting.

Even though meetings can cover a bunch of advice topics, you’re also encouraged to reach out with one-off questions you have at any time! This is included in your monthly fee unless it’s deemed part of a large consulting project.

Getting into the specifics, monthly accountants can offer advice directly based on the financial statements they generate each month, tax strategy advice, and other topics surrounding:

• Setting KPIs.
• Maximizing profitability.
• Industry-specific advice.
• Sales and marketing ideas.

If you’re in a bad payroll or accounting situation, it’s always the right time to switch... and CSI is always accepting new clients!

Switching Accounting Solutions

We can help you get started with us, whether you’re starting with in-house bookkeeping or you’re switching from a different outsourced accounting service. 

We’ll go through the steps to determine if monthly accounting is the right form of accounting for you right now, what you should look for in an accountant, and how to plan ahead for the transition if you’re coming on board with us. Our goal is to make this as easy as possible for you!

Switching Payroll Solutions

The payroll side is a bit simpler. We’ll guide you through the steps that may look like these:

• Third-party or agent access to state taxing authorities.
• EFTPS enrollment.
• Bank information.
• Other necessary information that may be encrypted by software.
• Details on your desired payroll.

Afterward, we’ll ensure your payroll data is transferred to our system correctly and that our system uses the data to create reports correctly. These are the steps we follow:

• Obtain online access to your current system.
• Transfer your data into their system, then run in parallel.
• Compare Forms 941.
• Automatically transfer sensitive information.

If your books aren’t completely up to date when you come on board with CSI, we need to catch you up. Don’t worry. We won’t judge. We've had clients with as many as 10 years of back work and taxes to file before. Read about why back work is necessary, what the benefits are, and what it may cost you here.

For smaller projects, our goal is to get back work done in a few months, whereas we’ve never had a large project take us more than six months. Much of this depends on how quickly you provide us with the information we need to move forward.

In the meantime, we can start some of your current accounting, but we can’t produce any financial statements until your back work is completed. (Again, this is because accounting numbers build on each other over time and can't just be estimated.)

Once you sign your proposal with CSI for accounting or payroll services, you’re going to be eager to get started! What happens next?

Payroll Onboarding

On the payroll side, you’re going to be walked through these fairly short steps over a period of about three weeks:

• Welcome to CSI Accounting & Payroll.
• Payroll Setup Meeting.
• Payroll System Setup.
• Payroll Software Demonstration.

Accounting Onboarding

For accounting, you’re going to go through some similar introductions to CSI as you would on the payroll side, and then you’ll enter into a short series of onboarding meetings called Initial Strategy Sessions (ISS). The timeline can vary a lot depending on any back work required, but it’s typically a 90-day process.

While our service is monthly, the onboarding process includes more frequent ISS meetings (Initial Strategy Sessions). So, what do these ISS meetings look like? Generally, there are three sessions, but there may be subsequent sessions for unique situations or larger operations.

• Session 1: Your accountant will focus on fact-finding to get a deeper understanding of your situation and answer some of your burning questions.
• Session 2: You will be offered accounting education so you can properly document income and expenses, pay bills, and handle reimbursements.
• Session 3: This is all about tax education and some preliminary tax planning. 

During this time, we also work on gaining access to any business accounts needed so we can pull your numbers each month. The information we need varies, but common examples include: 

• Copies of your bank statements for that prior month.
• Copies of your credit card statements for that prior month.
• Your sales reports for that prior month.
• A journal of the assets you purchased in that prior month.

Regular meetings are quite different from onboarding meetings. Once you get through onboarding, we shift into Monthly Meaningful Client Contact (M2C2) meetings.

Our meetings often last around 30 minutes, but we're happy to chat until all of your priority questions are answered. If you have any additional one-off questions between meetings, you can call, text, or email your accountant for advice at no additional cost!

There's no set agenda for these meetings because every client’s needs are different. However, if you're like most of our clients, you may want to receive advice based directly on the financial statements that we create for you each month. 

Remember, monthly accounting allows for a complete tax strategy, consisting of tax planning, projections, preparation, and filing. As a small business owner, minimizing your tax liability is critical.

Tax planning meetings are often part of your regular meetings, but they can also be separate if you want or need extra help! There are typically at least two meetings needed per yeara: one in the spring to review your tax season and at least one more in the fall to anticipate the upcoming tax season.

You can expect these tax planning meetings to be similar to your regular meetings in that they don’t have an entirely set agenda. However, we want to make sure we discuss topics like:

• What your next tax season might look like.
• Various tax strategies to legally minimize what you owe.
• The best method to pay your government tax bill.

You also leave with a tax projection, which is an estimate (backed by your accounting) of what you might owe in taxes. This will help you plan your finances if you’re looking at a large tax bill from the government.

Any amounts listed here may be outdated; please consult your proposal for actual pricing customized to your business’s situation. This is a brief description of some of the fees that you may expect to encounter.

Click this link to learn more about what monthly accounting fees look like. Of course, this will vary quite a bit depending on the complexity of your business’s accounting and how much financial activity you have. 

Click this link to learn more about what payroll service fees look like, but be aware that pricing can vary a lot depending on the features you’re looking for and the frequency you want to run payroll at. A basic payroll package includes:

• Payroll check processing.
• Direct deposit.
• Electronic payroll tax payments.
• Federal (941) & State withholding tax returns.
• Federal (940) & State unemployment tax returns.
• Workers' compensation audit reports.
• Payroll tax audit representation.
• Personal portal logins for your employees.
• Employer portal login for your admin account.
• Standard report package:
  
  • Cash requirement report.
  • Payroll journal report.
  • Check register report.

There are also many circumstances that might lead to these additional accounting and payroll fees.