Our CPA Firm’s Process

At Grigg Financial Group, each engagement is a financial planning engagement. At a minimum, we discuss tax efficiency, tax compliance, and basic wealth building. Basic wealth building may include topical discussions of each of the 8 Planning Realms.

Involved discussions of the 8 Planning Realms are reserved for financial services clients.

The following practices are in place to protect your time, to preserve accuracy, and to deliver a high level of service. Please ensure you’re comfortable with these practices before engaging us:

We will provide a quote during our introductory call, and our minimum fees are listed below. The quote is based on complexity, expected time to complete a project, and other factors.

Portions of the fee may be offset if we are engaged for other financial services.

Our fees are not a flat rate for unlimited work. Each engagement includes a limited number of hours for a set level of complexity; if those hours are exceeded, we reserve the right to bill extra at our hourly rates and in quarter-hour increments. If complexity is added or discovered during an engagement, we may increase the fee.

Planning engagements provide for 1-2 hours of client meetings, depending on various factors, and 1-2 hours of prepratory work or post-meeting work.

We ask clients to be proactive in disclosing changes in income, deductions, or other items that may influence a tax return. This provides an opportunity for us to notify you of any changes in fees. If, instead, we discover changes during tax preparation, we won’t know the full scope of the fee changes until we have completed the return. At that point, we reserve the right to bill for the work completed.

Our fees increase 2-5% each year.

We will request a retainer to start each new engagement. We bill against the retainer as we complete projects. We need a sufficient retainer to start a new project, and all fees are due before we release the final product.

Some projects, like tax projections, have minimum fees. Some engagements, like Q&A sessions, are open-ended and are billed by the quarter-hour. We send a summary email after our meetings, which are also billed by the quarter-hour.

Scheduled planning engagements have a minimum fee of $1,000 to help reflect the value of advice, meeting preparation, and meeting after-actions.

We offer quarterly, semi-annual, or annual payment of retainers for ongoing work.

Engagement fees are 100% earned once we have met the following conditions:

If a refund of a retainer is requested, a refund is issued minus:

¹ An Accounting Inspection is not an audit, review, compilation, or forensic accounting. We do not provide any opinion or assurances that third parties can use. We check various quality control procedures within your accounting process with the goal of improving the accounting. This process helps minimize taxes and helps with audit defense practices. The inspection is not intended to find theft or other abuses, though we may see such activity and will report these findings to management. Once an inspection is complete, we will contact the owner and disclose our findings. 

² We usually require all business clients to engage us for 1-2 annual inspections unless we are engaged for accounting. Some exceptions to the inspection rule may be given to sole proprietorships with extremely low accounting activity.

³ All businesses must use double-entry accounting software, and we must be granted access to it. Exceptions may be granted for small, low-activity, sole proprietorships.

Clients will save on tax, accumulate wealth, reduce the risk of losing accumulated wealth, improve tax compliance for audit defense, and accomplish important goals. Over the course of working together, your situation will improve if you follow our guidance.

Much of what we do can be measured in terms of tax savings and wealth accumulation. We can measure immediate or future tax savings and wealth accumulated.

Some of what we do can’t be measured, yet it adds substantial value either in time saved, peace of mind, or other factors. For example, we can’t always measure improvements to tax reporting to defend deductions. We can’t immediately measure the value of improving accounting methods for management decisions. We can’t measure the peace of mind of successfully defending clients under audit. However, we have seen the reduction of stress in clients because we coached them on clean, easily usable documentation by the auditor. The peace of mind was valuable.

We offer tax preparation, tax planning, bookkeeping, accounting consulting, payroll, payroll consulting, and audit representation.

Yes. We specialize in delivering comprehensive solutions and not just focusing on tax reduction. We help clients prioritize complex options that increase their wealth while lowering taxes at each step.

No. Our staff is a critical part of all engagements. However, staff work is reviewed by partners and/or managers.