Thompson Flaherty CPA, Accountants & Tax Consultants

Home
United States
Edwardsville, IL
Thompson Flaherty CPA, Accountants & Tax Consultants

You aren’t just another client to us; you are a partner. We move beyond basic number-crunching to provide proactive, year-round guidance.

We are a Full Service CPA Firm and specialize in the following:
Personal & Business Tax | Accounting | QuickBooks | Bookkeeping | Payroll | CFO Advisory | Entity formation | Business Valuation | Experts in Medical, Real Estate, Law, Construction and more! Thompson Flaherty | Professional Tax Strategy & Accounting for Businesses & Individuals | Bookkeeping | Payroll | New Business Formation/Setup | Valuation | Exit Planning| Budgeting | Forecasting|

Running a business is demanding—managing the complexities of taxes, payroll, and financial growth shouldn’t be what keeps you up at night. At Thompson Flaherty, we provide a white-glove CPA approach to Personal & Business Tax, Accounting, and Strategic Consulting, ensuring you stay compliant, organized, and confident. Whether you are an individual looking to protect your income, a growing startup, or an established firm, we handle the technical heavy lifting so you can focus on your life and your business. Core Services:
• Tax Strategy: High-level Planning, IRS Representation, and Tax Prep to keep more of what you earn.
• Business Operations: Full-cycle Bookkeeping, Payroll, and Accounting so you can get your weekends back.
• Growth & Advisory: Forecasting, Business Valuation, and Exit Planning for your next chapter.
• Strategic Launch: New Business Formation and entity selection for entrepreneurs. Specialized Industry Expertise:
✔ Medical & Dental Practices: QBI optimization and entity selection.
✔ Real Estate & Construction: 1031 Exchanges and Cost Segregation.
✔ Attorney & Law Firms: Trust accounting and tax reduction.
✔ Home Healthcare & Nonprofits: Form 990, compliance, and payroll management. Serving the Metro East, St. Louis, and Chicago, with virtual services available nationwide. Ready to simplify your finances and maximize your growth?
👇 Contact us today for a consultation.
📩 Inquiries: [email protected]
🌐 Website: thompsonflaherty.com

10/09/2026

The truck you order in December and pick up in January is a next-year deduction, however you paid for it.

With full bonus depreciation back on the books, a lot of Metro East small business owners are planning a big equipment purchase for the end of the year. Reasonable. The detail that gets missed is that the deduction belongs to the year the equipment is placed in service, meaning it's on site, set up and ready to use. The year you signed the order doesn't count, and neither does the year the deposit cleared.

So a December decision is often a January deduction, and if the point was to shrink this year's bill, it missed.

If equipment is on the list, October is the month to order it, while delivery and setup still have time to land before December 31. Which method to use once it lands, Section 179 or bonus, depends on your numbers, and that's a conversation worth having before the order goes in: https://thompsonflaherty.com/tax-business/

10/08/2026

Year-end tax planning is only as good as the numbers it starts from, and in October a lot of small business owners are planning off books that stop somewhere around June. We'd much rather sit down with you in November looking at nine closed months than at three closed months and a hopeful guess about the rest.

Closing September means the bank and credit card accounts are reconciled through the 30th, the uncategorized pile is empty, and the things you've been meaning to ask us about (that one big deposit, the loan payment that got coded as an expense) actually get asked. It's about as exciting as it sounds, but it's the difference between a plan and a hunch.

If the books have drifted, October is a good month to catch them up, and it's work our team does every month for Metro East businesses: https://thompsonflaherty.com/accounting/

10/07/2026

Your first paycheck as an employer creates two governments that now expect to hear from you on a schedule.

Most Metro East owners we've watched hire employee number one worry about the wrong thing. The math isn't the risk, the software does the math. What actually goes wrong is a deposit deadline that slides past in a busy month, because nobody wrote down when the deposits were due or who was making them.

So the setup we recommend is unglamorous. Run the payroll software yourself if you like, but have somebody check the setup once, before the first run: the withholding accounts are registered, the deposit schedule is written down, Illinois unemployment insurance exists, and if your new hire works across the river, the Missouri side is handled too.

Here's the full list of what needs to exist before the first paycheck: https://thompsonflaherty.com/payroll-setup-for-first-employee-in-illinois-metro-east/

10/06/2026

If you filed an extension back in April, your return is due Thursday, October 15, and for most people there isn't a second extension waiting behind this one.

The part that surprises people is that the extension only ever covered the paperwork. Any tax you owed was still due in April, so if there's a balance, the IRS has been adding interest (and possibly a late payment penalty) since April 15.

So if your return has been sitting in the "I'll get to it" pile since spring, this is the week it comes off the pile. If the holdup is a missing K-1 or a stack of receipts nobody wants to open, send us what you have and we'll tell you what's actually missing: https://thompsonflaherty.com/tax-business/

10/05/2026

A Metro East business owner with a paid-off house, a company worth a few years of its earnings, and a million-dollar life insurance policy has an Illinois estate tax problem. Most of them don't know it, because their estate plan was built around the federal number, which is far higher.

Illinois starts at $4 million, and it isn't indexed, so the line stays put while your business grows toward it. The Illinois Attorney General's own worked example puts a $5 million Illinois estate at $285,714 of state tax with no federal estate tax owed at all.

The two traps we see most often. Assuming a spouse's unused exemption carries over the way it does federally (in Illinois it doesn't). And forgetting that the life insurance payout counts toward the total, which is usually the thing that pushes a "we're nowhere near it" family over the line.

Here's what you can still do about it while there's time to plan: https://thompsonflaherty.com/illinois-estate-tax-4-million-federal-plan-state-trap/

10/02/2026

A contractor we work with set up a second entity to hold the equipment, which is a sensible move. The operating company paid the holding company rent for the machines. So far, so good.

The rent was a number somebody picked in year one because it felt about right. Nobody wrote down where it came from, and it never changed as the fleet did. When we looked at it, the rate had nothing to do with what an outside company would've charged. That matters, because the IRS expects related companies to deal with each other the way strangers would, and rent between your own entities is one of the first things it checks. The fix was amended returns. Not the end of the world, not free either.

If your entities pay each other for anything (rent, management fees, a shared truck), the price needs a reason you could explain to someone who doesn't like you. The rest of the multi-entity picture for growth-stage small businesses is here: https://thompsonflaherty.com/multi-entity-reporting-for-growth-stage-businesses/

09/30/2026

📣 Edwardsville Connections - We're Hiring!

As a local CPA firm, we're proud to serve the Edwardsville community and would love to hire someone from our local (and surrouding) area. We're looking for a Receptionist / Administrative Assistant who genuinely enjoys helping people and has exceptional communication skills.

The ideal candidate is someone who is warm, professional, organized, and able to communicate clearly and confidently with clients, both in person and over the phone. Since this role is often the first point of contact for our firm, outstanding customer service and interpersonal skills are essential.

Responsibilities include:
✅ Answering and directing client calls
✅ Greeting clients and creating a welcoming experience
✅ Scheduling appointments and assisting staff with calendars
✅ Helping clients scan and upload documents
✅ Managing document drop-offs and pickups
✅ Assisting with tax return e-filing and administrative tasks
✅ Providing general office support to our CPA team

Hours: Monday-Friday, 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

Additional hours may be required during tax season and major filing deadlines.

We're looking for someone who is:
• An excellent communicator with a friendly, professional demeanor
• Organized, detail-oriented, and dependable
• Comfortable with technology and learning new software
• A team player who enjoys helping others succeed
• Able to multitask in a fast-paced office environment

Previous receptionist, administrative, or customer service experience is a plus, but we're willing to train the right person with the right attitude and communication skills.

📧 Please send your resume to: [email protected]

Please share with friends, family, and anyone who may be interested! 😊

09/18/2026

Almost every tax move that saves real money has a deadline attached, and almost all of those deadlines sit before December 31 rather than in April.

April is when you report what happened. By then the year is closed and the arithmetic is fixed, and a good preparer is finding the things you already did rather than creating new ones.

September is where the year is still cheap to change. You have three months of runway, you have eight months of real numbers to work from rather than projections, and most of the moves that matter are still open, whether that is a retirement plan decision, equipment timing, an entity election, or how you take compensation for the rest of the year.

The owners who feel good in April are almost always the ones who had a conversation in the fall.

If that conversation has not happened this year, now is roughly the right time: https://thompsonflaherty.com/contact/

09/17/2026

Construction and contracting businesses have a cash flow problem nobody warns them about, and it almost always shows up in the same place: between when the work is done and when the customer actually pays.

Let's look at an example. We work with a Metro East contractor who runs a tight operation, good margins, full crew, and a steady backlog. On paper everything looked healthy. But by month three of a bigger commercial project, he was paying his crew weekly out of operating cash while waiting on a draw payment that wouldn't hit until day 60. He'd done the math on the project margin. He hadn't done the math on the cash gap.

That gap is where contractors get stuck. The bigger the project, the bigger the cash hole between payroll out and customer payment in. The margin can be excellent and the business can still run out of working capital halfway through.

The fix isn't smaller projects. It's a cash flow forecast that anticipates the gap, draw schedules that line up with payroll obligations, and a line of credit sized for the worst case rather than the average case. Construction owners who scale without this usually grow into a cash crunch first and have to claw their way out.

If your business is project-based and growing, we run cash flow forecasting that's specifically built for that shape: https://thompsonflaherty.com/accounting/

09/15/2026

The most common bookkeeping mistake we see at growing businesses isn't sloppy books.

It's a great bookkeeper with no CFO function above them.

Let's look at an example. We had a client doing about $1.8M in revenue with a bookkeeper who closed every month within 10 days and produced clean, accurate P&L statements. By every traditional metric the bookkeeping was excellent. But when the owner came to us trying to decide whether to take on a $200K equipment purchase to win a bigger contract, the bookkeeper said "I'll show you what you have in cash" and that was as far as it went.

The bookkeeper's job ends at telling you what already happened. The owner needed someone to look at three things at once: what cash looks like in the next six months under different scenarios, what the equipment does to depreciation and taxes, and whether the bigger contract actually changes margin enough to justify the capital outlay. That's CFO work, not bookkeeping.

For most owner-led businesses, the gap shows up somewhere between $1M and $3M in revenue. The bookkeeping is fine. The questions you're asking just outgrew what bookkeeping is built to answer.

If you've found yourself doing that math in your head, we run quarterly CFO conversations that fill in the gap: https://thompsonflaherty.com/accounting/

Address

219 2nd Avenue, Ste B
Edwardsville, IL
62025

Telephone

(618) 656-6010

Website

http://www.thompsonflaherty.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Thompson Flaherty CPA, Accountants & Tax Consultants posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Thompson Flaherty CPA, Accountants & Tax Consultants:

Want your business to be the top-listed accountant in Edwardsville?