Cross + Co CPA LLC

Cross + Co CPA LLC Full service CPA firm with a concentration in the Fractional CFO space generating leveraged strategic solutions for start-up and growth phase entities.

10/08/2026

Is the CPA Credential Being Watered Down?
More than 40 states have made the CPA license easier to reach, and not everyone in the profession is cheering. Dropping the 150-hour rule removes 30 credit hours of structured academic preparation for complex rules, and that training doesn't vanish. It shifts to employers, who now teach on the job what used to be learned in the classroom. That could affect early-career readiness for audit and tax work, where a missed rule has real consequences for clients.
Critics also see a watering down of the credential, and traditional industry societies have pushed back. Meanwhile the profession risks a two-tier perception among peers, with CPAs who took different roads to the same license.
The firms that invest in real training and review turn the license from a checkbox into a value-added result for the client.
Before you hire or keep an accounting firm, ask how it trains and reviews the people doing your work.
If you want a firm that invests in judgment and review, not just headcount, message me and let's talk.

10/06/2026

Free Money Hiding, Check Your Working Capital
Before you cut a single expense, look at how many days your cash is stuck in the business.
DSO, DPO, and DIO measure how long customers take to pay you, how long you take to pay suppliers, and how long inventory sits before it sells.
Together they set your cash conversion cycle, and every day you shave off releases real cash without raising a price or losing a customer.
For a business doing $5 million in revenue, one day of DSO is roughly $13,700 sitting in someone else's bank account. Most owners chase margin with cost cuts that hurt, when tighter collections or renegotiated terms would free more cash with far less pain.
Tracking the three numbers monthly turns a bookkeeping output into a cash lever, which is exactly what makes finance a value-added function.
Find your cash conversion cycle this month, then pick one lever and move it five days.
Cross + Co provides value-added outcomes that will transform your finances. Our pricing model is a fixed monthly subscription, which includes tax filing. DM or email me to discuss!

10/02/2026

The Controller Is the Hire Everyone Skips
Most scaling companies reach for a CFO when the hire they actually needed was a controller.
The controller is the backbone of a finance function. Someone owns the close, owns accuracy, owns the controls, and makes sure the number you're about to make a decision on is real.
Skip that seat and everything above it collapses into it. Your forecast inherits bad data, and your new CFO spends six months rebuilding the books instead of shaping strategy.
‘Here's what most owners miss: the seat has to be filled, but it doesn't have to be filled full time. A fractional controller gives you senior discipline on the close and the controls for a fraction of a salary, which is exactly how a growing company gets that rigor years before it could hire for it.
Get that right and the sequence takes care of itself: a controller who closes clean, then FP&A to point the numbers forward, then a CFO, also fractional first, for capital strategy and judgment a few days a month.
That's the shift that turns finance from overhead into the function telling you which growth is worth funding.
Fill the controller seat before you think you need to. Fractional counts.
Let's connect and explore transformative ways to add value to your business. DM me to discuss.

09/29/2026

The S-Corp Election Is Arithmetic, Not a Strategy
Every owner has been told to elect S-corp and save on taxes. Almost none of them have been shown the arithmetic.
The only real saving is self-employment tax: the 15.3% you stop paying on the slice of profit you take as a distribution instead of as W-2 wages.
On the other side of the ledger sit the costs nobody mentions upfront. A payroll service, a separate 1120-S return, state minimum and franchise fees, and the wrinkle that paying yourself wages shrinks your QBI deduction.
Run both columns and the break even usually lands somewhere around $70,000 to $80,000 of net profit. Below that the fees eat the savings, and well above it the election is usually obvious.
Here's the part that surprises people: the number that decides it is reasonable compensation, not revenue. If your labor is the business and honest reasonable comp absorbs nearly all the profit, there's no distribution left to save anything on.
Entity choice is a modeling exercise, not a default, and with QBI now permanent it's a ten year decision rather than a bet on a sunset.
‘Before you file the election, ask to see the two column math. If nobody can show you the break even, that isn't advice.
Let's nail down the process together, drop a comment or message to connect!

09/25/2026

Your S-Corp Salary Isn't a Guess. It's an Audit Risk.
If you own an S-corp and someone asked you to justify your salary to the IRS tomorrow, could you?
Reasonable compensation is one of the most scrutinized numbers on an S-corp return, and most owners set it by feel: a round number, prior year plus a little, whatever's left after distributions.
The IRS doesn't grade on feel. It looks at what someone in your role, industry, and market would actually be paid, and it can reclassify distributions as wages, complete with penalties and back payroll tax, if your number doesn't hold up.
The fix isn't complicated. Benchmark your role against real compensation data and document how you got there, before an examiner asks.
That one page justification is cheap insurance against a very expensive conversation.
Know your number before the IRS decides it for you.
If you want a second set of eyes on what reasonable compensation looks like for your role, message me and we'll work through it together.

09/21/2026

What the QBI Deduction Being Permanent Actually Changes
For years, Section 199A planning came with an asterisk. It was set to disappear, so nobody built long-term strategy around it.
That asterisk is gone. The QBI deduction is now permanent, and it comes with a new $400 minimum deduction for owners who barely cleared the old thresholds.
Permanence changes the math on decisions you used to treat as temporary: S-corp versus sole proprietor, how much salary versus distribution, whether to restructure at all.
Those used to be one year bets against a sunset clause. Now they're ten year commitments that compound, for better or worse.
That's the moment for accounting to stop being a rearview mirror exercise and start actually shaping the decision in front of you.
Revisit your entity and comp structure now, while the rules are finally standing still.
If you're ready for a CPA relationship built on transformation instead of transactions, let's talk.

09/18/2026

AI Is Great at Categorizing. That Was Never the Hard Part.
The AI coded the transaction correctly, and the financials were still wrong.
A client's $14,000 payment to a contractor got booked to repairs and maintenance, which is exactly what the description said and exactly what the model learned from the last twenty similar payments.
It was a building improvement, a capital asset depreciated over years, not an expense that cratered one month's margin and distorted every trend line behind it.
That's the pattern. AI is excellent at matching, sorting, and speed, and blind to intent, materiality, and anything that requires knowing what the business was actually trying to do.
Automation compresses the bookkeeping work. It does not compress the judgment, and the firms telling you otherwise are selling faster data entry and calling it accounting.
Used well, AI is what frees the accountant to stop typing and start advising. That is where books turn from a compliance record into a value-added function.
Let the machine do the coding. Make sure a human is still reading it.
If you're ready for a CPA relationship built on transformation instead of transactions, let's talk.

09/14/2026

Your First Out-of-State Client Just Created a Filing Obligation
Your best growth year can quietly make you delinquent in six states, and nobody sends a warning.
Most service business owners still think sales tax is a retail problem, something that applies only if you ship boxes or keep a storefront.
Economic nexus is triggered by revenue, not real estate. In most states the trip wire sits around $100,000 of sales into that state, and more states keep pulling services and SaaS into the tax base.

The expensive part isn't the tax. It's that uncollected tax becomes your liability, with penalties and interest, and it usually surfaces years later in a state notice or a diligence request, long after you could have billed the client for it.
A quarterly look at revenue by state turns a landmine into a routine check, which is what moves tax from a cleanup cost to a planned one.

Before you celebrate that new out of state contract, ask one question: does that state think we just started doing business there?
Cross + Co provides value-added outcomes that will transform your finances. Our pricing model is a fixed monthly subscription, which includes tax filing. DM or email me to discuss!

09/10/2026

The Accountant Shortage Is Real
If it feels harder to get your accountant on the phone this year, it's not you and your CPA didn't get worse.
The profession is short hundreds of thousands of people, and fewer students are entering the pipeline every year.

Firms are absorbing more clients with fewer hands, so response times slip and the relationship starts feeling transactional instead of personal.
From the client's seat, that shows up as slower turnaround, less proactive advice, and a nagging feeling you've become "just a filing."
The owners who stay a priority client are the ones who make themselves easy to serve — clean books, organized documents, communication on a schedule instead of in a scramble.

That's not about being a bigger client; it's about being a well-run one, and it's how a compliance
relationship turns into a real advisory partnership.
The firms that survive this shortage will keep the clients who make the work easier — be one of them.

Let's connect and explore transformative ways to add value to your business. DM me to discuss.

09/08/2026

Your Employees Get the Tax Break. Your Payroll System Gets the Headache
Everyone's celebrating the new tax break on tips and overtime. Almost nobody's talking about who has to do the extra work to make it real.
The deduction belongs to the employee — but the reporting burden lands squarely on the employer.
Payroll now has to separately track and report qualified tip income and qualified overtime pay, not just lump it into gross wages like before.
For restaurant and construction payrolls, that touches nearly every paycheck, every pay period, all year long.
Get the coding wrong and your employees either miss a deduction they're entitled to, or you're untangling W-2 corrections next January.
This is exactly the kind of change that separates a payroll process running on autopilot from one someone is actually managing — and managing it well is where an accountant earns their seat at the table, not just files the return.
Update your payroll system now, not in December, and turn this compliance headache into the reason your team trusts your books.
Let's nail down the process together—drop a comment or message to connect!

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