Page 5 - BetterOfficeSolutions

“What drives meis a love of small business and entrepreneurship. I’m an entrepreneur myself. What I love more than anything else is to help small business owners. That’s what drives me,” says Kevin Marshall, CPA, owner, president and CEO of Better Office Solutions.
His firm provides outsource accounting, bookkeeping, payroll and tax preparation for clients in Tucson and, with an office in Tempe, the greater Phoenix area. The firm also helps businesses in other areas such as HR issues and hiring employees through a strong network of service providers.
As a certified public accountant, his firm is licensed as a CPA firm. It’s an important advantage for his clients. “We don’t do any reviews or audits and we only do a few taxes. We like to do bookkeeping and accounting. That’s what we do day in and day out.”
He notes two significant differences between his and other firms. One is that his bookkeepers are overseen and managed by a CPA. “I’ve been doing this 25 years. I’ve looked at thousands of books, so I can do this almost in my sleep. It almost comes naturally to me. It’s rare that you would find a bookkeeping service run by a CPA.”
Another advantage is that Marshall is a successful small businessman in other areas. He is a manager and owner who understands the needs, frustrations, joys and mindset of a small businessman. “I’ve launched five or six businesses and sold three. Three accounting businesses, a bed and breakfast, an alternative funding company for small businesses that have difficult time getting funding from traditional resources, and an outsourced HR firm. That firm was just listed to the Inc 500 list.”
Better Office Solutions’ client base runs the gamut of small business from charter schools and nonprofits to doctors and dentists, and attor- neys and restaurants. There’s no niche market. All clients use Quick- Books, which the firm backs up nightly.
Fast turnaround is one of the firm’s strong points, Marshall says. A big problem for small business is the long waiting time associated with acquiring important information. By the time they get the information it is so dated it’s hard for the owner or the bank to make decisions. Bet- ter Office Solutions has a program in which a client’s bank account is reconciled on a daily instead of a monthly basis and is provided finan- cial statements by the first business day of the following month instead of the usual 10th or the 15th of the following month.
Marshall says, “I get the same response to this as I did when I told people we were going virtual five years ago – ‘Are you crazy!’ When I tell people I can close their books and give them a balance and an in- come statement by the first day of the month, they look at me like I’m an alien. They tell me it’s impossible, but it’s not. I’ve done it for years. It’s very possible.”
As an auditor for 10 years, he knows exactly what tax preparers and the CPAs are looking for from an organization. “When we give them the records at the end of the year, they’re nice and clean. The CPAs we work with love us because we send them a clean set of books,” he says.
His plan for expansion is to seek out and acquire other bookkeeping businesses. He plans on growing his business by bringing on new clien- tele, not through opening new offices. The current Tucson and Tempe sites are sufficient for the current needs of his firm and its clients.
Business Professional Magazine® Greater Phoenix | 15