Getting back into the swing of things

Caring for a couple of newborns is tough. Once you've gotten used to the sleep deprivation (hint: you never REALLY get used to not having enough sleep), you must then contend with the reality that everything else in the world is put on the backburner. One "luxary" my employer has for new dads is the fact they give you two weeks of paid leave (on top of any other vacation/personal days you accrue). I not only took those two weeks off, but also took an additional two weeks of vacation.

Even though 99% of my time off was spent caring for the the newborn twins in one capacity or another, I still managed to squeeze in a little time for REI. One major accomplishment was getting ALL of my tax documentation to our CPA. She said she'll e-file it (more on that in a minute), and we should get our refund in 7-10 business days. Since I have a lot of supporting documentation to include, she said she'll need to file a "paper" version as well later. I also spent some time writing a program to calculate whether a property is a good candidate for a Sub2/Owner-Financing. After doing so, I recalculated the most recent deal I turned down, and realized it was probablya good deal after all (I'll talk more about this in a separate post).

Now back to the CPA ...

My wife and I are considering using another CPA in the future. The one we currently have is okay, but we both notice she doesn't have a good track record of returning emails/voicemails in a timely fashion. We also notice several miscommunications in our dealings with her. As far as the poor response level, we can go literally days (and one time almost a week) without hearing back from her. In a professional business, this is totally unacceptable. As far as the miscommunication goes, the latest fiasco involved the e-filing. She had sent me an email early last week saying she only needed my bank info to send out the e-file. I called her up, and gave her the info. Several days passed, and I sent her a follow-up email to confirm the e-file was sent. After three days of no response, I finally got an email saying we need to sign an authorization form for the e-file. Huh?!?! All she said she needed was my bank info in order to "press the button for the e-file." Stuff like that is what I mean by miscommunication. Two reasons we got her were (1) she was close by, and (2) she seemed to understand REI as it relates to accounting needs. Time to shop around.