Here's my experience - judge for yourself.
The short version:
Bryan didn't listen to our needs and rarely communicated in a timely manner. He went on vacation when our taxes were due & didn't check in before leaving to let us know they were done (we called to find out the status & get a copy of them), he & his office could not tell us if they had filed our taxes after we had signed them, they forgot to bill us for payroll services for a while, he hung up on us when we told them we were unhappy with his office/his service - and would not discuss how we could get our final client files from them, & they refused to call us back - even though we called & emailed numerous times.
The extended version:
CVA did our taxes for two years. Our accountant was Bryan. The first year, he never told us our taxes were done & ready for review. When I called to check in on their status, he was out of town on vacation & we were handed off to a different accountant who did their best to fill us in on the main things to review. Upon review, Bryan had done our taxes differently than what he'd discussed with me in our tax meeting. The second year, our business return got rejected online so they needed us to sign a paper copy to submit via mail. They told us they'd tell us when the paper copy was ready to sign. Weeks later we hadn't heard so I called & found out they were ready to sign, so we signed them. Then a week later they asked us to come sign a printed copy again because they didn't know if they had filed them or not. How do you forget if you filed someone's taxes? Isn't that a big part of your job as an accountant?
We also received notices that our S-Corp election didn't go through, that our extension filing was rejected because it was late, & other notices - each time these were brought up to them, they shrugged them off & said not to worry - the s-corp election takes time so we'll just file it again/the extension is no problem because they also filed our extension electronically/ they were preparing a letter to send back to the IRS, etc.
We also asked them to do owner payroll - it took months & multiple requests on our end for them to get it setup. We finally got it set up & for many months they put the wrong amounts in the system. A year later they reached out to say they had never charged us for payroll & wanted to discuss what we owed & upgrade us to a new system. Bryan offered us a discount in writing by email since it was their mistake for not billing us for so long. That seemed like a nice gesture. Until we had a call with Bryan & he offered a different (smaller) discount. When I asked about the larger discount he'd offered by email, I was met by anger & something along the lines of "well it only costs us $X to have you in our payroll system, so if we gave you that discount we'd still make some money so whatever I guess that's fine." I found this very unprofessional.
Shortly before this payroll call we found out it wasn't just to discuss payroll but a GAP call or 'goal achievement process" - a way to help clients reach their business goals. On the call we were basically told they wanted to upgrade our service to help us achieve our business goals & wanted to charge us a monthly price to do that (which would then include payroll & annual taxes). I didn't feel like this was a service I trusted them to do considering our past experiences. (If a business isn't able to tell me if they've filed our taxes & then they forget to charge us for payroll service for an entire year -- that's not really a business I want to help me plan my goals & give me any business advice.)
So we told Bryan we didn't want to move forward with GAP, that we'd been unhappy with our past service, & we were going to take our business elsewhere. Instead of saying okay or asking for feedback, Bryan said "then there's no point to this call" and hung up on us immediately. We wanted to get a copy of our final documents, our final bill, etc, but when we called immediately back to speak with him, he refused to take our call. We asked to speak to the owner & were told he would call us, but he never did.
When I emailed (since no one would call us back) to ask about wrapping up final services - such as filing our final quarterly payroll taxes to go along with the payroll periods they had completed for us and we charged for - we were told that it would be an extra $250 fee because they'd given us a discount. However they had previously filed quarterly filings to go along with payroll at no additional cost (this was an included service). If we'd paid the full price for the final quarter instead of the discount they gave us, the difference would only have been $60, not $250.
It took 3 weeks of us reaching out by email and phone to finally get a copy of our documents so that we could file our quarterly payroll taxes on our own. We've asked to speak to the owner on 5 different phone calls and 2 emails and still haven't heard back after 6 weeks. read more