Update to my prior review: After my review appeared, I received an email message from Paul Mei,…read moresaying, among other things,
"Can't believe you would write such an extremely nasty review.... If you really want to complain, use your real name, not 'Peter D.' Fight like a man, not a sniper that stab people behind."
As I mention in my review, he complained a lot during the few weeks we used him; I asked him to let us know how we could restructure the project to make it more efficient and easier for him. Instead, he just quit, with no notice at all. Now he's sent this message to me. I do not think this professional. I really want everyone to understand what you're getting into if you hire Mei CPA.
Below is my review in full:
He quit in the middle of a job because it is "too much for me."
I work for a very small business with very limited bookeeping needs, and Mei CPA was indirectly recommended to us; it took a really long time to explain to Paul what seemed to be really simple concepts of running a business (some money comes in for sales, some goes out to pay our suppliers, and there are business expenses for advertising and marketing need to be accounted for as well - that's really it). He kept expressing befuddlement at all of this. I asked him over and over again if there was a better way to do our accounting; he kept talking about how confusing this is, and he never offered any advice or suggestions for how to make it better.
On the materials he created for us, he always got the name of the company wrong. He kept representing himself as my personal accountant, even though I told him over and over again that the accounting had to be done for the LLC, which I don't own in its entirety. He said that "usually" that's not the way he does things, and so he never fixed the errors in what he created for us. I had to do it myself.
He didn't ever seem to understand the basic idea of what a business is, and he kept complaining all the time about it without offering any suggestions. Every time he complained, I asked him please to give us suggestions for improvement, but he never did. He offered nothing of value.
A week or so ago, he called me and said that the job was too "tedious" for him, that there were "too many numbers to add up." I asked him if there was a way to simplify it, to make our system less complicated - this is after all what we were coming to him for.
He said, "It's not that it's complicated, it's that it's tedious." He complained that the work for Q2 had taken him an entire day to complete and that he wasn't paid enough. I offered to work on getting him more money, if that was the concern.
Following this conversation, I sent him an email - I began as follows: "Good morning, Paul - Thanks again for raising your concerns yesterday about the tedious nature of the work you're doing on this project. I hope this email helps clarify what we are looking for and the way this runs, which we discussed verbally, and you can then use this to send a proposal for the types of work you are willing to do, and we can see if it fits in with what we need." I followed then by outlining the nature of the company - how he should treat payments to the company, from the company, outlining as clearly as I could the various different income streams, and asking him to outline how he would propose the service should work, what he would be willing to do. I had by that time devoted a huge amount of time to trying to get him up to speed.
He sent back an email quitting with no notice. He said, "This project is too much for me," still without explaining what about the work was "too much" or what would have made it better for him. Was it just too much work? Was it too complicated? Was there something that could have been done to streamline our accounting system? This is what we would have hoped to get from him.
Maybe he didn't like me, or the work, or whatever it was. I certainly tried my best to make it work; I was never rude to him, never snapped at him, tried to explain it patiently over and over, and always sought his input and feedback. But even if somehow he just didn't like me, this is really unprofessional behavior, just to quit like this and do nothing to finish the work he started.
