This firm was recommended to me by a bookkeeper we started using in Leesburg, VA called Clarity Accounting. She specifically referred me to a gentleman named Brian Kling. He would just sheepishly follow whatever the bookkeeper at Clarity told him to do and you better not dare challenge it, even if it was completely incorrect. He did not care. He was enthralled with this bookkeeping agency and did not have enough confidence in himself or us to listen to good reason. Even if I kept raising the red flag stating that I thought it did not reflect the reality of the type of transaction it was- he did not care--then he just found excuses to not meet with you which led to even more delays and more costs. I should have known to not use a CPA so closely tied to an academic bookkeeper like himself that thinks they know everything and they do not need to listen to the owner of the company. This led to us being more delayed because he was essentially just a paper pusher for the bookkeeper which I could not run away fast enough especially when I knew his straight A student bookkeeper was wrong, completely in many areas. While we were late already by the time we got to him and had told him we had not filed an extension, he did nothing, offered no other solutions, just waited until I would agree with the bookkeeper. He made you fearful to even challenge them. But i knew this guy who hid behind his emails too was not to be trusted when out the gate in our first meeting he gave me completely wrong information about going to the IRS and asking for a refund that was owed back in Feb but never received. He told us we should not even try and that it was a waste of time as they were too busy and with COVID I would wait on hold forever. We did anyway the very next day and had our refund 3 weeks later. It was like, who is this guy that thinks he knows everything but has been wrong about something so simple. Those kind of people that make snap judgements like he did with our concerns about his trusted bookkeeping firm are dangerous. The lateness just grew and grew because he basically forced us to find someone that gave a darn and would listen to my concerns. So is complete apathy towards us meant we got hit with a huge late bill from the IRS--again worsened in our company's opinion because we were not as enthralled with this bookkeeper who I knew from the beginning was the kind of person who does not know when to stop and ask questions. When we began to challenge what he was recommending you could tell he just ignored it because it was not what his bookkeeper recommended who never listened to anyone but her own voice. He would hide behind emails and make windows of time so small it was nearly impossible to meet. anyone who has any sense of what it is like to run a company knows that a CEO needs more flexibility, planning and proper and professional communication which he was completely incapable of providing except once at the beginning. Again, I found this firm arrogant, over confident to the point they make mistakes, and wrongly place all their confidence in terrible bookkeeping that may look correct on paper but is grossly misclassified. They have no ability to listen to the client and show an interest in listening before believing everything someone good with numbers is telling you even if they have zero common sense when it comes to business operations and costing items from inventory to loans. They did nothing but cost us money and waste time and did nothing to mitigate either when it came to the IRS deadlines either. read more
