Tax Planning Services for Businesses & Individuals in NYC & Long Island

If you own a business, the honest answer is that it already started. For our business-owner clients, we're planning continuously for everything happening inside the business — the moves, the timing, the decisions unique to how that company runs. That's the entire reason to have someone in it with you year-round. If you're running a business without that, it's the very reason to start.

If you don't own a business, planning earns its keep the moment your taxes stop being simple. A few clear signals: you owed a lot more (or got back a lot more) than you expected, you have a rental property, you're running even a small Schedule C, or you have an investment portfolio. Any one of those puts decisions on the table during the year that quietly change what you'll owe.

Either way, it isn't a one-time event. At a minimum we plan twice a year — once mid-year to see where things are heading, and again before year-end while there's still time to act. The best decisions get made before the year closes, not after.

Probably, if you have meaningful income that isn't having tax withheld from it. The federal rule of thumb: if you expect to owe $1,000 or more when you file, after withholding and credits, you're generally expected to pay quarterly. That most often applies to the self-employed, business owners, S-corporation shareholders, partners, and anyone with significant investment or rental income.

Miss them and the IRS tacks on an underpayment penalty — an avoidable cost that catches people every year. The safe harbor is what protects you: pay in at least 90% of this year's tax, or 100% of last year's (110% if your prior-year income was over $150,000), and you won't be penalized even if your final bill comes in higher.

Here's how we handle it. We don't hand you a vague worksheet — we give you two numbers: what you're actually on track to owe, and the minimum you're obligated to pay to stay inside the safe harbor. From there you decide whether to cover the real liability or pay the safe-harbor floor and hold onto your cash, but either way there's no penalty and no April surprise. (Your state sets its own estimated-payment rules, and we build those into the same calculation.)

If year-end is when you're starting, you've already missed most of it. The moves that matter get set up during the year — year-end is simply when some of them have to be executed before the door closes.

By the time December arrives, our clients already understand the cause and effect, because we've walked through it with them all year. We're not guessing in the fourth quarter. We've already shown you that putting, say, $10,000 into a retirement plan saves you a specific amount in tax — and exactly when it has to be funded to count. The year-end step is just pulling the trigger on decisions we've been modeling together for months.

The levers we weigh through the year include:

• Income and expense timing — accelerating or deferring between tax years when it works in your favor.
• Equipment and major purchases — timing what you buy, and when it's placed in service, to land the deduction in the right year.
• Retirement contributions — funding the right plan for the year, some of which must be established before year-end, not at filing.
• Owner compensation — settling salary versus distributions before payroll closes out the year.
• State-level elections — pass-through entity tax (PTET) elections and payments, which carry their own deadlines and differ by state.
• Multi-state activity — employees, property, or sales in other states that change what you owe and where.

The reason several of these can't wait is simple: a retirement plan not established in time, a PTET payment missed at year-end, or equipment placed in service a day too late can't be undone in April. That's the entire case for working with someone throughout the year instead of handing over a shoebox in the spring.

Maybe — and the real test is whether it still makes sense two and three years out, not just this year. As a rough starting point, once your business is producing around $75,000 in net income, it's worth a serious conversation, because that's roughly where the self-employment-tax savings can begin to outweigh the added cost of running payroll and filing a separate return. Below that, the election often costs more than it saves.

But that number is only where the conversation starts. The election is really a bet on where the business is headed: What do next year and the year after look like? Might you bring on another shareholder? Are you scaling up — or did you just have one unusually strong year before winding down? We've seen businesses elect S-corp status off a blog post or a prior accountant's boilerplate, often without ever setting the reasonable compensation the IRS requires, and end up paying more in payroll and filing costs than the election ever saved them. A great one-year snapshot can point you the wrong way if the next three years look nothing like it.

(One common mix-up worth clearing up: an LLC is a legal entity, while "S corporation" is a tax election. An eligible LLC can choose to be taxed as an S corp without changing what it legally is.)

So we don't answer this from a rule of thumb. We take a 360-degree look at your situation and where it's going, then coach you through the plusses and minuses of each path — so the decision fits your business, not a generic breakeven someone read online.

One rule drives everything here: an S-corporation owner who works in the business has to take a reasonable salary as W-2 wages before pulling profit out as distributions. Skipping the salary, or setting it artificially low to dodge payroll tax, is one of the fastest ways to invite an IRS problem.

That salary has to be defensible, and the standard is essentially what it would cost to hire someone else to do the job you actually do. That gets weighed against the factors the IRS looks at — your duties, the hours you put in, your experience, and what comparable work pays in your field. There's no magic percentage or one-size number; what's reasonable for one owner is wrong for the next.

The real skill is threading the needle. Too low, and the IRS can reclassify your distributions as wages and hit you with back payroll taxes and penalties. Too high, and you've thrown away the self-employment-tax savings that made the election worth doing in the first place. We're aiming for a number that's efficient but genuinely holds up.

And because payroll is in-house here, it's not something you have to manage. Once we land on the right figure, we set it and run it through payroll — handled correctly and consistently, with nothing left on your plate.

The pass-through entity tax (PTET) is a state-level election that lets your business pay state income tax at the entity level instead of you paying it personally. Because the business gets to deduct it, PTET effectively sidesteps the federal cap on state-and-local-tax (SALT) deductions — a benefit that would otherwise be lost.

Whether it's worth electing changed recently, which is exactly why it's a yearly conversation rather than a set-and-forget. The federal SALT cap jumped from $10,000 to around $40,000, and it phases down for higher earners. The practical upshot: if your income is above the phase-out, PTET still delivers real federal savings; if you're comfortably under it, the larger cap may get you close to the same result on its own. So we run the numbers each year instead of assuming the election is always right.

PTET is elected state by state, and the rules and deadlines vary. In states like New York, the election has to be made ahead of time — by March 15 of the tax year, long before your return is anywhere near filed — and it carries its own estimated-payment schedule. Miss that window and the option is gone for the year.

That's where we come in: for clients where PTET makes sense, we handle the entire thing — the election, the deadlines, and the payments — so the savings actually land and nothing slips through the cracks.

It might — and it's one of the most commonly missed and commonly misunderstood taxes we run into. The NYC Unincorporated Business Tax applies to unincorporated businesses carrying on business in New York City: sole proprietors, partnerships, and LLCs taxed as partnerships. The city imposes it at 4% of the income allocated to NYC, though exemptions and credits can shrink or even eliminate the liability for smaller operations.

The confusion cuts both ways. Some clients are quietly on the hook and have no idea — a freelancer, consultant, or partnership doing real business in the city — until it surfaces as a bill with penalties attached. Others assume they owe it and don't, and end up paying money they never had to. Guessing is expensive in both directions.

Here's a point that trips people up: a Long Island address, on its own, does not decide whether you owe UBT. What matters is where the business activity actually happens. Plenty of our Long Island clients do real work across the five boroughs, and plenty of city businesses qualify for relief they've never claimed — exactly the kind of local nuance we're built to catch.

When UBT does apply, we handle it like the rest of your compliance — filing and estimated payments included — so it's covered and never a year-end surprise.

• It can create tax obligations in states you've never set foot in — and that surprise is the part that catches people. The key concept is "nexus": a connection to a state strong enough that it can require you to register, file, and pay there. Most owners assume nexus means having a physical location in the state. That hasn't been true for years. You can trigger it with a remote employee living across a state line, equipment or inventory sitting elsewhere, or simply enough sales into a state to cross its economic threshold.

  Once you have nexus somewhere, it can reach into income-tax filings, how your profit gets allocated between states, payroll withholding for that employee, sales-tax collection, and even the owners' personal returns. And because every state writes its own rules, the same activity gets treated differently from one to the next.

  What we do is work through your actual operations — where your people are, where your equipment and inventory sit, where your sales are landing — to map where you may have created nexus, ideally before it turns into a back-tax bill. Often a client doesn't even have the systems in place to see this coming, so part of the job is building those systems with you, so the exposure is tracked going forward instead of discovered after the fact.

When your income climbs, your tax bill stops being fixed — it starts moving with the decisions you make throughout the year. That's why high earners and investors have the most to gain from planning ahead, and the most to lose by waiting until April. The areas we focus on most:

• Estimated taxes and withholding — keeping payments in step with income that shifts during the year, so there's no penalty and no surprise.
• Capital-gains timing — deciding when to realize gains, and whether a sale belongs in this tax year or the next.
• Tax-loss harvesting — using realized investment losses to offset gains and trim the tax on your portfolio.
• Retirement strategy — weighing pre-tax versus Roth and choosing the right vehicles to move the current-year number.
• Charitable giving — timing and structuring gifts (including bunching or a donor-advised fund) so generosity is also tax-efficient.
• Major transactions — modeling the tax consequences of a big sale, exit, or investment before it happens, not after.
• The SALT phase-out — managing income around the point where that federal deduction begins to shrink for higher earners.

That's a representative set of where we look, not the entire toolkit — the right mix depends on your situation. But the real value at this level isn't any single move — it's that nothing works against anything else. We work hand in hand with your wealth advisor and your trust and estate attorney so the tax strategy, the investment strategy, and the estate plan all pull in the same direction. Too often those professionals sit in silos and opportunities slip through the gaps between them. Our job is to make sure no stone is left unturned.

If we already work with you, you don't need to gather much of anything. Between your ongoing engagement and the fact that we coordinate with your other professionals, we either already have what's needed or we know exactly where to get the missing pieces — so you're not stuck digging through files. And because we're already in your books throughout the year — keeping a living document that tracks your tax picture continuously — a planning review for an existing client isn't a gathering exercise at all. We just pick up from everything we already have.

If you're coming to us for the first time, a productive session starts with a few basics:

• Your most recent tax return
• A current pay stub (and your spouse's, if filing jointly)
• Your expectation for income this year — roughly what you think you'll make
• Any big moves on the horizon: a business sale or purchase, a property transaction, a relocation, a large investment
• For the self-employed: year-to-date business numbers, any estimated payments already made, and your entity and ownership details

Don't worry about having it all perfectly assembled. Part of what we do early on is figure out what's actually needed for your situation and help you round up anything that's missing — the goal is a real conversation about your options, not a document scavenger hunt.

With us, tax planning isn't a one-time project with a start and a finish — it's an ongoing cycle. Each year we work through the same core loop, always with an eye on where you're headed next:

• We review your current position — income, entity structure, compensation, payments already made, and what's coming.
• We project what you're on track to owe, so there are no surprises.
• We identify the moves worth making — entity and compensation decisions, timing, retirement funding, PTET, multi-state exposure — and walk you through the plusses and minuses of each.
• We coordinate the execution across your accounting, payroll, and tax filing, so agreed decisions actually happen and on time.
• Then we do it again, revisiting as your income, business, or life changes.

A living document ties the whole cycle together between reviews — we track your plan year-round, so nothing resets to zero each January and every decision builds on the last.

What makes it planning rather than paperwork is the forward view. The right strategy today depends on what next year and the year after look like. A client planning to sell their business in two years needs a very different plan from someone just starting out who has to pour every dollar of profit back into the company — where locking cash into a retirement plan might be exactly the wrong move. Same tools, opposite decisions, because the trajectory is different.

That's the whole philosophy in a sentence: we're not just filing your past, we're planning your future — and that work starts well before year-end.