Entrepreneurs CFOThe election is a question

The question is about the shape of the year, not about a trick. One shape treats the company's profit as the owner's profit. Another shape pays the owner a wage through the provider you run and treats what remains differently. The right shape depends on the closed months, on what you actually do in the company, and on timing. A blog post cannot see those three.

The closed months, the work you actually do, and the clock are read from your file on the call. We say what we see. A refund, a loan approval, or a smaller bill is not something this page can offer you. Anyone who promises those from a headline is selling a feeling. The election is paperwork with a deadline and a set of facts. The facts have to be true in the books before the paperwork is worth signing.

If you already made the election in a prior year, this page is about living with it. The wage has to be real, the payroll has to match, and the draws have to wear the right name. An election that was filed and then ignored is a mess we would rather untangle in a quiet month than in the week a notice arrives.

An election has a clock. Some clocks are in the early months of a tax year. Some are tied to when the company began. We look up the clock that fits your facts and we say it in a sentence, with the date. We do not guess the date from memory of a different company. If we cannot point at the rule, the date does not go on the page or on the call as if it were solid.

October matters even when the clock is not October. By October the shape of the year is visible, and a wage that should have been running can sometimes still be corrected with less fiction than a March reconstruction. Sometimes it cannot, and we say cannot. The dignity of this work is the refusal.

We will not file an election on an open set of months. Closing comes first. If the cleanup will outlast the clock, we tell you that before anyone drafts a form. Missing a clock on purpose, with your eyes open, is a decision. Missing it because the books were fog is just a loss.

We need the year the company started, the way you take money out now, and whether a payroll provider already runs. We do not need a thesis. A few facts and the closed months are the whole kit. If the months are not closed, the first deliverable is the close, and the election waits in a labeled note so it is not forgotten and not faked.

The conversation is finished when those three are on the table and no fourth promise has been added. Whether an election is even on the table. What the clock is. What would have to be true in the wage and the books for the shape to be honest. If the answer is that you should stay as you are, that is a complete answer, and we stop.

Nothing on this page is a plan fitted to your year. Your year needs the file. Disclosures repeats the boundary in the language of covers this practice will not put a name on. Read them together if you are the sort of founder who wants the boundary before the conversation.