Archives: Services

Post Type Description

Accounts Payable & Receivable Management

Management and oversight to improve cash flow

Accounts Payable & Receivable Management

Timely processing strengthens cash flow and vendor relationships.
Managing payables and receivables effectively is essential to sustaining healthy cash flow. We help you stay on top of due dates, invoice tracking, and collections, ensuring your business runs smoothly and your partners are paid accurately and on time.

Protect your cash flow and strengthen your vendor and customer relationships.

Managing payables and receivables efficiently is key to maintaining a healthy financial position. Our team supports your business by handling invoice processing, payment tracking, aging reports, and collections—so you don’t fall behind or leave money on the table. With Atherton’s AP/AR services, you gain control over your working capital and improve communication with vendors and customers. We help you stay current, avoid late fees, and create predictable cash flow, allowing you to plan and operate with greater confidence.

Let us manage your payables and receivables with precision—so you can manage your growth with confidence.

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Bookkeeping (Monthly or Quarterly)

Customized to your workflow

Clear, consistent records that support smarter business decisions.
Our bookkeeping services are designed to ensure your financial records are always accurate, organized, and up to date. Whether you need monthly or quarterly support, we tailor our approach to align with your operations and reporting needs, giving you a clear picture of your financial position at any time.

Reliable, routine accounting support that keeps your business grounded.

Consistent bookkeeping is the cornerstone of good financial management. At Atherton & Associates, we provide monthly or quarterly bookkeeping tailored to the size and complexity of your business. We record and reconcile transactions, maintain general ledgers, and ensure your financial records are accurate and up to date—so you’re always ready for tax season, audits, or strategic planning. Whether you need basic recordkeeping or more hands-on support, we adapt to your workflow and provide clear, organized data that supports informed decision-making.

Need dependable bookkeeping? Let us keep your records in order so you can focus on running your business.

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Tax Planning and Compliance

Both compliance and planning are crucial steps in making sure that your tax returns have been filed correctly and efficiently—but what exactly do they both mean?

What is Tax Compliance?

Naturally, compliance takes place while returns are being filed to ensure that taxes have been filed in such a way that complies with local, state, and federal tax requirements.

What is Tax Planning?

Tax planning, on the other hand, starts before tax season and involves planned minimization of taxation.

What’s the Difference Between Tax Compliance and Tax Planning?

Compliance takes place around tax season—whereas tax planning typically takes place in the taxable year. It requires thinking ahead to maximize tax minimization by incorporating money-saving strategies into your overall tax plan. Also, whereas tax compliance is obviously required, tax planning is only recommended as something that can have an incredible impact on take-home income.

What Does a Tax Plan Consist Of?

A tax plan consists of legal ways to cut down on tax liabilities and necessitates having a good understanding of your tax situation and the tax laws you’re governed by. In addition, these plans also require projections for the next tax year that take business and personal tax liabilities into account.

An experienced CPA will know to take a look at your present and past tax situation and be able to form an accurate and valuable projection of your next tax year.

To ensure that your taxes are compliant—and that your tax plan maximizes
returns—contact Atherton & Associates, LLP.

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2025 Business Tax Law Update

Embracing Change: How OBBA’s Business Tax Updates are Reshaping Financial Strategies” unpacks the significant alterations to business taxation set to begin in 2025, with a focus on boosting domestic investment

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Tax Controversy & Dispute Resolution

Unfortunately, the tax process is not always smooth. Audits and disputes can sprout up from unanticipated errors or risks, and the results can be costly. Controversy and dispute resolution services exist to help you prepare for this in a number of ways—including following certain steps before your audit, navigating tax litigation, and more.

Pre-Audit Plans

Before an audit, there are a number of steps to ensure that you’re prepared. Firstly, make sure that your process includes strategies which can assist your operation in an audit. These include pre-filing rulings such as unilateral agreements and advance pricing agreements.

Keeping contact with the proper tax authorities is also integral to get insights into the tax process so you can be more certain that you’re protected against penalties. In addition, internal reviews of audit and controversy risks are crucial to making sure an audit doesn’t take your operation by surprise. Once risks are identified, incorporate risk management into your processes.

Dispute Resolution

Attaining resolutions to disputes can be an intricate process, requiring a tax official to properly guide businesses to the most efficient conclusion. An accountant can analyze your business’ tax risks to anticipate and manage controversies and disputes in order to save you time and potentially money.

There are two types of disputes and controversy to account for— federal and state and local. The IRS, in charge of federal taxation, have a wide array of areas in which they can analyze for audit purposes. The state and local taxes, on the other hand, are subject to an increasing bevy of regulations.

For more information or assistance with handling your controversy and dispute resolution needs, contact Atherton & Associates, LLP.

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International Tax

At our California-based CPA firm, our primary focus is on U.S. tax compliance and planning for individuals and businesses. While most of our clients are domestic, some have international touchpoints — such as working abroad for part of the year, investing overseas, or holding foreign bank accounts.

We provide guidance on these common areas:

  • U.S. tax reporting for foreign income
  • Foreign bank account and asset reporting (FBAR and FATCA compliance)
  • Foreign tax credit planning to reduce double taxation
  • U.S. tax considerations for working or living abroad part-time
  • Captive insurance company compliance and reporting issues

A Practical Approach for Global Touchpoints

We are not a large international tax advisory firm, but we can help when international matters intersect with your U.S. filings. For example, if your business maintains or is considering a captive insurance company, we can assist with the U.S. reporting aspects and coordinate with specialized advisors when needed.

Helping You Stay Compliant

International tax rules are complex, but staying compliant doesn’t need to be overwhelming. Our role is to help you navigate the U.S. requirements, handle the reporting obligations that apply, and connect you with trusted international tax professionals when more advanced planning is required.

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State & Local Tax

Understanding the SALT Deduction

The federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) is currently capped at $40,000 for most taxpayers ($20,000 for married filing separately). This expanded deduction applies to tax years 2025 through 2029. After that, the limit is scheduled to return to $10,000.

 

For taxpayers in high-tax states, or those with significant property taxes, the SALT deduction can have a major impact on overall tax liability.

Why It Matters

  • Deduction limits matter: The amount you can deduct directly affects your taxable income.

  • High-income and high-tax areas: Residents in certain states feel these caps more significantly.

  • Planning window: The higher deduction is temporary, so strategy today affects your future tax position.

The Bottom Line

The rules around SALT deductions will continue to evolve, but proactive planning ensures you’re positioned to take full advantage while managing future changes.

Contact Atherton & Associates today to discuss your SALT strategy.

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Tax Structuring & Entity Optimization

The tax process often includes meticulous planning and careful execution. Some higher-income ventures might start accounting for their tax liabilities and deductions the year before. Tax structuring is yet another way in which direct and indirect tax costs can be reduced—this time with the use of efficient structure and trading arrangements.

What Does Tax Structuring Involve?

Tax structuring is focused on efficiency, and as such, focuses on the following specialized fields: international tax planning, value chain transformation, group tax-planning programs, and more. The entire goal of tax structuring is to find and utilize tax-efficient methods of obtaining profits from investments.

In fact, tax structuring should be one of the first steps in a tax-planning process for any business, publicly-traded corporation, or multinational enterprise. Through tax structuring, you can attain structural tax improvements, increase shareholder value, and be able to account for future changes in your business.

Why Consult a Specialist?

Our specialists offer close analysis of tax structuring plans for our clients, consulting and identifying problems and solutions to mitigate taxes. Tax structuring takes place in such a crucial time in the process and is a complicated but essential step.

At Atherton & Associates, LLP, with the help of our team of experts, we can help construct a plan and tax structure that’s best for your business.

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Preparing an Estate Plan

Preparing an estate plan can be difficult, and each step of the process can be complicated in its own way. Getting an estate plan ready is a multi-step process that involves not only information gathering, but reviewing and analyzing.

Calculate Your Net Worth

First things first, you need to determine your net worth by adding up the rough estimates of all of your assets. This includes personal property such as collectables and vehicles, retirement plans (401ks and IRAs), business interests, real estate, etc. You take this number and subtract it from your liabilities—a.k.a, your debts, loans, and mortgages. Finally, you must determine if your estate is liable for federal estate taxes and the full scope of what that might look like.

Establish the Need for an Estate Plan

There’s a good likelihood that your estate won’t be valued near federal estate tax limits, but there are still other fees—even if you’re not beholden to the estate tax it can still be an expensive process. Probate, for example, can be arduous and costly. There’s also the matter of handling significant assets: you’ll want to be certain that your property is in good hands and is distributed according to your wishes. Therefore, it’s crucial to find an expert to lend a hand.

Find a Good Professional

It’s crucial to have someone with experience to guide you through the estate planning process. It has a myriad of moving parts and those preparing plans are faced with many choices that can be very important to their loved ones.

A will is a contract, and any contract—if written incorrectly—can have consequences. Poor phrasing can invalidate an estate plan, and every aspect of a will carries with it formalities which must be observed.

Not to mention, there are many steps in the process of estate planning—even after hiring an attorney. These include determining if you need a will or revocable living trust, what to do if you become mentally incapacitated, forming a plan for what happens after your passing, wisely choosing fiduciaries, and more.

At Atherton & Associates, LLP, we strive to prepare you with the best information and advice for the hard questions.

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Fiduciary Accounting

Fiduciary accounting is, in short, a comprehensive report that analyzes a time period in the life of a trust, estate, or conservatorship. It can also reference the process wherein a fiduciary, such as a trustee, keeps principals up-to-date with transactions and investment policies.

Although some bookkeeping can be done independently, fiduciary accounting can be carefully scrutinized by the IRS or the courts—so any fiduciary accounting must be conducted very precisely. A specific and specialized knowledge of accounting and protocol is crucial to handling a fund that requires accounting of this kind.

What Does Fiduciary Accounting Involve?

Typically, fiduciary accounting requires a high level of transparency between principals and those who are handling the accounts. With this in mind, a careful summary should be prepared that clearly states the purpose and content of the account. Following that, the account should represent information that is integral and important to the principals.

The account will also reflect the value of assets at acquisition, current values, gains, losses, and significant transactions.

Do I Need to Hire an Accountant?

Absolutely. Again, because fiduciary accounting is such a specialized field, it should only be conducted by an experienced accountant. Our accountants at Atherton & Associates, LLP are equipped to assist you with our extensive institutional knowledge about fiduciaries and fiduciary accounting.

For more information about Fiduciary Accounting, contact Atherton & Associates, LLP.

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Estate & Trust Administration

Estate and trust administration involves the management of trust property in accordance with the terms laid out in the trust document. There are a number of steps involved in the process, to ensure that beneficiaries are properly benefited after the death of the settlor. The best practice is to hire an attorney to help you through the process.

What is Trust Administration

The process starts with a notice to beneficiaries, after which they have an allotted amount of days to file a trust contest. If there are no contests, the beneficiary surrenders their ability to file.

What is Involved

If there is real property in the trust, then the title must be bestowed to the successor. This is to make certain that the settlor’s wishes are observed in regards to the property. After this, the trustee must take account of other trust assets (investment accounts, etc.) and transfer the title of those, as well.

In addition, the trustee must oversee the trust and keep a careful eye on trust activity. This can include using trust funds to cover the decedent’s affairs and reviewing documentation to decide what accounting for the fund should look like. Before even starting the administration process, it is strongly advised that trustees seek out an attorney so that they can know how much they are obligated to perform.

Only once assets have been collected and distributed and the taxes filed can the trustee distribute the remaining assets. That’s where the trust document comes is, as it will decide how the remaining assets are distributed.

For more information or assistance with your estate and trust administration, contact Atherton & Associates, LLP.

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