The way accounting is organized affects the information an owner receives, the questions that can be answered and, ultimately, the decisions that get made. These are the ideas behind how HannumCPA works.
Nine principles shape how HannumCPA approaches accounting, reporting, financial review and the relationships the firm takes on. They aren’t values statements. They’re specific claims about how the work should be done.
Interpretation is only as good as the information underneath it. A company can’t make confident decisions from unreliable books, an incomplete balance sheet or statements that arrive too late to matter. So every relationship starts with the accounting foundation: current, reconciled, dependable.
Before asking what the numbers mean, we make sure the numbers deserve to be believed.
Bookkeeping, the close, reporting, cash management, review and interpretation are not unrelated activities. Transactions become accounting. Accounting becomes reporting. Reporting becomes understanding. Understanding supports decisions. When the pieces are handled separately, by separate people with separate priorities, something is usually lost in between. We treat them as one connected function.
Producing a balance sheet and an income statement is not the finish line of the monthly process. The owner should end the month knowing what changed, what drove it, what deserves attention and what questions the numbers raise.
The close produces the statements. The review makes them useful.
Consistent financial management creates more value than episodic intervention. A steady rhythm of reconciliations, close, reporting, cash review, the owner conversation and follow-up surfaces issues while they’re small and keeps decisions from waiting on the books.
Good financial management should feel routine long before it feels urgent.
Technology matters, but technology is not the product. Accounting systems, automation and shared information should reduce repetitive work, improve consistency, keep information current and free experienced people to apply judgment.
The best technology is often the technology the owner barely has to think about.
There is no universal staffing model. One company has an excellent bookkeeper. Another needs more hands-on help. Another mostly needs oversight. We assess the current financial function, keep what works, fill the gaps and define responsibility clearly.
The division of labor can change. The responsibility for a dependable financial function does not.
Recurring accounting work should be systematized and handled by appropriately skilled people. Experienced judgment should be concentrated where it earns its keep: interpreting results, identifying issues, solving unusual problems and weighing decisions with ownership. That’s a principle of firm design, not a personality.
Routine work should become routine. Judgment should not.
A recurring relationship works when the business genuinely needs the work, the firm genuinely knows the business, and both sides value the arrangement enough to keep information flowing and responsibilities respected. That’s why HannumCPA serves a deliberately limited number of clients. The point isn’t scarcity. It’s depth over volume.
A recurring relationship involves many moving parts, so responsibilities should be defined carefully. But once the relationship exists, an owner should never hesitate to ask a question because a billing increment might appear. Fixed monthly fees. Clear scope. Normal conversation.
Define the work carefully. Then make the relationship easy to use.
Client advisory services is an established practice model within the accounting profession: recurring accounting oversight, financial reporting and financial review, rather than periodic compliance work. HannumCPA’s approach is informed by that professional framework, and by decades spent working inside privately owned businesses. The principles above are our own.
Not a blog. A few permanent pieces explaining how the approach works in practice.
Most owner-led companies already have the pieces: someone doing the bookkeeping, a tax CPA at year-end, a banker, accounting software and plenty of reports. What is often missing is a layer between the day-to-day accounting and the owner: someone reviewing what the accounting produces, making it credible for the people who rely on it, and reading it with the owner every month.
These are not three services chosen from a menu. They are a sequence, and each depends on the one before it. Reliable books make reliable reporting possible. Reliable reporting, reviewed, becomes understanding.
For most privately owned businesses, the most immediate financial question is where cash stands. The answer should be a maintained picture, kept current, rather than something assembled when someone asks.
Two things should be current at all times: where cash stands today, tied to the bank rather than to last month’s statement, and where cash is headed, with payroll, debt service and major obligations mapped weeks ahead. Around that picture runs a standing discipline: receivables watched and collected, payables scheduled deliberately, borrowing availability and covenants tracked during the year, and developing liquidity pressure identified early, while options still exist.
The owner should never have to wonder where cash stands.
The purpose of a monthly review is not to present financial statements. It is to find what deserves the owner’s attention and talk about it, on numbers that deserve to be believed.
Each review is built around Curt™, the Clear Understanding Review Tool: the working surface we use to move from accounting records to understanding, decisions and commitments. It starts with the actual records: the trailing twelve months of general ledger activity, the financial statements and receivables, looked at across the year rather than one month in isolation. What changed and what looks noteworthy is surfaced for review, and any line on the statements opens to the transactions underneath it, so a change can be understood rather than merely noticed.
What comes out is short: a concise written review; the items we decided together deserve action, sustained focus, continued watching or simply need to be handled; and the commitments that follow, with an owner and a date, carried forward to the next review. The statements are the starting point. The conversation is the point.
Dependable monthly financial information should let an owner answer, without a special project: Are the books current, and does the balance sheet make sense? Are we profitable, and where do margins stand? Where is cash today, and what’s coming? What changed meaningfully from prior periods, and how do results compare with what we expected?
It should also surface the quieter questions: anything unusual in the numbers, any trend beginning to form, anything a bank or bonding company will eventually ask about, answered before the request arrives, not scrambled after it.
If the monthly package can’t support those answers, the problem is usually upstream: in the books, the close or the reporting itself. Good financial statements should answer questions, and lead to better ones.
HannumCPA is not built to replace a company’s tax CPA. Tax planning, returns, compliance and specialized tax questions stay where they are.
We look after the recurring financial side during the year: the reliability of the accounting, the close, the financial statements, cash visibility, and the owner’s questions about what the numbers mean. Along the way, we keep the books in a condition that makes the tax CPA’s work easier: clean records, reconciled accounts and year-end information organized and ready.
Good coordination benefits everyone. The company gets one dependable financial function all year and a smoother tax season at the end of it. Your tax CPA handles the return. We handle the year.
Start with an Initial Financial Assessment, or just a conversation about where the financial side of the business stands today.