We do not prepare income tax returns or give income tax advice.

• That depends on whether you elect to do your bookkeeping in QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online.
• If you elect QuickBooks Desktop, we will put together a financial package either in an Excel or QuickBooks format that will contain all of the information your accountant needs to file your taxes.  Included in the package will be the general ledger, a trial balance, an income statement, and a balance sheet.  Should your tax preparer request any additional ledger or statement that can be automatically generated through QuickBooks, we will provide that as well.
• If you elect QuickBooks Online, your tax preparer will have direct access to all of your financial information and will be able to easily download it into his software to generate your tax returns.  If he needs us to make any adjustments or changes, we cooperate with any request.
• Of course, under either scenario, our account managers will be available anytime to answer your accountant’s questions and assist in providing any additional information needed.

A common argument made by our U.S. based competitors is that all of your bookkeeping work is done in the U.S.  While this sounds patriotic it is inconsistent with how things work today.  For many years, Fortune 500 companies outsource their high skilled and labor intensive work to the Philippines.  Try calling the telephone number on the back of your credit card; more often than not you will speak with a person sitting in the Philippines who will access your credit card financial information and provide you with exceptional service.  The same situation happens with health and casualty insurance companies who will assist you with your claims from the Philippines.  If Fortune 500 companies take advantage of the lower cost of doing business, why shouldn’t you?

If you read our Terms of Service you will learn that you are hiring a U.S. company whose headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California. The company is owned by two California licensed attorneys and a Harvard MBA, all of whom are U.S. citizens.  Your bookkeeping work is being processed by employees of an affiliated company in Philippines that is owned by the same three individuals.  Want to speak with the CEO, give him a call.  His name is Fred Kumetz and his mobile number is (213)590-8888.  He will be happy to amplify this answer.

eDataQuick is a division of eData Services U.S., LLC.  While eDataQuick is a new division of the company, we have been performing financial services to our clients for almost 20 years. The difference is that we have bundled these services into a separate department within our organization.  One of our founders, Maurice Silberstein, is a CPA and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.  We have primarily serviced doctors, lawyers, and insurance companies in the past, but decided to expand our financial services to a much-needed segment of our U.S. business establishment; small and medium sized businesses.  Take a look at our parent company’s website at www.edataservices.com for more information.

Definitely! We use an encryption process that is similar to what banks, hospitals and insurance companies use.  Simply put, this means that documents and other data that is moved between us through the internet is scrambled before it leaves and is unscrambled after it arrives.  Should a hacker grab the data while moving through the internet, it would be almost impossible to unscramble without having the needed keys to do so.

Additionally, all of your data that is kept on servers is similarly encrypted.  To add additional security, we only store your data on Intuit QuickBooks servers or on other servers owned and operated by companies like Microsoft Azure that are located in the U.S.

Our offices in the Philippines are in a very controlled environment. We screen all of our employees and do background checks.  They are required to sign confidentiality agreements and there are very strict data security laws in the Philippines with severe penalties imposed on people that violate them.  All persons that enter the work area must have special access cards and must punch in a security key in front of a security guard before they can enter.  We have video surveillance throughout the office.  Employee’s access to the internet is limited to what they need in order to do their work.  The ability to download data to thumb drives or other devices as well as exporting data is prevented by us.  While hackers sometimes try to breach our servers, we have systems in place to immediately notify us and take preventive action.  The bottom line is that we have been managing financial and medical data for almost 20 years without any serious problem.

Filipinos speak with a Filipino accent.  Some accents are heavier than others.  We try to employ Filipinos whose accent is not severe and we believe we accomplish this.  You probably come in contact with Filipinos all of the time.  If you’ve visited a hospital lately a great number of Filipinos work as nurses and have no problem communicating with patients and other hospital staff.  Many calls for technical support are handled by Filipinos without a problem.  If you don’t understand something your account managers say, just ask them to repeat themselves or speak slower.  They won’t get insulted.  Similarly, they may also ask you, on occasion, to repeat what you said.

The simple reason is that cash basis accounting requires very little analysis and is much faster to perform than accrual accounting. The cost to a bookkeeping firm is much less when they only do cash accounting.  The skill level of their bookkeepers is less and the salary paid to them is less.  As we will explain below, we will do either cash or accrual reporting; and if you want both, we will do that also.  More important is that what you pay for any of these options is far less than what you would pay a bookkeeper in the U.S.

Before making a selection, you should understand what is involved with each method and how you can use it.  The work performed by a cash basis reporting bookkeeper is to transfer information from your bank and credit card accounts to your bookkeeping software. Once the software has learned your business transactions, which takes a couple of months, the bookkeeping software will automatically categorize your expenses.  Your bookkeeper will rarely be required to manually do any of this work.  The reports you receive are also generated automatically.  At the end of the month, you will only know how much money you received and how much money you spent.  You will not be able to use this information to project future income or expenses or to project your cash flow.  The real reason for cash basis accounting is to pay income taxes at the end of the year only on what you physically received and paid.  If this is all you want to accomplish, we can do that for a lot less than our U.S. based competition.

On the other hand, accrual reporting gives you a lot more information that will help you plan into the future and understand how your business performed in the past.  You can compare the accurate performance between this year and last year, this month and last month, and this month and the same month last year.  As with cash reporting, we also download the information from your bank and credit card accounts and the software automatically categorizes the transactions and reconciles your accounts.  But, it doesn’t stop there.  Our bookkeepers will also analyze your bills and invoices and post due dates extracted from them; post journal entries such as depreciation and prepaid expenses; make journal adjustments and do a myriad of other things.  We will provide you with the same reports you would get from cash reporting plus you will receive reports that will give you a more realistic idea of how much money you have coming in and what you can expect to see on future expense reports and what your company resources actually are.

If you want all of the benefits of cash reporting for income tax purposes while having us process your bookkeeping using accrual reporting, we can do that as well.  Just let us know that you want this done when we get started with your account and we will enter the data so that we can generate the financial reports both ways.  The great part about this is that you do not pay extra for having us process the work both ways. For an idea on the cost check out the samples on the Pricing Page of this website.