James D. Sharpe, CPA
I learned to program first, and this combination allows me insights that most of my colleagues don't have.
Two ways in
Tax, books and advisory from a CPA who has done the work — plus software written for the trade you are actually in, starting with fuel jobbers.
See what I do for businesses If you are a CPACalculators, industry applications and the field notes — written by a CPA who codes, for the people doing the same work I do.
See what I do for CPAsWhat I do
The accounting work tells me what the software has to prove. The software makes the accounting work possible at a price a small operator can pay.
Returns, planning and the books behind them, for closely held businesses and the people who own them.
Counties, districts and the funds they answer for. I spent three years inside a county treasury and know where the money actually gets lost.
Advisory work. I do not perform attest engagements.
Generic accounting software is generic because it has to be. I write programs that assume the industry — its filings, its units, its margins.
Tools for CPAs
Prior-year and current-year tests side by side, with the quarterly instalments that follow from each.
Failure to file, failure to pay and interest, run out over the months the client actually sat on it.
S corporation against LLC against schedule C, on one set of numbers, including payroll tax.
Planning materiality, performance materiality and the sample the conclusion needs.
Type A and type B thresholds and the coverage rule, for a single audit that will hold up.
What a billing rate has to be before overhead, write-downs and the hours nobody bills for.
These run inside your portal account. Free downloads live on the software page. Everything for CPAs →
Industry software
Cardlock and remote sales generate more tax detail than any small office can key by hand. So we stopped keying it.
Sales tax recovery and amendments, filing automation and an aggregator that takes cardlock and remote-sale detail straight through to a return. Built for jobbers and the convenience stores attached to them.
Field notes
Every one of these cost somebody something. Written down plainly so a younger CPA can read it in five minutes instead of learning it the way I did.
A schedule that footed, tied to the trial balance, and referenced a number nobody had traced to source. It held for two years. Here is what I do differently now, and the one question that would have caught it.
Tell me the episode and I will draft it in your voice for your approval — title, the setup, what went wrong, and what you would tell someone to do instead.
Background
Governmental auditing became the centre of the work, and stayed there for the best part of three decades.
With more than 2,000 hours of audit experience behind the signature.
Under Steven L. Harrah, CPA. The office moved off cash and checks onto card and check-scanning systems, put in a new tax voucher system, improved the tax collection system, and instituted summary judgment for unsecured taxes. Tax collections and the Office of Revenue Collection both improved.
Working with Ryan Rogers and Mike Howard, and building accounting programs for the private sector.
Contact
Uploading them to the portal keeps them off email servers. You sign in, drop the files, and they land in your account rather than in an inbox.