About
Who We Are
Accounting Advisor is an accounting and advisory practice working from Phoenix. We are a separate company from the one that builds the software we use, under shared ownership, and we would rather explain that here than have you discover it.
The Two Companies
Accounting Advisor is a separate legal entity from the company that builds Automate Accounting, under shared ownership. We say so first.
Neither is a condition of the other. You can license the software and never speak to us, and you can engage us without moving your books onto it.
An engagement with us is on our paper, invoiced by us, at our own prices, and carrying our own liability. It does not ride on anybody's software invoice.
Two companies, one owner
This firm. The accounting and advisory practice. Our own paper, our own liability.
The software. A separate company, and a separate agreement with you.
Shared ownership means the same people own both companies. It does not mean one is a department of the other: each keeps its own books, signs its own agreements, and carries its own liability. Nothing in the software is unlocked by hiring us, and nothing in our engagement requires you to license it.
Why We Say It This Way
Why we explain it before anybody asks
An arrangement like this is either an advantage you explain or a problem you manage, and which one it becomes is decided entirely by when the other party learns about it. A client who reads it on this page is evaluating a firm that builds its own tools. A client who hears it from their lender in week three of a diligence process is evaluating a firm that kept quiet.
If a lender or auditor asks
When a client’s books are on Automate Accounting and we also run their whole finance function, a lender or an auditor may ask about the combination: a firm under common ownership with the platform the books sit on, preparing everything in them. It is a fair question with a plain answer: the arrangement is disclosed before anybody has to ask, and what makes the books right is the evidence behind them, the same as anyone else’s.
If your books are on Automate Accounting and we run your whole finance function — For You — the engagement carries a written independence assessment. It sets out the shared ownership between us and the platform, so your lender and your auditor can judge your books on their merits. The sign-off stays with your management, and if either of them objects to the arrangement, we will tell you. None of this applies when your books are kept elsewhere.
It is a disclosure about the platform, not about the posture: a client whose books are kept elsewhere is not in that combination. The platform, and what the arrangement means →
Who You Would Be Working With
Accounting Advisor is one person today. He is the sole creator, owner and designer of both this practice and Automate Accounting, the software it runs on — the two separate companies described above, under the same ownership. You are reading that here rather than finding it out later because it is the kind of fact that changes how somebody reads everything else.
There is no account manager between you and the person doing the work. When you write to the firm, he reads it. When your close is prepared, he prepares it.
That has a plain advantage and a plain cost, and both are worth weighing:
- The person keeping your books also built the system they are kept in, so a gap in the tooling is his problem to fix rather than yours to work around.
- One person is one person. Capacity is finite and there is nobody to hand your work to — which is why every engagement is scoped in writing before it starts, and why this firm will say no to work it cannot do properly.
He built Automate Accounting for this practice first — as a way to have software do his job for him when he was the only person running the firm. It is how he describes the work to clients and how he sells it, and it is why this firm's services are grouped the way the software groups what it does.
When there is more than one of us, this section will say so. It says one because that is what is true.
Why the Tool and the Practice Are One Loop
We keep our own books on the same platform we put clients on. When something in it is wrong at month-end, it is wrong for us first.
What that buys you, and what it costs us
Most accounting software is built by people who have never closed a month under a deadline with an auditor waiting, and most accounting firms work in tools they had no hand in. The useful thing about this arrangement is that neither is true here: the close runs on something we use ourselves every month.
It also means we can tell you what the software does not do. A firm with no practice has no cost to overclaiming; we pay for it in our own close.
Where This Is Going
A practice where the routine half of a close is genuinely handled by the system, and our people spend their hours on the judgement calls that actually need them.Where this is going
No date attaches to that, and it is not a commitment. It is the reason we work the way we do rather than a thing you are buying.
Where We Are
2828 N Central Ave, Suite 1000, Phoenix, AZ 85004. Most of the work is remote — the books live in software rather than in a filing cabinet — and we are glad to sit down with you in person when that is useful.
The software company publishes its own account of the relationship, from its side: Automate Accounting on the same two companies →
The first conversation is a look at your books and an honest answer about whether we are the right firm.