The professionals at Porter & Company have been serving small business enterprises since 1971. Our team of experienced professionals is ready to serve you, and we offer a full range of services including:

• Monthly accounting services
• Accounting consulting
• Quickbooks consulting
• Tax planning and preparation
• Reviews and audits
• Business consulting services
• Computer Systems Design, Installation, and Implementation

Porter & Company is a nationally recognized firm. Gary Porter, the owner, has authored several books on accounting, auditing, and tax matters, plus more than 200 technical articles.

We have worked with a diverse group of clientele in various industries including:

• Manufacturers
• Construction contractors
• Professional practices (doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc.)
• Retail sales
• Personal services businesses
• Wholesalers
• Restaurant and fast food operations
• Farmers
• Real estate and insurance brokers

ACCOUNTING SERVICES

Our primary goal in working with the small business owner is to make you more profitable.

We offer traditional accounting services, wherein we will prepare your general ledger and financial statements from source data created by you. In addition, we can send one of our technical staff to your office to assist in the accounting process. For some clients, we access their accounting system via computer to assist in completing the accounting process.

Some businesses have their own accounting staff, and just need some consulting from us to maintain the integrity of the accounting system.

Quickbooks has become the general ledger software of choice for almost 75% of the small business world. Gary Porter participates in Intuit Corporation's Quickbooks Professional Advisor Program. If you need help installing or using Quickbooks, we can help you. We also support other software including Peachtree and Businessworks.

TAX SERVICES

No one benefits more from tax planning than the small business owner. By understanding your business, we can help arrange your tax affairs to minimize taxes. However, that is not our main goal. Our primary goal is to help you maximize profits. Chasing tax savings at the expense of profits is unwise. We are available to prepare your tax returns for whatever type of business entity you are operating as. We can also assist you in determining the proper form of business enterprise for your operations.

REVIEW AND AUDIT SERVICES

Many small CPA firms do not offer review or audit services. But, for many small businesses, the review or audit is an essential service to comply with bank loans or contractual provisions. Porter & Company performs approximately 200 audits and reviews annually. We are very experienced in performing audits, which makes us very efficient at that task. While we don't consider the fee to be the most important factor to consider in selecting an auditor, we are able to keep our fees very reasonable as a result of the efficiency gained by performing numerous audits.

Our unique capability in today's ever-increasing electronic environment is the ability to audit through the computer. We use a computer "utility" program that allows us to access and use your computer transactions, without ever disturbing any of the underlying data. With our program, we can then manipulate the data in any manner we desire. At times, this allows us to generate information that you are unable to retrieve from your own system. This makes us more efficient in our audit procedures, as we can test vast amounts of data in a relatively brief period of time.

Our audit "workpapers" are also unique. We were one of the first firms to move to a completely electronic set of audit workpapers. Our automated audit workpaper program is built on a MS Windows platform using MS Word and MS Excel and scanned images to create all workpapers, ensuring compatibility and easy transferability of information. Again, because we perform all procedures on the computer, we have become extremely efficient.

Our staff is very stable, which means you get the same auditors back year after year. You won't be stuck having to "break in" and "train" new staff members form the CPA firm every year. It is also our philosophy to have the owner of the firm review every audit. And for the larger engagements, he also participates in the audit fieldwork. By stripping away the administrative layers in the CPA firm, we become more efficient. This means you are getting the direct benefit of very experienced auditors.

CONSULTING SERVICES

Porter & Company is available to assist you on many different types of consulting engagements. We have assisted our clients in:

• Profit consulting
• Designing accounting systems
• Selecting and interviewing candidates for accounting positions
• Budgeting
• Financing plans
• Reviewing and reporting on compliance with contractual arrangements

We are available to assist you on these and other matters.

Our profit consulting engagements are rather unique. Our specific goal in such an engagement is to help you maximize business profitability. Over the years, we have discovered that the primary reason business owners don't maximize profits for two reasons, (1) they don't have the proper tools to help them maximize profits, and (2) they don't absolutely focus on the events that maximize profits.

Our profit consulting engagement consists of four steps:

• Identify the events that maximize profits
• Install a system to measure those critical events
• Coach the business owner on the system
• Monitor the system to ensure continued effectiveness

Microsoft and Dell have become dominant in their fields through application of these same processes. Bill Gates and Michael Dell will both tell you (and have in their books) that they "run their business by the numbers." This does not mean strictly an accounting exercise. In his book "The Road Ahead," Bill Gates described an "electronic nervous system" for a business as being a key to success.

Creating the electronic nervous system is the first step in establishing a system to measure profitability events, improve marketing effectiveness, and improving office efficiency.

Please contact us to discuss profit consulting for your business.