All Forum Posts by: Laura Newton

Hi All

We are looking for an accountant that specializes in multifamily real estate deals (5+ units).

Unfortunately/fortunately, we are not locked into a specific state currently so an accountant that has experience in multiple states may be a better route.

Does anyone have good recommendations?

Looking for an accountant to help my family flipping business. 

My wife and I are HI W2 and business owners. We have a primary home, short-term rentals as well as paper investments. Early last year we started looking for our first tax planning partner.
In March 2023 we started conversations with True Books. In April we closed the tax planning combo with them. There was an onboarding phase, which was mostly about uploading our financial docs and answering questions. About a month later we had our meeting with our sponsor CPA. From the start we could tell she hadn't read any of the questions we carefully answered nor reviewed any of the sensitive documents we uploaded during onboarding. The CPA was clearly knowledgeable and answered all our questions. She also provided further information - after the meeting, via email - about aspects of points we discussed. All of them boilerplate emails.
The meeting was mostly passive. It was probably the most expensive Q&A we have ever paid for. After the meeting there was no action plan other than doing a cost segregation study on the properties we had. That was it! Any YT vid gives you that. There was no tailored strategy on the best way to save taxes by investing in real estate or otherwise. There was no scheduling for further calls. All and any of our questions moving forward were addressed via email. Sometimes with a significant delay.
In July we were prompted to answer a feedback survey. We were thoughtful about every word we wanted to send, so that we wouldn't be unfair to what they had promised to offer. We review the text 4 times before shipping. Weeks later we received an answer from their CEO. The email was short and challenged us by implying we were looking for investing planning and not tax planning. We felt gaslighted. And $5,000 poorer.
Over the course of our relationship, we barely used 10 hours of their time, including the onboarding, the meetings and email communication. My wife thinks we used not even 5. But who's counting?
I wanted to drop this review so that future clients are aware of what they are getting into. Make sure you are going to get your money's worth.
One more thing: Matt claims they have now fixed their staffing issue and fine tuned the business. Good for them! We are not coming back. Neither is our investment. We can only hope future clients get their expected return. Good luck!

I was really excited to use Truebooks when we first hear of them.  They sounded very promising and seem like they was right for the job, so we hired them to do our 2022 tax and to help do our tax planning for 2023.  Soon after the start of the new year of 2022 and when tax season started getting busy, their quality of communication and response time start to degraded extremely bad.  Also I was very disappointing that even thought we provided our tax information to our CPA a month before the tax deadline we still had file an extension for our tax.  We worked so hard to provide that all the information the CPA need and wanted and at the end it was wasted of our time and effort.  On top of the extension, we had to continuously ask over and over, and over for updates.  It was extremely painful.  Worst part, we missed many opportunity during this time.  

I paid thousand of dollars to do tax planning and I got two meeting so far with not tax planning, just chatting.  I would not recommend them.

 I made a tracker based on the IRS audit guide. Its free on our site, but happy to share a link if anyone is interested