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Thinking about switching your CPA? Here is how it actually works.

Almost nobody hiring a CPA is starting fresh. You are leaving someone, and the friction of the switch is what keeps you stuck. It is a smaller project than it feels like.

The real obstacle

Nobody stays with the wrong CPA out of loyalty. They stay because leaving feels like a project.

In fifteen years I have onboarded a lot of clients. Almost none of them left their last CPA over a catastrophe. They left because the relationship had quietly stopped being worth what it cost, and they had been meaning to do something about it for a year or two.

The thing keeping you in place is rarely the work. It is the friction you are picturing. An awkward conversation with someone you have used for a decade. A worry that years of history will fall through the cracks in the handoff. A vague sense that the timing is never quite right. I want to take those one at a time, because every one of them is smaller than it looks from where you are standing.

The awkward conversation mostly does not happen. You are not required to explain yourself, and a CPA losing a client is not surprised by it. In practice you send one short email, or you let me request your file directly, and it is done. Firms hand client records back and forth constantly. For your old CPA it is a Tuesday.

The history does not get lost. Prior returns, depreciation schedules, loss carryforwards, and basis records all travel with you. I request them as part of onboarding, and where an IRS transcript is cleaner than waiting on a busy office, Form 8821 lets me pull it directly. You do not chase a single document.

Michael Cowell going through three years of prior tax returns with a new client over coffee.
A first working session after a switch: coffee, the last three years of returns, and a plan for the rest of them.

The process

Three steps, and I handle most of them.

Here is the whole switch, start to finish. You are in the first conversation and on three signature lines. Everything in between is on me.

  1. The first call

    Thirty minutes, free, no commitment. We talk through why you are considering a change and what your situation actually needs. If staying where you are is the right answer, I will tell you that, and we will both have spent half an hour well.

  2. The handoff

    I send the records request to your current CPA, prepare the engagement letter, and file Form 8821 if transcript access will make the review cleaner. You sign three documents. The prior-firm follow-ups, and the work of making sense of whatever they send back, stay on my side of the line.

  3. The first thirty days

    I run a discovery review of your last three years of returns, flag anything open or mispositioned, and we meet for a working session. You leave it with a written plan for the rest of the year, not a vague assurance that things are handled.

Switching mid-year? It is easier than year-end, not harder

The instinct is to wait until after tax season. Mid-year is actually the calmer time to move. Nothing is mid-deadline, so the discovery review gets done properly instead of in a rush. Your prior CPA is not buried under filing-season volume, so the handover is faster. And the planning year is still open, which means anything the review turns up can still change your outcome for the current year. Switch in December and most of the levers for the year have already been pulled.

The discovery review

The first review almost always finds something.

This is not a sales line, it is arithmetic. Three years of returns prepared by someone filing them correctly but not thinking about them tend to leave money on the table. Here is what turns up most often.

Entity structure left on autopilot

A business that outgrew its LLC two years ago and never made the S-corp election, or made the election and never set a reasonable salary to go with it.

The QBI deduction taken short

The qualified business income deduction gets fiddly above the income thresholds. A rushed return often stops at the first limitation instead of working the calculation all the way through.

Depreciation left simple

Property placed in service on straight-line depreciation when a cost segregation study and bonus depreciation would have pulled real deductions into the years you needed them.

Estimated payments on a stale safe harbor

Quarterly payments still sized to a year the business earned far less, quietly handing the IRS an interest-free loan until the refund comes back.

Not every one of these lands on every return. But across three years, the review usually recovers a meaningful share of the first year's fee before any forward-looking planning even starts.

Start here

The first call is free. It costs you thirty minutes and nothing else.

Tell me why you are thinking about a change. If a switch is right, I will make it painless. If it is not, I will say so.

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