It’s really simplifying the tax and accounting experience for business owners.

I am not a small business owner, so I won’t pretend to know how painful the process of bookkeeping for an entire business is.

I am, however, an individual who does his own taxes, hates the time it takes, and dreads the day the IRS imprisons me for not properly declaring how much money I spend on Skittles.

If the process of financial accounting for one person is horrible, it’s safe to assume that trying to keep books for a company is that much worse. So to all those small business owners in despair, swamped by endless numbers and mountainous stacks of papers, know that there is an alternate solution: Tax Alli.

“To manage finances, there has kind of been two routes a business owner could go,” CEO Zach Olson told Beehive Startups. “The first and more traditional is hiring a local CPA, a local accountant, to deal with it. Which is pretty archaic, a lot of traditional accountants are operating under the very old business model of billing by the hour…The other approach is a do-it-yourself software, like QuickBooks or TurboTax. Great technology, cool concept, but a lot of them have been built for accountants. If you really try to dissect QuickBooks, you have to understand accounting methods and principles to maximize and use the software.”

Serving over 500 different small businesses spread across America, from every possible background imaginable, Tax Alli was created to simplify the process of accounting for business owners. Instead of forcing customers to choose between the two different routes (human or technical), Tax Alli combines them.

“We’ve built out a simplified, cloud-based accounting system synced with over 9,000 financial institutions — credit cards, banks, major payment portals like PayPal — and that data gets sent to us automatically by the bank,” Olson said. “More importantly, we’re injecting some human capital behind the technology. We have an actual in-house accounting team doing all the work and delivering it through cloud-based technology.”

This might be a generalization, but I’m going to state that most small business owners didn’t start a company so they could sharpen up on their accounting skills. If we’re going off this assumption, then any accounting work takes time away from the real reason for creating a business — because we all want to be a part of creating something successful.

Tax Alli saves you that time, and in turn allows you to concentrate on more important things, like destroying your employees in ping pong or firing the ones that beat you.

“We’ll do everything from reconciling all their transactions, basically doing all the bookkeeping, to profit/loss balance sheets, payroll, end-of-year tax filing, and quarterly estimates,” Olson said. “Then we also provide year-round Q&A support. If a small business is getting ready to buy some computers and equipment, or they get a letter in the mail from the IRS and don’t know exactly what it means, they have access to our in-house accounting team to really get the information they need to make better decisions running their business.”

Tax Alli’s pricing is based on a monthly subscription model, with varying plans offered depending on what stage your business is at. Just because you’ve spent untold hours scrabbling together the finances of your business, doesn’t mean you always have to.

“It’s really simplifying the tax and accounting experience for business owners,” Olson said. “Real-time access to their data and a 360-degree view to what’s going on with their business…we’re a SaaS company with a human element.”

Published 4/27/2015