Member of Russell Bedford International, a global network of independent professional service firms.
Member of Russell Bedford International, a global network of independent professional service firms.
In this video, Nick Ashmore, an in-charge accountant at Cray Kaiser, share his experiences and insights about working at the firm. He discusses the diverse opportunities, the supportive and collaborative work environment and the personalized growth plans that help team members explore different areas of interest.
Transcript:
My name is Nick Ashmore. My current position at Cray Kaiser is an in-charge accountant and I am a hybrid between the accounting services and the tax departments. First off, there are a lot of opportunities and they want you to work on what you want to work on. So as I mentioned for the first years or people just coming into this firm they have an idea of what they want to work on or even if they don’t have an idea just try everything and Cray Kaiser will make that possible for them so that you can kind of really figure out what you’re good at develop a niche if that’s what you want to focus on and you could grow from there.
Every time I have an annual review or as we call them now growth plans we set goals for the year that you want to meet and you know you have the standard like billable hours and things like that but then you get to throw some oddballs in there and for me I usually try to include something I haven’t done before. So for instance this year is working on a nonprofit. I know that the nonprofit accounting is a little bit different. I have never done it. Maybe I’ll like it, maybe I won’t, but I at least want to try it and have a general understanding of it.
So they do a good job at meeting the things that you want, which in turn helps you grow because they’re doing things that you like to do or are interested in versus things you’re not interested in.
Their expectations of me were very clear but they also made the path to get them very clear. This stuff’s really easy to follow. As I said, I had a lot of different mentors for different challenges I faced. They helped me get over each and every hurdle. It’s very collaborative and I would also say empowering just because everybody wants to help you, you know, you don’t feel beaten up when you don’t know something. You have somebody you can go ask, they’ll sit with you and make time for you to really break it down and learn it. My learning style is not really being told how to do something, but it’s actually doing it with somebody kind of looking over my shoulder, guiding me through it. That’s how I learn. You know, somebody could tell me you just need to do this, this, and this, and I could get that done, obviously, but I wouldn’t fully understand it until I’ve actually taken and start to finish.
In accounting services, we all sit in the same section. That’s like, I guess, my home department, I would say. You know, we’re kind of talking back and forth over the cubicles, running ideas by each other. We all help each other out. We kind of all have our things that we have handled in the past, so when a problem arises with somebody else, you know, we can easily help them. So those are kind of the goals and values we have at Cray Kaiser here and I think it’s very beneficial for everybody.
In Cray Kaiser’s Employee Spotlight series, we highlight a member of the CK team. We couldn’t be prouder of the team we’ve grown and we’re excited for you to get to know them. This month we’re shining our spotlight on Carl Thomas.
GETTING TO KNOW CARL
Carl is an Assurance Manager at Cray Kaiser. His typical engagements include financial statement audits of mid-sized not-for-profit entities and businesses. He has also been involved in many non-audit projects over the years, such as coordinating the budget process, drafting tax levies, ad hoc operational analysis, monthly reporting, ERP systems implementation assistance and more. “You never know what the issue will be when the phone rings,” says Carl.
Carl joined the CK team in April of 2024. He was excited to join CK because of the warm and supportive environment. Carl was most drawn to the growth-mindset shared by the CK team.
Carl received his Bachelor of Science in Accountancy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Reflecting back on his time at the university he said, “The experience was tough and it taught me a lot of valuable lessons about how to be autonomous, how to advocate for myself and how the little things you do every day add up to the big things one day.”
WHY CK?
As someone motivated by a challenge and the feeling of a job well done once a solution is found, Carl enjoys the variety of projects and clients he assists at CK. “No two projects are ever the same,” he shared. Which is just the way he prefers it.
When asked which of CK’s core values mean the most, Carl answered, “Education resonates the most with me.” He believes each individual owes it to themselves and their clients to never stop learning and always embrace new challenges. Carl explained, “CPA’s owe it to the profession to share their knowledge base with junior employees and new CPA’s so that we can help ensure the quality of the profession for generations to come. When we see potential in someone up and coming, we need to treasure and nurture it.”
For the up-and-coming CPA’s and those new to the industry, Carl suggests the first step to being successful is to find a mentor. Getting to know your mentor, observing how they work and learning from them is an invaluable opportunity. “I have had someone like this at the highest points of my career and I have lacked someone like this at the lowest points of my career. I don’t feel that it can be explained away as a coincidence.”
MORE ABOUT CARL
Do you have a special/hidden talent or hobby?
My hobby is manual-camera black-and-white film photography. I prefer the subdued aesthetic of black and white film over the sanitized and overly vivid digital and phone shots. These photos feel distant and dreamy to me, which is exactly how I like to remember these moments. I have all the equipment and chemicals to process the film. Owning the process from shot to print really gives you a new mindset when you push the shutter button.
What’s your favorite movie or tv show?
My favorite TV show is The Sopranos. James Gandolfini’s mastery of Tony Soprano is unmatched in the history of television. My favorite film is Saving Private Ryan – and not because it’s an action movie. I love this film because Tom Hanks’ character never lost his hope, he never stopped daydreaming, and he never lost his ability to care about people in the midst of the darkness around him.
What’s on your music playlist?
I have diverse music interests! Armor for Sleep, Bcalm & Dontcry, Chihei Hatakeyama, Deftones, Down, Dustin Kensrue, Every Time I Die, Floor, Hammock, Hank Williams Sr., Hank Williams III, The Hope Conspiracy, Hopesfall, Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, Apple Music Lo-Fi Chillhop Study Beats Playlist, Magrudergrind, Nasum, New Found Glory, Neil Young, Palms, Paramore, Pinback, Pig Destroyer, The Receiving End of Sirens, The Smashing Pumpkins, Such Gold, Taking Back Sunday, Team Sleep, Terror, Toro Y Moi, 40 Watt Sun, The War on Drugs, Weekend Nachos.
What was your favorite vacation?
My favorite area to go for vacation is the Orange County, California area. From Santa Monica pier to Disneyland, the Getty Museum, Griffith Observatory, the ocean, the mountains, and much more, there is simply an endless amount of iconic activities and beauty to take in. Southern California weather is also near perfect with warm days and cool nights.
Effective July 1, 2024 certain taxing jurisdictions in Illinois have imposed a local sales tax or changed their local sales tax rate on general merchandise sales. The following taxes are affected:
To be in compliance with the new tax rates, you must adjust your point of sale and/or accounting system to ensure that you will collect and pay the correct sales tax effective July 1, 2024. You may need to contact your software vendor to confirm that they will correct their systems to the appropriate tax rate. Remember that even if you under-collect tax, the tax is still due. That means it will be your responsibility to pay the difference.
To verify your new combined sales tax rate (state and local tax) use the Tax Rate Finder and select rates for July 2024.
The sales tax rate change will affect anyone collecting sales tax in some cities in Cook County, DuPage County, Kane County, Madison County, McHenry County, Stephenson County and other jurisdictions. To see a full list of all the cities impacted and the new rates, please click here.
These rate changes do not impact what is and is not subject to sales tax. As a reminder, most sales are subject to both the state sales tax and the locally imposed sales tax.
Note that some jurisdictions may impose and administer taxes not collected by the Illinois Department of Revenue. Contact your municipal or county clerk’s office for more information.
If you have any questions regarding the sales tax rate change, please don’t hesitate to contact Cray Kaiser today or call us at (630) 953-4900.
Nick Ashmore, an In-Charge Accountant at Cray Kaiser talks about his path to becoming an in-charge accountant. He shares about the culture at CK along with everything he learned during his journey.
Transcript:
My name is Nick Ashmore. My current position at Cray Kaiser is an in-charge accountant and I am a hybrid between the accounting services and the tax departments.
So on the accounting side, I am handling a lot of quarterly payroll, quarterly financial statement compilations. I am assisting with accounting consulting, sporadically as clients need assistance with journal entries or purchases they’re making and how to record things. I assist with a lot of tax returns, mainly during tax season and the tax extension filing deadlines. I do sales tax. I am currently learning depreciation, the ins and outs and becoming the go-to person for the accounting services department. I do a lot of different things.
Cray Kaiser has met every single expectation, want and need that I anticipated when I first started. I was looking for a firm with resources for me and them. I was looking for the collaborative almost tight-knit community vibe from the firm which I did get as well. I’ve made some great friends or great co-workers. You know, you’re here nine to five every single day five days a week for years, you don’t always want to just be work, work, work, got to have a little bit of play involved, a little bit of that relationship aspect on what’s going on with people’s lives, so to say. So like, you know, we have meetings every Monday where we go over what we’re working on, what we need help on, the basics and accounting, but you know, it’s also, what’d you do this weekend? You went shopping, what’d you get?
My first year here, I think I learned more than my previous three years in accounting from two different firms combined and that was exactly what I was looking for in my next position and why I ultimately chose to come on board with Cray Kaiser. They had the resources and the staff to kind of train and tailor my skillset to what was needed.
My first year at Cray Kaiser, I had never done a financial statement compilation, whether it’s an annual, quarterly or monthly. It’s just something I haven’t had experience with. So there was a learning curve there, but eventually I got the basics down, was able to apply my accounting knowledge to it once I learned the processes and the ins and outs of the client. So I’d say that was a big achievement for me and it was something that I’ve used ever since. So it was a good skill to learn and knowledge to have.
They had a great onboarding process. For the first couple months even though I had a couple years of experience, it was essentially a lot of training, learning the ins and outs of the firm, the softwares that you use, the processes they have in place. They were more up-to-date. I was looking for someone up-to-date technology wise, you know, and paper files are going away. We want everything on our computer, digitally, at the tips of our fingers. They have all that, which helps you increase efficiency and productivity. There are challenges out there. I went through trainings, I asked questions, and I learned a lot.
In this third audio blog in a series about business valuations, Micah Vant Hoff, a principal at CK, explains the business valuation services we provide to our clients. Many different levels and layers of services are offered under the business valuation umbrella.
Transcript:
My name is Micah Vant Hoff. I’m a principal at Cray Kaiser. We rather than doing the formal reporting a lot of the time, a lot of time business owners just want to know, what’s a range of what my business is worth? Or what would you put it at? Or, you know, I’ve received this offer. Is this within the right range? Does this offer make sense for me? Or should I be looking for more?
And what we do, because we have access to all of these business valuation resources. Because we have the ability to source and review comps. Because we have the ability to consult these various resources, and also the experience in doing this work, we’re able to either evaluate offers that businesses have received and tell them this is within the expected range or this is not. Or if there is no offer on the table if there’s just a question of value we can use some of our models that we’ve developed to drive an expectation as to value to come up with a range that is indicative of what this business is likely worth and help owners that way be able to position themselves in the discussions with potential purchasers or to even position themselves with whether they’re going out to a business broker or just starting to consider it. They at least have this idea of what they believe their business is worth and then the negotiation effectively starts from that point oftentimes.
I would note too that while we talk about business valuation, there’s many different levels and layers of the services that we offer within that umbrella. So we can be doing a formal business valuation report which is a 40 to 150 page report with the NACFA specified sections and walks you through kind of front to back what this business is, what the economic considerations are, buildup of the discounts, how we’re valuing the business, what methods we’re using. A very comprehensive analysis and reporting of business value. But a lot of business owners come to us and they’re not looking necessarily for that level of depth and detail. They just really want the question answered of what is my business worth? And we have various other consultative things that we can do to help educate them both on the business valuation, business sale process, and drivers of value, as opposed to necessarily going through a full formal business valuation.
So there are ways that we can answer that question for them or help them start to think about how to answer that question without doing a full blown valuation. And that’s, I would say, in the past couple of years we’ve done even more of that. Just as there’s a lot of M & A activity out there, there’s a lot of interest from whether it’s private equity or larger businesses in acquiring and smaller businesses, closely-held companies. And so we were able to plug in alongside our clients, our smaller businesses, to be be able to give them the resources that they need that they’re looking for to effectively enter into these discussions and be able to understand the steps involved, walk through the process and feel like they’re educated in that process and not just being taken along for the ride.
Accounting & Tax Specialist
We are all aware that it is common for a business to have employees and independent contractors performing their work. But there is a big question to ask yourself as a business executive – are we classifying our employees and independent contractors correctly? It is critical that businesses correctly determine this classification due to the following:
Following the release of the 2021 Independent Contractor Rule, in which the Department of Labor (DOL) provided guidance on the classification of independent contractors versus employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), misconceptions and room for inconsistencies with the law arose.
Effective March 11th, 2024, a new final rule regulation (RIN 1235-AA43) was released. This new rule revises the “economic reality test” that determines workers’ status under the FLSA. The main goal is to make sure workers are protected, classified properly, and that they receive the wages earned.
The new rule consists of a new economic reality test for employers to use to determine whether a worker should be treated as an employee or independent contractor. The test includes six factors, which increased from the five factors included in the previously released 2021 rule.
The following are the six factors to consider under current law.
With the newly updated final rule for independent contractors, it’s a good time to review your vendor relationships for proper reporting. Beyond compliance with the FLSA, employers should be certain the determination of an employee or independent contractor is consistent with IRS guidance.
We hope this information is helpful. If you’d like to discuss the new Act and its effect on your situation, please contact the experts at Cray Kaiser at (630) 953-4900. For more information on Tax Guidelines for Independent contractors, please visit our blog.
In the following videos, Damian Contreras, an in-charge tax accountant, who was formerly an intern at Cray Kaiser, gives an inside perspective about what it is like to be an intern at CK. If you are an aspiring professional seeking insights into the inner workings of CK, these videos offer a glimpse into the realm of an accounting internship.
My name is Damian Contreras and I’m an in-charge tax accountant. I was looking around and I already had a job lined up for a big four internship and I wanted to see what smaller firms had to offer as well. And I found Cray Kaiser and after interviewing and meeting with the people I thought it would be a great fit to try out a very hands-on tax season internship.
I noticed that the bigger firms you’re more stuck in, one area versus at Cray Kaiser, you can work in all departments in any given day and that’s one of the factors on why I chose working here. It started out heavy in hands-on training and then we started preparing simple tax forms 1099s. I gravitated more towards business returns my initial year here so I worked heavily in preparing business returns for some of our smaller family-owned businesses that we have. And then like everyone else I moved into the individual 1040 land which is also a very heavy season here. Preparing business returns initially was my favorite because they balance in the end and as an accountant that was very, it was gratifying.
Just how much you can learn if you’re willing to and that small amount of time I remember during my interviews they told me everything I’d learned in three months span and I got off the phone and laughed. I was like there’s no way that’s going to happen and then after the internship I walked away saying wow I’ve learned a lot and you know they invited me back and I was like just think about how much more I can learn in another three month span there. I worked into the summer and through the next fall and tax season and they’re very big on putting you in even on their firm CPE trainings as an intern. While you don’t need it they want you to be there to hear the new standards that are coming out and to partake in all the extra education opportunities beyond just basic intern training.
I’ve found that recently it’s a very energetic culture, especially when we’re here during tax season until ten or eleven o ‘clock at night. We have a lot of fun and we play games or talk over the cubicle walls. You know when we’re working our Saturday weekends we have Saturday games in the cafeteria that turn into competitions audit versus tax.
I’ve always liked the open-door policy that everyone has to ask questions and come in and talk and work on your own development with them.
My name is Damian Contreras and I’m an in-charge tax accountant. Bring a willingness to learn. It’s one of our values as education. And I’ve seen other interns here and I assisted in running the internship program. You need the willingness to learn and try to research on your own. A lot of things you can at least come into the meeting with understanding because if you don’t and they’re explaining it to you, you’re going to be lost. So it’s definitely that education and wanting to learn, especially in our industry, it’s ever changing every year with new regulations.
My second internship, they actually let me assist in running some of the trainings and kind of taking charge of the intern group. And we start out normally on Martin Luther King Day because everyone has the day off and we hit the ground running with 1099 trainings and then, we work into our business trainings and then eventually individuals in certain complex areas will have separate trainings, Then we’re giving you hands -on work. You’re in there preparing the returns, asking questions, you will get some contact with the clients. We’re going to put you out on audit engagements. One of my colleagues and I were talking about that this morning trying to schedule everything out because we want the internship experience to give you well-rounded as a whole. We don’t want you to only see tax. We want you to see audit because that’s the big question you get audit or tax. So without seeing both, how do you know to make that decision?
Amy Langfelder
CPA | CK Principal
As a business owner, the first quarter of each year can be a blur. You work to finalize the prior year’s operating results and complete tax reporting in a timely manner so you can focus on the current year’s operations. As changes occur in tax legislation, this becomes increasingly difficult as different information is being requested from the outside accounting firm and more time is needed to comply. You feel the impact of staff shortages in your company, and you hear murmurs of this occurring at your accounting firm too. Before you know it, you are having a conversation about tax extensions. Which only means more uncertainty in the weeks ahead as you continue to wind down operating results from the prior year and continue to stay afloat in the current year. If this sounds familiar to you, read on. We will offer some considerations to make year-end more manageable and simultaneously allow you to have control of your financial reporting all year long.
Implementing the following tips throughout 2024 will help streamline your financial reporting, plan for tax obligations and bring a sense of “certainty” in uncertain times.
As we embark on the second quarter of 2024, we have plenty of time to make some tweaks so that the year-end scramble is more manageable and will allow you to be confident as you approach 2025. Contact Cray Kaiser at 630-953-4900 to help you understand how you can implement some of these tips today.
In this second audio blog in a series about business valuations, Micah Vant Hoff, a principal at CK, explores the three primary approaches to business valuation and gives insights into each method.
Transcript:
My name is Micah Vant Hoff. I’m a principal at Cray Kaiser. There’s three broad approaches to business valuation. There’s the market approach, which would be comparable to thinking about the real estate market, where you have quite often value determined based on looking at comparable properties, right? In the same area, trying to get as close to your subject property, your house, for example, as possible, and then deriving the value of your property based on those comparable properties around you. So that would be real estate, but the same is true for business valuation. Under the market approach, you would be looking for comparable property, not properties, but businesses that have sold recently and using the parameters to try to pull in the most comparable ones, and then using various metrics to compare to your business and deriving a value off of that. So that’s approach one is the market approach.
Approach two is the cost approach, which for most businesses, I would say is generally not applicable. The cost approach is looking at what is the value of your assets minus the value of your liabilities, and that’s really the value of your business. Most businesses that we deal with generate income or have some other value to them to where a cost approach would be understating the value of that company, the value of that business, because most businesses generally speaking, if they’re profitable and if they’re in growing industries, their value would be greater than the difference between assets and liabilities.
And then the third approach that’s used is the income approach. This is the one that we use most frequently. We consider all approaches, but the one that we come to most frequently and weigh most heavily is the income approach. That is looking at the expected future cash flows from operations, the expected future income that the business is anticipated to generate, and then capitalizing or discounting those future cash flows into a model, an income-based model that then backs into and derives what the value of the business is under that approach.
As we observe International Women’s Day, we want to recognize and celebrate the strong women of Cray Kaiser. These women make invaluable contributions to the accounting profession and are blazing a bold path forward for women’s equality in the world.
At Cray Kaiser, we are proud that 50% of our team is made up of women, with the firm being 66% women-owned. These talented women provide expert accounting, tax and advisory services to our clients.
As we work towards a more equitable future, International Women’s Day reminds us to continue to champion women’s empowerment and equal opportunities across all sectors and roles. Our world is better when diverse perspectives and backgrounds are represented and valued.
Please join us in celebrating the remarkable achievements of women in accounting and financial services this International Women’s Day!
