Stephen L. Nelson, a leader in the CPA community
In late July when I was doing research online for creating my new MashupX company as an LLC in the state of Washington, I found a great resource online by author and CPA and MBA Stephen L. Nelson, at his website: http://www.stephenlnelson.com/.
Stephen is the author of QuickBooks for Dummies, Quicken for Dummies, and Excel for Dummies, and has sold around a half a million books worldwide over the past years (just click on Books on his web site to see a list of some of his publications).
One of the great resources on his website is a Do-it-yourself LLC Formation for all Fifty States eBook offering. I ended up buying the eBook version for the state of Washington, the premium version (PDF and Word files) for $49. While I could have stepped through and eBook and created my own LLC online, I realized that Stephen’s office is in Redmond, WA and only about 4 miles from where I live in Kirkland. I had some questions about various company formation options as well as questions preparing general accounting and taxes, so I setup an hour with him a few days later. It cost $235 for the hour with him, and I not only left with every one of my questions answered with additional great advise, I also left with my application all filled in online for applying for the new LLC. The next afternoon, I received a confirmation email from the office of the Secretary of State in Washington approving and confirming the formation of my LLC. I then had to register my new business which was easy with the included document in the LLC formation kit.
I also bought Stephen’s book called QuickBooks 2008 for Dummies (rated with 5 full stars on Amazon) in the Kindle eBook format since I recently bought a copy of QuickBooks 2008 Pro.
Stephen is the type of CPA who helps people as much as he can with his website content and books, and tries to focus on having clients who he can help the most. For example, he encouraged me to do as much as I can myself and then just hire a tax accountant for tax purposes. He said he would be best used for taxes if I were to ever convert my LLC into an S Corporation which requires more complex tax consulting.
Even if you are not located in the Seattle area or in the state of Washington, Stephen’s website has a ton of great resources for businesses, accounting, and taxes including a great FAQ page. If there was some type of MVP program for CPAs for contribution to the self employed business community, Stephen would get my nomination.
