By Monarch Tax & Advisory LLC
Accounting and tax for vocational experts and expert witnesses. We have seen behind the curtain.
You spend your time evaluating employability, earning capacity, and work limitations. You prepare reports, testify, and prepare for hearings and trials. You should not also be chasing unpaid invoices, reconciling six different payment methods, or guessing what you owe in taxes. We work with vocational experts and related expert witnesses who want their financial house in order so they can focus on their cases.
THE STORY
How a first-year vocational expert went from AR chaos to clarity.
A vocational expert came to us after a busy first year in practice. They were taking payments through PayPal, QuickBooks Payments, Venmo, and checks. Money was arriving in the bank, but invoices in QuickBooks did not line up. They were new to the software and had been matching deposits to the wrong invoices.
On paper, accounts receivable showed large, very old balances. In reality, much of that work had been collected. We could not tell which cases were still unbilled, which deposits had been applied correctly, or which law firms and parties genuinely owed money for reports. The client had no clear way to look at their books and understand what was going on. It was costly to clean up.
We helped implement a unified billing and invoicing system. Engagement letters, retainers, invoices, and CVs now flow through one process, and that system sends clean information into QuickBooks. Reconciliation became straightforward. The AR mess disappeared, and the client finally had an accurate picture of what was outstanding and what was paid.
Once the foundations were in place, our work together shifted. Our time stopped going to constant untangling and pestering. We moved to focusing on tax planning, cash flow, and retirement contributions, and the client focused on preparing reports and getting ready for trial.
We work with vocational experts and expert witnesses who run real practices. They have steady referrals from attorneys and solid hourly rates. On the surface, the work is going well. They are busy. Inside the books, there are common patterns.
You:
- Attorneys directing clients to direct pay or confusion on who still needs to pay.
- Accept checks, ACH, credit cards, and payment apps (how many are there you might have found out by now), and the deposits do not tie cleanly to invoices.
- You often begin work after a phone call or email, with no standard engagement letter or retainer agreement. Each firm gets a slightly different deal, and there is no single place that clearly states scope, rates, and retainers.
- Handle several types of work under one roof, for example, Social Security hearings, divorce earning capacity evaluations, personal injury cases, consulting, and coaching each with its own billing and payment process.
- Do not have a simple way to see what is outstanding by firm, by case, or by month.
Generic small business systems like QuickBooks are not designed for this. The result is messy books, confusing AR, and confusion when you ask yourself, "What did I actually earn, and what is still out there?"
The downstream money problems
When the foundation is messy, it affects more than your bookkeeping.
Uncollected or Delayed Fees
Weak Tax Projections
Underused Retirement Savings
What working together looks like
We start with a diagnostic, then we fix what is broken, then we keep it clean going forward. Pricing is fixed and you will know what it costs before we start.
What working together looks like
We start with a diagnostic, then we fix what is broken, then we keep it clean going forward. Pricing is fixed and you will know what it costs before we start.
Most CPAs have never seen the inside of a vocational expert practice. We have.
We understand that your calendar is driven by hearings, evaluations, and trial dates, not by a steady weekly schedule. A handful of firms can represent a large share of your revenue. Case load and income can swing sharply from quarter to quarter. You often combine expert work with other professional activities such as consulting or training.
You do not have to explain why a trial month looks different from a quiet month, or why a large receivable from one firm affects your decisions. That saves time and allows us to work directly on solutions that fit the way your practice actually runs.
Let me take a look
We offer a free sixty-minute diagnostic for
You send your QuickBooks file (or current bookkeeping export), your most recent tax return(s), and a current AR aging report.
During the call, we will walk you through what is working, what is not, and the most important changes to improve cash flow, clarity, and tax planning. At the end, we will outline what it would look like to fix the issues we identified and what that would cost. You can decide in your own time whether you want help with the implementation.