In short, we had a poor experience. Almost no communication after initial visit and dropping off paperwork. Absolutely no follow up until the final deadline AFTER the extension. Ron seems to be very competent as a CPA. He was very helpful during the initial visit and explained a number of things we were unclear on and set us on track with accounting for our small (a fairly new) business. But that initial meeting was essentially the only communication we received from the office or Ron. Perhaps you’ll have a better experience if you are larger client (which we are definitely not), but that’s only speculation on my part. To Ron’s credit, he said he may be delayed in responding to emails or returning calls. We still hope to receive a response one day. We received no updates on status approaching extension filing deadline and final deadline. We were called on the FINAL deadline day to come into the office and sign papers with no reasonable opportunity to review them before signing them at the front desk without meeting with Ron or another CPA (mind you this is October 17th 2022 at this point). I’m not exaggerating when I say this was the ONLY call received since our initial visit. Come next year 2023 we received a standard “fill in all your info and drop it in the box” form. We had received no additional feedback on our taxes for 2022 (or what we should have been doing to prepare for this new tax year). We called on February 7th 2023. The front desk patched us over to Ron’s office phone to make an appointment which I though was odd for simply making an appointment. There was no answer and we never received a response to our message. We were done with Ron Schafer & Co at that point. You’ll have to take my word for it, but we are a pretty easy-going people. And we were always polite (the handful of times we were able to communicate with someone usually by coming into the office in person because they would not communicate with us by any other means). Though the initial meeting went great, and we were told we would schedule a follow up meeting to get things in better order for the next year, that meant nothing after nearly a year without any basic minimum communication. Luckily we gleaned enough from our first meeting with Ron and our own research that we were able to get our accounting in order. So in the end, we were able file our own taxes for 2023 well before tax day. In the end, we were treated quite unprofessionally. One last thing. During our initial meeting, we asked Ron if we should start filing estimated taxes and how that works. He told us we would be going over those kind of things pertaining more to the next tax year at a further meeting at some point. And if you’ve read this far, you know there was no subsequent meeting. This was not an issue for our 2021 taxes since our business was really just ramping up at that point (and we had a few w-2’s from fill in jobs and had some money withheld already). Our business did much better during 2022. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of “discovering” at tax-time how self-employment tax is calculated, especially if it’s the first year your business has turned a significant profit, you probably had the same multi-thousand-dollar shock we did. It’s a big surprise if you did not put that money aside. We should have done our due diligence educating ourselves, but these are the kind of things you expect an accountant to help prepare you for. It would have taken one short meeting, phone call, or even email, to save many weeks of added stress. Do not recommend.

After years of using TurboTax I decided to try an accountant last year and it was a huge disappointment. When I went to sign and pick up my taxes I payed what I owed to Schafer and left with the impression that was all that I needed to do. Schafer notified us a couple months later that they needed more info, even though they had said earlier it was complete. It wasn’t until November that we got a notice from the IRS about what we owed plus the interest accrued. We reached out to Schafer via email and phone calls and never heard back, except to file our 2022 taxes with them… Yeah right. Went back to turbotax this year and my AGI from 2021 was incorrect on the return Schafer gave me, causing it to get rejected. I had to verify my identity with the IRS online to get the right number, which was further complicated by the fact that they got my name wrong last year. Thanks for the headache!

Ron has been our small business and personal Accountant for about 12 years. He has always worked hard to keep us going and his work is outstanding. We’ve had a lot of questions over the years and he has always done a great job at answering them in a honest and trustworthy way or directing us to the proper source. Thank you for all the hard work you’ve done, and we look forward to having you as our Accountant for many years to come.