Ledgerly Books
One company per file.
That is the whole problem.
Every accounting package is built for one company. So six companies means six files that cannot see each other. The moment one of them pays another's bill, the two halves live in different files and nobody can tell whether they agree. The transfer gets entered once. The balance sheet stops tying. Nobody finds out until March.
This keeps all of them in one place, and records both halves itself.
For anyone who owns more than one company. You do not need an accountant to use it, and we do not keep your books for you. It is software.
6 Powerful Accounting & Tax Engines Built Into One Subscription
Stop paying $90+/month per company file and fixing broken intercompany transfers at tax time. Ledgerly reads the original legal and financial documents and posts audit-proof double-entry books across all your entities:
What it deliberately does not do
- It does not guess at depreciation. It computes it — MACRS lives and conventions checked against IRS Publication 946, land and building kept apart, closing costs capitalised — and posts the charge to a journal you can see. What it will not do is decide a §179 election or a bonus election for you: those are choices with a filing consequence, and they stay yours.
- It does not run payroll. No tax tables, no deposits, no 941s — that is your provider's job. Bring their register and books records it properly: the wages, the tax you are holding for your employees, and what the payroll actually cost you once the employer's share is counted.
- Bank statements, CSVs, and optional live feeds. You can drop a bank PDF, export a CSV from your bank, or connect a live bank feed. Importing the same month twice changes nothing — every line is fingerprinted, so a second import can only tell you what it already had.
- It does not file anything. No tax positions, no returns, no advice.
- And it never posts on its own. A document becomes a proposed entry with both sides shown, and a person agrees. A model that categorises confidently is a model that is confidently wrong occasionally — and "occasionally" in a ledger is a number somebody files.
We do not keep your books for you. There is no bookkeeping service behind this, nobody doing the work overnight, nobody to blame in April. It is software you run — and the reason it is worth running is that it knows your companies are related, which no single-company package ever will.
Invoices and bills, precisely
Asked directly, so the answer is not inferred from a feature list. An invoice you RECEIVE is a document: it is read, recorded as a vendor bill against the right company in the right period, tracked on your Accounts Payable (AP) aging schedule, and the paper stays attached to the entry. Rent you are OWED has a schedule, an ageing list and receipts, and customer invoices you RAISE are tracked on your Accounts Receivable (AR) aging schedule until collected.
What is not here: transmitting money out of your bank account. Books tracks what customers owe you (AR aging), what you owe suppliers (AP aging), and blocks subcontractor payments when a W-9 or COI is missing, while the actual wire, ACH, or check originates from your bank.
How to judge whether it works
Take a year you have already finished — in QuickBooks, in a spreadsheet, anywhere — and put it through this. Then look at whether the companies tie to each other.
If it finds three real things, each pointing at a document, the value is obvious in one sitting and needs no explaining. If you own several companies, the first one it finds is usually a transfer that only got entered once.
If it surfaces forty things and thirty are noise, it is worse than nothing because a list nobody trusts is a list nobody reads. We would rather miss something than waste your afternoon.
Give it a hard year
Everything above runs today. What we want now is the awkward real cases: if you have two to six entities and a closed year we could test against, we want to hear from you. That year is worth more to us than a description of the problem.
Day one: before a single document
Three things happen before you send anything, and the third is the one every other package makes you regret later.
Say which companies
- You
- Name them. One, or twenty. If your accountant already uses Ledgerly, your companies are already there and you tick the ones you want books for.
- It
- Puts them UNDER you rather than side by side, so "my companies" becomes a thing that exists. It also records what each one is: a partnership, a holding company, the one that owns the building, the one that is dormant this year.
You get: every company in one place from the first minute, instead of six files that will never see each other.
A chart that already fits what you own
- It
- Starts you with accounts for what you actually hold: land and building kept apart, accumulated depreciation, each mortgage, partner capital, and an intercompany account per company so a transfer has somewhere to land.
- You
- Rename anything, add anything, delete what you will never use. It is your chart.
You get: the accounts you were going to have to invent, on the first day rather than in month four when something will not post.
Where you are starting from
- You
- Hand it last year's closing figures in whatever form you have them: a trial balance PDF from your accountant, a spreadsheet, an export from the package you are leaving.
- It
- Reads the trial balance, maps each line onto your chart, shows you the mapping to correct, and will not open the books until the opening balances balance. It also keeps the cheques and deposits that had not cleared yet, separately, so your first bank reconciliation is possible.
You get: an opening position that ties, and a date before which nothing is yours to explain.
A company with no history starts at zero and skips step three. Nothing here assumes you are coming from somewhere else.
Every day: who does which part
Nothing is posted to your ledger by software. At every stage below the product proposes and you approve. That is why each box says what you do and what it does, separately.
You send it the pile. Bank statements, invoices, receipts, mortgage statements, closing statements from a title company. It reads them, works out the two sides, and shows you the entry before it posts anything.
When something does not connect, it asks, and it says exactly what would answer it. Not "could not process": "your mortgage statement shows escrow and this company has no escrow account. Do you have the escrow analysis?"
Send the pile
- You
- Upload whatever you have, in whatever order it came: bank statements, leases, invoices, closing statements, a photograph of a receipt taken in a car park.
- It
- Reads each one locally first and only asks a model about pages it cannot name itself. Nothing is sorted by you beforehand.
You get: every document on file, including the ones that could not be read. Those are kept, not rejected, so a better reader can try again later.
Read what came back
- It
- Names each document, pulls out the terms it states, and shows the sentence each figure came from, so you check the reading against the page, not against our word for it.
- You
- Correct anything read wrongly, in place. What the document said is kept beside your correction, so nothing erases the evidence.
You get: a reading you can audit, and a correction that teaches the reader every document of that form from then on.
Say what it is, once
- It
- Proposes which company each document belongs to, which building, and which account. It says why, with the rule or the authority behind it.
- You
- Confirm or change it. A name you teach it once is remembered: the building you call "the Neal Street place" is matched from then on.
You get: documents filed against the right company and a vocabulary that is yours rather than ours.
The bank, and what the money actually was
- You
- Export the CSV, or drop the statement PDF in with everything else. Several accounts, several companies, whatever order.
- It
- Matches each line against entries it already has, so a receipt you sent last week and the payment that cleared this week become ONE transaction. What it cannot match it codes by a rule you taught it once, by payee, and what it still cannot place it leaves in a list rather than guessing an account.
- You
- Code the leftovers once each, across every company you own.
You get: expenses coded the way you code them, and a reconciliation that names the lines nobody has explained.
It works out what follows
- It
- Turns a lease into the dates rent is due, a purchase into a depreciation schedule, a build's invoices into a cost basis split across land, building, 15-year land improvements and equipment.
- You
- Nothing, until there is a question only you can answer.
You get: the arithmetic done and shown: every figure with the clause or the code section it rests on.
You post it
- It
- Pre-fills the entry: both sides, the accounts, the amount, the building, the document it came from. Then it waits.
- You
- Approve it, in bulk if there are a hundred of them. Or change any figure you disagree with first.
You get: a ledger where every entry was approved by a person and carries the paper it came from.
The same thing, said shorter
Photograph the receipts, drag in the invoices, export the bank CSV. Forty files at a time, in whatever order they came out of the drawer. It reads them, works out which of your companies each one belongs to, and proposes an entry with both sides shown.
Then you look. Agree with it, or correct it — and a correction is not a one-off fix. Answer the same kind of document twice and it stops asking: the rule is yours, kept inside your firm, and it applies across every company you own.
On a pile of thirty ordinary business documents — invoices, receipts, a card statement, a trial balance, a payout summary, a pay application — it named twenty-eight and got twenty-eight of twenty-eight right, with nothing named wrongly. The two it would not touch were an upside-down photograph and a personal holiday booking. It would rather ask than guess, because a confident wrong answer in a ledger is the one nobody checks.
A profit and loss across all of them
It is the books. A chart of accounts, double entry, your bank statements reconciled, and a profit and loss and balance sheet for every company on any Tuesday, not after somebody closes the month.
Each company has its own profit and loss and its own balance sheet, the same as anywhere. Then there is one more for all of them together, with what they owe each other taken out of it, which is the report a single-company file cannot produce however many copies of it you own.
You can also cut it any way you keep the business in your head: by building, by partner, by the companies one bank lends to, by the ones you are selling. A company can sit in more than one group, because an owner's idea of a group is not an accountant's.
And this is the error it exists to make impossible. A loan between two of your own companies, entered once. Both balance sheets are wrong, for a year.
Nothing inside either set of books is wrong. Each one balances. Double entry is satisfied. The error exists only in the space between them, which is the space nobody reads. Here, one of them is the other's entry: you record what you can see on one bank statement and it writes the other side, in the other company, naming each to the other.
The things it works out for you
- Both halves of a transfer between your own companies. You enter what you can see on one bank statement; it writes the other side, in the other company, and names each to the other. This is the thing six separate files cannot do.
- A mortgage payment split three ways. Principal against the loan, interest to expense, escrow to an asset, not one line called "mortgage".
- A property purchase turned into a basis. Land and building separately, because land is never depreciated, and it will not guess the split. It asks for the county assessment and works it out from the ratio.
- A consolidated view with the intercompany removed. Add six balance sheets together and the total is wrong. This takes the internal lending out, and tells you if the two sides disagree.
- The companies you own a part of. 100% of one, 60% of the next, 30% of a third. Three different answers, and getting them wrong changes every figure on the page. See below.
Everything a person holds, and what each one means
Not a list of asset types. Twenty-one kinds of thing, each with what it does to your books once it is in them: which are never depreciated, which are not on the balance sheet at all, which are taxed differently when you sell, and which are a liability only if something happens.
They hang off a PERSON, not off a company, which is the whole shape of this product: you own the companies, the companies own some of it, and you own the rest directly. One list answers both.
Who holds it
A person, and everything that hangs off them.
- a person
- the owner everything else hangs from
- a company
- an entity with its own books
- a trust or estate
- an entity with its own books and a different set of rules. §671 taxes the grantor on any PORTION of a trust they are treated as owning under §§671-679, so one trust can be a grantor trust as to part of itself and file its own return for the rest. Control alone does not make it one.
Real property
Where the money usually is, and where the mistakes are expensive.
- a building
- land and building split, depreciated over 27.5 or 39 years
- land
- NEVER depreciated. Carrying costs may be capitalised under §266 rather than deducted. For unimproved and unproductive land that election is made EACH YEAR, by a statement filed with that year's return, and it binds no other year.
- oil, gas, mineral, timber or water rights
- depletion, not depreciation, computed per property. §611 allows a reasonable allowance and cost depletion is its method and the fallback. PERCENTAGE depletion (§613) is capped at 50% of the property's taxable income, 100% for oil and gas, and for an oil or gas well §613A allows it only to independent producers and royalty owners. Take whichever available method is greater.
Money and what it is held in
- a bank account
- cash, reconciled monthly
- a brokerage holding
- basis per lot, and gain or loss on sale
- a retirement account
- NOT on the business balance sheet. Contributions may be deductible; growth is not income; distributions are.
- cryptocurrency or a digital asset
- property, not currency, under Notice 2014-21. Every disposal is a taxable event: paying for something with it, swapping one asset for another, converting to dollars, and even paying the transaction fee in the asset itself.
- a life insurance policy with cash value
- cash surrender value is an asset. A loan against an ordinary policy is a liability and is not taxable while it stays in force, but on a MODIFIED ENDOWMENT CONTRACT §72(e)(4)(A) treats the loan as received when taken. Gain on surrender is ORDINARY income, not capital.
- money somebody owes this person
- an asset with interest income, and §7872 imputes interest when the note charges less than the applicable federal rate
- an annuity
- Each payment splits between a return of the investment in the contract and ordinary income: §72(b)(1) excludes the part that bears the same ratio to the payment as the investment in the contract bears to the expected return.
- AND §72(b)(2) caps the total excluded at the unrecovered investment, so once the investment has been recovered, every further payment is income IN FULL. It is not a retirement account either: a traditional IRA distribution is ordinary income from the first dollar, and folding the two together gets both wrong in opposite directions.
What is owed, and by whom
- a loan
- principal on the balance sheet, interest in the P&L, and the deduction follows where the PROCEEDS went
- a credit card
- a liability. The charges are the expense; paying the card is not.
- a guarantee or cross-collateralisation
- NOT a liability until called, and disclosed rather than booked. Under Reg. §1.752-2 a guarantee is a payment obligation, and whoever bears the economic risk of loss takes that share of a RECOURSE debt into basis. The exception matters: §1.752-2(b)(3)(ii) does not recognise a BOTTOM DOLLAR guarantee, so that one buys no basis.
Things
- a vehicle
- 5-year MACRS. The §280F caps bite only on a PASSENGER automobile, which §280F(d)(5) rates at 6,000 lb or less, so a heavier truck escapes them. Business use must also be more than half: §280F(b) drops listed property below that onto ADS straight line, and the percentage has to be substantiated.
- equipment, machinery or furniture
- 5 or 7-year MACRS. §179 expensing needs property bought for use in the ACTIVE CONDUCT of a trade or business, which a passive rental may not be, and it cannot create a loss. Bonus has no such active-business test.
- art, jewellery or a collectible
- not depreciated. Held more than a year, the gain is taxed at a MAXIMUM of 28% under §1(h) rather than the normal long-term rate, and a lower ordinary rate still wins. Held a year or less it is short-term and ordinary.
- livestock or a growing crop
- raised versus purchased is the whole question, and they are treated completely differently
Rights and reporting
- a patent, copyright, trademark or franchise
- Acquired: amortised over 15 years under §197(a), from the month of acquisition. SELF-CREATED depends on which kind: a patent or copyright generally falls outside §197, but a TRADEMARK, TRADE NAME or FRANCHISE stays amortisable, §197(c)(2) excludes self-created intangibles except those in (D), (E) and (F), and franchises, trademarks and trade names are (F).
- a foreign account or foreign entity
- reporting, not bookkeeping. A NON-WILLFUL failure to file an FBAR is up to $10,000 per REPORT per year, not per account, Bittner v. United States (2023). WILLFUL is per account: the greater of $100,000 or half the balance, which over several years can exceed what is in it.
- a power of appointment
- Nothing is owned here, so nothing is on the balance sheet, and §2041(a)(2) may still include the whole property in the holder's gross estate as though it were theirs.
- The test is in §2041(b)(1): a power is GENERAL if it is exercisable in favour of the holder, their estate, their creditors, or the creditors of their estate, any one of those four. A power limited by an ascertainable standard relating to health, education, support or maintenance is NOT general, and which it is decides whether the whole value is taxed.
And the three things that make it a list worth keeping
It is yours to arrange. Headings you rename and categories you invent, because the way you hold things in your head is not the way a chart of accounts holds them. A category is a label and nothing else: inventing one cannot move a figure or change a tax treatment.
Your client sees their own, on their phone. From a link, with no account to make and no password to lose, showing what THEY hold and what their COMPANIES hold, which is the same question asked once.
And it notices what is absent. A company with "Acres" or "Tract" in its name and no land recorded against it gets asked about, because the paperwork for the thing you forgot to mention is the paperwork nobody goes looking for.
Every kind above also carries how it is identified and which documents prove it, which is how a deed, a K-1 or a 1098 arriving in the pile knows what it belongs to.
You do not own all of it. That changes every number.
Almost nobody with several companies owns 100% of all of them. There is a partner in the restaurant, a brother-in-law in one of the LLCs, an investor who put in 40% of the building.
There is a shortcut here that looks right and is wrong. If you own 60% of a company, the tempting thing is to bring in 60% of each of its numbers: 60% of the building, 60% of the mortgage. Do that and your balance sheet says you owe less than you owe.
The group controls the whole building and owes the whole mortgage. So every line comes in at 100%, and the 40% you do not own is carried separately, as a claim against equity, called minority interest. Same total assets. Very different picture of who they belong to.
Four treatments, because ownership is not one question
- Consolidate in full. You control it. Every line, with the share you do not own carried as minority interest.
- The equity method. Influence but not control, usually around 20 to 50%. One investment line and one share-of-earnings line, not the company’s revenue and expenses mixed into yours.
- Held at cost. A small stake. What you paid, and dividends when they come.
- Excluded. It is yours and it does not belong in this group’s numbers.
Books suggests the treatment from the percentage and then lets you overrule it, and asks why, because control does not always follow ownership. A 40% holder with a management agreement may consolidate; an 80% holder blocked by a shareholder agreement may not. Your reason is kept with the figures, so next year somebody can see what you decided and on what grounds.
Why a consolidation tool bolted onto your files cannot do this
There are tools that sit on top of the accounting files you already keep and add a consolidated report. They are inexpensive and they work. If all you need is six profit and loss statements added together with the internal transfers taken out, one of them will do it and you should use it.
What they cannot reach is the thing underneath. They read finished ledgers. They never saw the closing statement, the operating agreement or the K-1, so the ownership percentage is a number somebody types into a settings page, not something read off the document that created it. When the split changes mid-year, nothing tells them.
- Books reads the K-1 and proposes the structure: the company, its EIN and the share printed in box J, instead of asking you to type it.
- Books holds the ledger, so the ownership and the entries are the same record. Nothing to keep in step.
- Books knows what follows from the structure: which company is a rental activity, which depreciation life applies, which election a property can join, with the section of the code that says so.
Built for property, construction, partnerships, and Form 990 nonprofits
Most multi-company groups do not hold only one kind of entity. A family group may hold commercial buildings, a construction LLC, an operating S-corporation, a partnership with outside investors, and a 501(c)(3) foundation. Books handles the accounting standards each one demands in the same workspace.
- Real estate and commercial leases (ASC 842 and IRC §467). Straight-line rent schedules, stepped rent and rent-free abatement periods, CAM and triple-net recovery pools, three-way client trust reconciliation, and land-versus-building basis splits.
- Construction and job costing (ASC 606 WIP). Cost-to-cost percentage of completion, over-billing and under-billing work-in-progress schedules, AIA G702 and G703 progress billing, retainage receivable and payable tracking, and approved change orders.
- Partnerships and S-corporations (§704(b), §752, §465, §469). Book and tax-basis partner capital accounts, recourse and qualified nonrecourse debt allocation, at-risk and passive loss limitation tracking, and Schedule E and Schedule L balance sheet tie-outs.
- Tax-exempt nonprofits and foundations (Form 990). Part VIII revenue classification, Part IX four-column functional expenses (Program Services, Management and General, Fundraising), Part X ASC 958 net assets with and without donor restrictions, Schedule A 33 1/3% public support and 2% donor cap, and Schedule B contributor thresholds.
- Local student-teacher document reader. Every tax form, lease, closing statement, invoice, and bank statement is read locally first with local PII redaction. When a new layout is answered by the teacher model or corrected by you, Books learns the label anchor and reads future documents of that layout 100% locally.
- Direct tax software auto-populate and MCP automation. Auto-populate Lacerte, UltraTax CS, Drake, ProSeries, and CCH Axcess with balanced trial balances, pre-mapped tax-line workbooks (1065, 1120-S, 1120, 990, 1040), blank Drake TB.xlsx fill-in-place, ProSeries QuickBooks .IIF files, W-2/8949/4562 schedule CSVs, and our Windows Desktop Screen Bridge, or connect via MCP tools for automated close checks and Form 990 preparation.
Closing the year, and the year after
Steps 10 to 13. The checks below run the whole time, not at year end, which is the point of them.
It checks itself, and keeps checking
- It
- Runs every check on every inspection: rent that should have arrived and did not, a deposit not held separately, intercompany balances that do not agree, a renewal notice deadline approaching.
- You
- Read the findings. Each one points at the transactions or the document that make the case, so you can open the paper it rests on.
You get: a finding before it becomes a problem, and no finding at all when nothing is wrong, because a check that fires constantly is one you switch off.
Close a month, and know what you closed
- You
- Close the month when you are done with it.
- It
- Refuses a new entry dated inside a closed month, and tells you what is still unexplained BEFORE you close rather than after: bank lines nobody coded, documents with no entry, entries with no document, companies that do not agree with each other.
You get: a month that means something. Reopening one needs a reason, in writing, and the reason is kept.
The year closes, and stays closed
- You
- Seal the year when the return is filed.
- It
- Exports a one-click tax-software bundle (Drake, Lacerte, UltraTax, ProSeries, CCH), refuses to let a sealed year be edited, and offers you the two ways out rather than picking one: reopen the year, which asks for a reason and is what a real error needs, or date the entry in the open year, which is what new information needs. Either way last year's figures still tie to what was filed.
You get: statements that still match the return a year later, which is the thing spreadsheets cannot promise.
And next year starts from it
- It
- Carries the closing balances forward as the opening ones, keeps every depreciation schedule running, moves each lease on to its next rent step, and starts watching the dates that fall in the new year: a renewal notice, a loan maturing, an election to make.
- You
- Nothing. The year rolls whether or not anybody remembers to roll it.
You get: a second year that costs less than the first, because the rules you taught it in January are still yours in December.
And it keeps checking
- Inter-company entries that do not match. A transfer out of one entity with no corresponding entry in the other. This is the one that goes unnoticed longest and is worst when found.
- A transaction categorised inconsistently. Either the categorisation is wrong or the account structure is.
- An asset expensed, or an expense capitalised.
- A document with no transaction, and a transaction with no document.
- Owner activity booked as business activity.
- Balances that do not tie. Not "does it balance", because double entry always balances, but does it match the document.
Each of these looks fine in the ledger, which is why they survive.
The same vendor, three accounts, one year. The P&L now says nothing useful about what the business spends on software.
A $4,000 laptop, expensed. The deduction lands in the wrong year, and the fixed asset register is short one laptop for its whole life.
An owner's draw booked as an expense. Profit understated, distribution untracked.
A car at 60% business use in one entity and 80% in another, with no mileage log behind either number.
None of these is exotic. Every accountant has seen all of them. They are found by somebody reading carefully, and nobody has time to read carefully.
Last year cannot be edited.
Not "we log it if you do". The ledger refuses the change. Fixing something writes a reversal and a new entry, both dated, both with a name against them, and the original stays exactly as it was.
Every other package lets you open a closed year and change a number, then offers you a report to find out afterwards that somebody did. That difference does not matter at all — until a lender, a buyer, a partner, an examiner or a divorce asks what your books said in March, and the honest answer is “whatever they say now”.
One person, six companies, one year
Not a simple case: a holding company, two property companies, an operating company, a trust and one that is dormant. A building bought in June, a lease with a recovery clause, a roof in September and a sale in December. Every step below is a thing the product does, and the figures in step 5 are off a real document.
Six companies, one owner
- The hard part
- Six companies in six files. The holding company lends to the property company, the operating company pays the trust's insurance, and nobody can see all six at once.
- It
- Puts all six under the person, records what each one IS, and gives every pair an intercompany account so a transfer has somewhere to land on both sides.
You get: one place where all six are true at the same time.
Opening balances that did not tie
- The hard part
- Last year's trial balance is a PDF from the accountant, and it is out by $1,840 because two cheques had not cleared.
- It
- Reads the trial balance, maps each line onto your chart, keeps the uncleared cheques and deposits separately, and REFUSES to open the books until the opening position balances.
You get: a date before which nothing is yours to explain, and a first bank reconciliation that is possible.
412 bank lines, and one of them is a transfer
- The hard part
- $14,000 leaves the holding company and arrives in the property company. Entered once, it is income in one set of books and an expense in the other. Both are wrong.
- It
- Fingerprints every line, so importing the same month twice changes nothing, and recognises the pair: same amount, same day, two companies you own. It proposes BOTH halves.
You get: a transfer that is a transfer, not $14,000 of invented profit and $14,000 of invented cost.
The building, bought in June
- The hard part
- $1,250,000, of which the land is not depreciable at all, and $38,400 of closing costs that mostly belong in basis rather than in this year's expenses.
- It
- Splits land from building and never depreciates the land, capitalises the closing costs that belong in basis, applies the mid-month convention for a June purchase, and posts the monthly charge to a journal you can open.
You get: a depreciation schedule you can defend line by line, with the convention and the life named.
The lease, read to the cent
- The hard part
- 171,703 characters. The rent is in one clause, the recovery is in another as a RATE, and the holdover is written as “the rent herein provided plus twenty-five (25%)”, which means 125%, not 25%.
- It
- Reads $9.10 per square foot and 1,216 square feet, works the recovery at $922.13 a month, and adds the $2,533.33 base rent to reach $3,455.46 — which is the total the lease itself prints, so the document grades its own reading.
You get: $55,327.80 of recovery over the term that a product reading only the base rent would never bill.
A $40,000 roof in September
- The hard part
- Coded to Repairs it is a $40,000 deduction this year that should not be, and 39 years of deduction that will never be taken. It is the most expensive single keystroke in small business bookkeeping.
- It
- Holds it as a COMPONENT of the building with its own life and its own in-service date, so it depreciates on its own schedule and can be retired on its own when the next roof goes on.
You get: a basis that is still right in year eleven, and a retirement that does not guess.
And it tells you what you are missing
- The hard part
- A $1,250,000 building on a 39-year line is the single largest deduction most owners never take, and nobody sends a letter about it.
- It
- Notices the shape — the basis, the life, the in-service date — and says a cost segregation study is worth asking about, showing the arithmetic behind the claim. It does not estimate the reallocation and it does not make the election.
You get: the question asked in year one rather than in year nine by somebody else.
December: one of them is sold
- The hard part
- The gain is not one number. Part of it is ordinary because depreciation was taken on the equipment, part of it is unrecaptured §1250 on the building, and the rest is capital. They are taxed at three different rates.
- It
- Works the adjusted basis from what was actually posted, separates the §1245 ordinary slice from the unrecaptured §1250 slice, and shows the three parts with the section that says so. It will do this on a price you have not accepted yet.
You get: the shape of the tax bill before you sign, not in March from a return you cannot change.
Year end, across all six
- The hard part
- The $14,000 transfer, the insurance the operating company paid for the trust and the holding company's loan all appear twice if you simply add the six companies up.
- It
- Eliminates every intercompany pair, consolidates the six into one profit and loss, seals the year so last year stops moving, and carries the closing figures forward as next year's opening ones.
You get: one set of figures for six companies, and a year that cannot quietly change.
The clause behind step 5, verbatim
Because a claim nobody can check is just a claim.
| Recovery rate, read off the page | $9.10 / sq ft / year |
| Rentable area, read off the page | 1,216 sq ft |
| Recovery a month — and 9.10 × 1,216 ÷ 12 checks out to the cent | $922.13 |
| Base rent a month | $2,533.33 |
| Total a month, which the lease also prints | $3,455.46 |
The same lease also hides a rate written in words, four months of free rent that is an abatement and not a rent of zero, and a $100 a day parking fine that the product REFUSED to read as percentage rent, because this lease has no percentage rent at all. A figure it cannot place is a figure it will not offer.