Steven M. Ellard, CPA

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Steven M. Ellard, CPA Steven M. Ellard, CPA is a one stop back office provider of tax preparation, accounting, bookkeeping, Our goal is to make life easier for you and your company.

We are a local business that offers a variety of financial services that are affordable. Let us help your business become more profitable. We have an experienced team of CPAs and professional staff that will handle your year round back office paperwork allowing you to concentrate on what you do best-managing your business.

The best time for a Cape Cod business to open a line of credit is when it doesn't need one, which in practice means righ...
10/27/2026

The best time for a Cape Cod business to open a line of credit is when it doesn't need one, which in practice means right about now, while the bank can still see a strong summer on your statements.

Let's look at an example we see most winters. A business gets through the season without borrowing a dime, then in February the roof leaks or the walk-in dies, and the owner walks into the bank with three quiet months on the books and a very urgent tone of voice. The answer is sometimes still yes, but the terms tend to reflect the timing.

Lenders mostly want recent financial statements and tax returns that tell a clean story, which is where tidy books and a CPA who can explain your seasonal pattern earn their keep. If you set the line up in October and never touch it you've usually lost very little, and if March throws something at you, the money's already there.

If you'd like help putting the numbers together for your bank, get in touch: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/contact/

Every Cape Cod business has a part that feels like the engine, the counter with the line out the door or the crew booked...
10/22/2026

Every Cape Cod business has a part that feels like the engine, the counter with the line out the door or the crew booked solid from June to Labor Day, and it's surprisingly common for that part to be the one that barely pays for itself.

Let's look at an example we see in the office. A restaurant that also runs catering splits its numbers out after the season and finds that the dining room carried the summer, while catering, with its extra staff, rentals and last-minute runs to the supplier, brought in plenty of revenue and very little of anything else. Nobody had checked, because both sides were busy and busy feels a lot like profitable.

Growing without knowing your margins by product or service is on our list of the most common financial mistakes we see on the Cape, and the off-season is the easiest time to fix it, since you've got a full season of data in front of you before deciding what to push, reprice or drop next year.

The rest of that list is here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/blog/common-financial-mistakes-cape-cod-businesses-make/

If you did work for someone this summer and the invoice is still open in late October, the odds of getting paid in full ...
10/20/2026

If you did work for someone this summer and the invoice is still open in late October, the odds of getting paid in full have already started slipping, and on the Cape they slip faster than most places.

The customers most likely to pay late are the ones hardest to reach once the season ends, whether that's a summer homeowner who's gone back to Connecticut or a seasonal business that's closed its doors until May. We see contractors and landscapers carry a surprising amount of summer revenue into the winter this way, which looks like profit on paper and does nothing at all for the bank account when January's bills come due.

The number worth watching is accounts receivable turnover, which really just means how long it takes your customers to pay you, and the time to chase anything past 60 days is now, while people still remember the job.

The other numbers we'd look at after a season are here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/guides/small-business-kpis/

When a Cape Cod season ends with less profit than it should have, the first instinct is to cut something, and it's usual...
10/15/2026

When a Cape Cod season ends with less profit than it should have, the first instinct is to cut something, and it's usually not the right place to start.

Let's look at an example we see in the office most falls. A business had its busiest summer on record, costs went up across the board, and the prices stayed where they were two summers ago because nobody wanted to be the place that raised them. Every extra customer came with a slightly thinner margin, and the owner worked harder for roughly the same result.

October is when next year's prices actually get decided on the Cape, since that's when menus go to the printer, rental rates get posted and contractors start quoting spring jobs. Before you trim hours or switch suppliers, it's worth checking whether your pricing still covers what it costs you to deliver the work, because that's usually the bigger lever and the less painful one.

We wrote more about where profit actually comes from here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/guides/more-profitable-cape-cod-business/

Most of the year-end questions we get in January would have been much easier to answer back in October, so this year we ...
10/14/2026

Most of the year-end questions we get in January would have been much easier to answer back in October, so this year we put the whole fall into one checklist for Cape Cod business owners.

It runs month by month, starting with a look at the summer you actually had and finishing with the payroll and contractor paperwork that lands right after the holidays. Each item says when it's best done and what to pull together, and you can tick things off as you go so it's easy to see what's left.

The off-season on the Cape is the one stretch of the year when there's time to do this properly, and it's a lot easier to make these decisions while there's still room to act.

You can work through the checklist here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/year-end-tax-checklist/

With Columbus Day weekend behind us the Cape has officially gone quiet, and this is the one stretch of the year when the...
10/13/2026

With Columbus Day weekend behind us the Cape has officially gone quiet, and this is the one stretch of the year when the season you just had is still fresh enough to plan the next one properly.

Most seasonal budgets get written in March from memory, which is how the same surprises turn up every June: hiring a couple of weeks late, ordering for the summer you hoped for rather than the one you had, and finding out in August that the rent went up in April. Right now you can pull this year's numbers month by month and see when revenue actually arrived, when payroll peaked and which weeks were busy without being profitable.

That's the raw material for a budget you'll trust, with revenue and expenses mapped by month and a cash-flow forecast you check as the year goes on rather than one that lives in a drawer.

The step-by-step version we walk clients through is here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/guides/how-to-create-a-budget-for-2026/

Our office will be closed on Monday, October 12 for Columbus Day, and we'll be back at our desks on Tuesday, October 13,...
10/09/2026

Our office will be closed on Monday, October 12 for Columbus Day, and we'll be back at our desks on Tuesday, October 13, most likely with a full inbox and a fresh pot of coffee.

If you filed an extension back in April, keep the timing in mind. The extended deadline for 2025 individual returns is Thursday, October 15, which leaves only a couple of working days after the long weekend. If we're still waiting on a brokerage statement, a K-1 or that one receipt you swear is somewhere in the truck, sending it over by Friday, October 9 gives us room to finish without a scramble.

Enjoy the long weekend, and if anything is on your mind before then, you can reach us here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/contact/

There's a particular Cape Cod business owner we meet every October, the one who's been doing the books in QuickBooks aft...
10/08/2026

There's a particular Cape Cod business owner we meet every October, the one who's been doing the books in QuickBooks after 10 PM all summer and has a quiet suspicion that the numbers on the screen aren't quite the numbers in the bank.

QuickBooks is a fine tool, and for a small operation with a handful of transactions a month it does what it promises. The trouble starts when the summer brings more staff, more vendors and more deposits than one tired person can reconcile, and the duplicated imports and miscategorized splits pile up somewhere nobody looks until tax time.

The off-season is the right moment to hand it over, because nothing's on fire and your history can move across cleanly instead of in the middle of a July week. The rule of thumb we use is that if you're spending more than three hours a week in QuickBooks and still don't trust the numbers, the software isn't the problem.

The whole case, including what a bookkeeper costs compared to doing it yourself, is here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/guides/when-to-move-from-quickbooks-to-a-real-bookkeeper-cape-cod/

An S corp isn't a type of business. It's a tax election, a form you send the IRS, and your Cape Cod LLC can make it with...
10/06/2026

An S corp isn't a type of business. It's a tax election, a form you send the IRS, and your Cape Cod LLC can make it without changing a thing on the sign out front.

Why it comes up every fall: a sole proprietor or single-member LLC pays self-employment tax on the whole profit. Once the business elects S corp status, the owner takes a reasonable salary through payroll and the rest comes out as distributions, and the distributions don't carry self-employment tax. On a business that just had a strong summer, that's a real difference in what stays in the account.

Why we don't tell everyone to do it: the salary has to be one you can defend, you're now running payroll for yourself, Massachusetts charges S corps a minimum excise every year whether you made money or not, and switching back isn't a quick undo. Below a certain profit level the extra cost and paperwork eat the benefit. Our rule of thumb for where that line sits is on the blog, along with when to stay an LLC and leave it alone.

https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/tax/taxes-with-llc-in-massachusetts/

The tax-planning meeting most Cape Cod business owners book in December is about eight weeks too late.Not because the ye...
10/02/2026

The tax-planning meeting most Cape Cod business owners book in December is about eight weeks too late.

Not because the year's over. Because the useful moves all need a clear picture of what the season actually did: buying the truck or the walk-in and getting it running before December 31, topping up a retirement plan, deciding whether a chunk of income belongs in this year or next, resetting the January estimate. On the Cape that picture doesn't exist in July, and by mid-December the vendor's backed up, the plan paperwork's stuck in someone's inbox, and you're making a five-figure decision between holiday parties.

September and October are the useful stretch. The books can be closed through August, the off-season budget is real instead of hopeful, and there's still time to act on whatever the numbers say. That's why our fall calendar fills the way it does, and why the people who book now get the good time slots.

The six moves we run through with clients every year are here: https://www.stevenmellardcpa.com/guides/year-end-tax-planning-cape-cod/

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2759 Main Street/PO Box 2241
Brewster, MA
02631

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Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

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