Cross + Co CPA LLC

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Ponte Vedra, FL
Cross + Co CPA LLC

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Full service CPA firm with a concentration in the Fractional CFO space generating leveraged strategic solutions for start-up and growth phase entities.

10/26/2026

When Cash Stops Telling You the Truth About the Month
You don’t switch to accrual because you got big. You switch when cash stops telling you the truth about the month.
Tax law lets many businesses stay on the cash method for a long time. For 2026, the limit is $32 million in average gross receipts for the businesses it applies to.
Cash basis works until a big invoice goes out on the 28th, the vendor bills arrive on the 3rd, and your monthly profit swings in a direction that has nothing to do with how you actually performed.
Four signs it’s time: receivables and payables large enough to move your monthly results, work that spans several months, a lender or investor asking for accrual statements, or decisions you no longer trust your P&L to support.
Here’s the good news. Your tax method and your management reporting don’t have to match, so you can often keep filing on cash while running the business on accrual.
That’s what turns accounting from a record of bank activity into a value-added tool for steering the company.
Don’t ask whether you’re big enough for accrual. Ask whether your numbers are still telling the truth.
Let’s nail down the process together. Drop a comment or message to connect!

10/22/2026

Stop Building Better Models. Start Vetting Assumptions
Your forecast isn’t wrong because the model is bad. It’s wrong because nobody owns the assumptions.
51% of CFO’s put improving forecast accuracy among their top five priorities for 2026.
Most forecasts miss for the same reason. The growth rate, the hiring plan, and the collection timing were typed in once and never challenged again.
Vet the assumption, review it, and continually refine it.
Then compare forecast to actual every month and ask which assumption broke, not just which number missed.
That’s how forecasting moves from an annual budgeting ritual to a value-added function leadership actually steers by.
Don’t build a better model. Build better owners for your assumptions.
Let’s connect and explore transformative ways to add value to your business. DM me to discuss.

10/19/2026

One Late Invoice Shouldn’t Be Able to Stop Your Payroll
One late invoice shouldn’t be able to stop your payroll. For a lot of owners, it already has.
QuickBooks’ 2026 late payments report found 39% of small business owners say a single late payment made it hard to cover payroll or bills in the past year.

That isn’t a sales problem. It’s concentration risk: when a few customers carry most of your receivables, their payment calendar quietly becomes yours.

Big companies watch this on a dashboard. Most small businesses discover it the Thursday before payroll.
The fix is three moves: know what share of your AR sits with your top three customers, keep a cash cushion that covers at least one full payroll, and require deposits or tighter terms on your largest accounts.
Do that, and your AR aging stops being a collections chore and becomes a value-added early warning system.

Pay your team from cash you have, never from cash you’ve been promised.
If you want receivables that fund payroll instead of threatening it, Cross + Co can build that system with you. DM or email me to talk it through.

10/18/2026

Why AI Needs a CPA More Than a CPA Needs AI
Nearly every finance team has bought AI. Barely a third of CFOs believe they know how to make it pay off.
Gartner surveyed more than 200 CFOs and found only 36% feel confident driving real AI impact across their business.
The problem usually isn’t the software. AI produces confident answers from messy data, and too often nobody in the room is qualified to say whether those answers are right.
That’s where the CPA earns their keep, and why the role isn’t going away. AI can reconcile, categorize, and draft, but it can’t hold a license, sign a return, or answer to the IRS, a lender, or a court when the numbers are wrong.
The work is shifting from doing the entry to owning the judgment. That’s a promotion, not a pink slip.
Pair AI’s speed with a CPA’s accountability, and finance stops being a cost center and becomes a value-added function that tells you what to do next.
Don’t ask whether AI will replace your accountant. Ask whether your accountant knows how to use it.
If you’re ready for a CPA relationship built on transformation instead of transactions, let’s talk.

10/14/2026

Your Banker Isn’t Reading Your Pitch. They’re Reading Your Ratios
Lenders don’t fund a story. They fund a ratio.
When your loan package hits an underwriter’s desk, they skip the business plan and go straight to three statements: the income statement, the balance sheet, and the cash flow statement, checked against your tax returns.
Then they run two numbers. Debt service coverage asks whether your cash flow pays the loan: earn $300,000 a year against $200,000 of debt payments and you’re at 1.5x, comfortably above the 1.25x many lenders look for.
Leverage asks how much debt you already carry, which tells them how hard a bad year would hit.
Approval isn’t the finish line. Most loans come with a covenant, usually a minimum coverage ratio tested every year, and tripping it can put the whole loan in default.
The owners who get turned down often have good businesses with messy books: personal spending in the P&L, add-backs nobody documented, a balance sheet that hasn’t been reconciled in months.
Lender-ready financials turn the monthly close from a compliance chore into a value-added asset, one that wins approvals and better rates.
Run your own coverage ratio before the bank does, and walk in already knowing the answer.
Let’s nail down the process together. Drop a comment or message to connect!

10/08/2026

Is the CPA Credential Being Watered Down?
More than 40 states have made the CPA license easier to reach, and not everyone in the profession is cheering. Dropping the 150-hour rule removes 30 credit hours of structured academic preparation for complex rules, and that training doesn't vanish. It shifts to employers, who now teach on the job what used to be learned in the classroom. That could affect early-career readiness for audit and tax work, where a missed rule has real consequences for clients.
Critics also see a watering down of the credential, and traditional industry societies have pushed back. Meanwhile the profession risks a two-tier perception among peers, with CPAs who took different roads to the same license.
The firms that invest in real training and review turn the license from a checkbox into a value-added result for the client.
Before you hire or keep an accounting firm, ask how it trains and reviews the people doing your work.
If you want a firm that invests in judgment and review, not just headcount, message me and let's talk.

10/06/2026

Free Money Hiding, Check Your Working Capital
Before you cut a single expense, look at how many days your cash is stuck in the business.
DSO, DPO, and DIO measure how long customers take to pay you, how long you take to pay suppliers, and how long inventory sits before it sells.
Together they set your cash conversion cycle, and every day you shave off releases real cash without raising a price or losing a customer.
For a business doing $5 million in revenue, one day of DSO is roughly $13,700 sitting in someone else's bank account. Most owners chase margin with cost cuts that hurt, when tighter collections or renegotiated terms would free more cash with far less pain.
Tracking the three numbers monthly turns a bookkeeping output into a cash lever, which is exactly what makes finance a value-added function.
Find your cash conversion cycle this month, then pick one lever and move it five days.
Cross + Co provides value-added outcomes that will transform your finances. Our pricing model is a fixed monthly subscription, which includes tax filing. DM or email me to discuss!

10/02/2026

The Controller Is the Hire Everyone Skips
Most scaling companies reach for a CFO when the hire they actually needed was a controller.
The controller is the backbone of a finance function. Someone owns the close, owns accuracy, owns the controls, and makes sure the number you're about to make a decision on is real.
Skip that seat and everything above it collapses into it. Your forecast inherits bad data, and your new CFO spends six months rebuilding the books instead of shaping strategy.
‘Here's what most owners miss: the seat has to be filled, but it doesn't have to be filled full time. A fractional controller gives you senior discipline on the close and the controls for a fraction of a salary, which is exactly how a growing company gets that rigor years before it could hire for it.
Get that right and the sequence takes care of itself: a controller who closes clean, then FP&A to point the numbers forward, then a CFO, also fractional first, for capital strategy and judgment a few days a month.
That's the shift that turns finance from overhead into the function telling you which growth is worth funding.
Fill the controller seat before you think you need to. Fractional counts.
Let's connect and explore transformative ways to add value to your business. DM me to discuss.

09/29/2026

The S-Corp Election Is Arithmetic, Not a Strategy
Every owner has been told to elect S-corp and save on taxes. Almost none of them have been shown the arithmetic.
The only real saving is self-employment tax: the 15.3% you stop paying on the slice of profit you take as a distribution instead of as W-2 wages.
On the other side of the ledger sit the costs nobody mentions upfront. A payroll service, a separate 1120-S return, state minimum and franchise fees, and the wrinkle that paying yourself wages shrinks your QBI deduction.
Run both columns and the break even usually lands somewhere around $70,000 to $80,000 of net profit. Below that the fees eat the savings, and well above it the election is usually obvious.
Here's the part that surprises people: the number that decides it is reasonable compensation, not revenue. If your labor is the business and honest reasonable comp absorbs nearly all the profit, there's no distribution left to save anything on.
Entity choice is a modeling exercise, not a default, and with QBI now permanent it's a ten year decision rather than a bet on a sunset.
‘Before you file the election, ask to see the two column math. If nobody can show you the break even, that isn't advice.
Let's nail down the process together, drop a comment or message to connect!

09/25/2026

Your S-Corp Salary Isn't a Guess. It's an Audit Risk.
If you own an S-corp and someone asked you to justify your salary to the IRS tomorrow, could you?
Reasonable compensation is one of the most scrutinized numbers on an S-corp return, and most owners set it by feel: a round number, prior year plus a little, whatever's left after distributions.
The IRS doesn't grade on feel. It looks at what someone in your role, industry, and market would actually be paid, and it can reclassify distributions as wages, complete with penalties and back payroll tax, if your number doesn't hold up.
The fix isn't complicated. Benchmark your role against real compensation data and document how you got there, before an examiner asks.
That one page justification is cheap insurance against a very expensive conversation.
Know your number before the IRS decides it for you.
If you want a second set of eyes on what reasonable compensation looks like for your role, message me and we'll work through it together.

Address

Ponte Vedra, FL
32081

Telephone

+19734442787

Website

http://www.CrossCoCPA.com/

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