Thompson Flaherty CPA, Accountants & Tax Consultants

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Thompson Flaherty CPA, Accountants & Tax Consultants You aren’t just another client to us; you are a partner. We move beyond basic number-crunching to provide proactive, year-round guidance.

We are a Full Service CPA Firm and specialize in the following:
Personal & Business Tax | Accounting | QuickBooks | Bookkeeping | Payroll | CFO Advisory | Entity formation | Business Valuation | Experts in Medical, Real Estate, Law, Construction and more! Thompson Flaherty | Professional Tax Strategy & Accounting for Businesses & Individuals | Bookkeeping | Payroll | New Business Formation/Setup | Valuation | Exit Planning| Budgeting | Forecasting|

Running a business is demanding—managing the complexities of taxes, payroll, and financial growth shouldn’t be what keeps you up at night. At Thompson Flaherty, we provide a white-glove CPA approach to Personal & Business Tax, Accounting, and Strategic Consulting, ensuring you stay compliant, organized, and confident. Whether you are an individual looking to protect your income, a growing startup, or an established firm, we handle the technical heavy lifting so you can focus on your life and your business. Core Services:
• Tax Strategy: High-level Planning, IRS Representation, and Tax Prep to keep more of what you earn.
• Business Operations: Full-cycle Bookkeeping, Payroll, and Accounting so you can get your weekends back.
• Growth & Advisory: Forecasting, Business Valuation, and Exit Planning for your next chapter.
• Strategic Launch: New Business Formation and entity selection for entrepreneurs. Specialized Industry Expertise:
✔ Medical & Dental Practices: QBI optimization and entity selection.
✔ Real Estate & Construction: 1031 Exchanges and Cost Segregation.
✔ Attorney & Law Firms: Trust accounting and tax reduction.
✔ Home Healthcare & Nonprofits: Form 990, compliance, and payroll management. Serving the Metro East, St. Louis, and Chicago, with virtual services available nationwide. Ready to simplify your finances and maximize your growth?
👇 Contact us today for a consultation.
📩 Inquiries: [email protected]
🌐 Website: thompsonflaherty.com

Tuition went out the door in August. The tax questions it created show up in April, when there's nothing left to change....
10/23/2026

Tuition went out the door in August. The tax questions it created show up in April, when there's nothing left to change.

Here's the one that catches small business families most often. A 529 withdrawal and an education credit both want the same tuition dollar, and you don't get to give it to both. Pay the whole bill from the 529 and the credit can disappear, even though your family qualified for it. The fix is deciding in advance which dollars come from the plan and which get paid out of pocket, and that decision has to happen before the bill is paid, not after.

Then there's the dependency question. Whether your student files their own return, and whether you still claim them, decides which return the credit lands on. Get that backwards and two returns need fixing instead of one.

Both returns get simpler when they're planned as one household, and October is a good month to do it: https://thompsonflaherty.com/family-tax-coordination-small-business-returns-college-students/

People sometimes ask what happens in a year-end planning meeting with us, usually with the face of someone about to have...
10/22/2026

People sometimes ask what happens in a year-end planning meeting with us, usually with the face of someone about to have a tooth pulled, and we promise it's a lot less painful than that.

We start with your books through September and a reasonable guess at October through December, which gives us a projected profit for the year. From there we look at what you can still move before December 31: your salary if you're an S-corp, retirement contributions, the timing of any big purchases, and whether your estimated payments are on track so the January one doesn't sneak up on you. Then we talk about next year, because some of the better moves have to be set up before the year starts rather than after it ends.

The goal is that you walk out with a short list of things to do and the dates to do them by. More on how we approach business tax planning: https://thompsonflaherty.com/tax-business/

Every fall somebody tells a small business owner to go buy something before December 31 "for the write-off," and every f...
10/20/2026

Every fall somebody tells a small business owner to go buy something before December 31 "for the write-off," and every fall we gently point out that a deduction is a discount, not a refund.

Federal income tax rates run from 10% to 37%, so a $10,000 purchase brings back only part of that at tax time and still costs you the full $10,000. A discount on something you weren't going to buy is still spending money. Year-end purchases make sense when the business actually needs the thing and you're only deciding which side of January to buy it on (and making sure it's in service by December 31, which is its own adventure).

So before the year-end shopping list gets written, it's worth running the numbers on which year is the better year for the deduction: https://thompsonflaherty.com/tax-business/

October 15 has come and gone, the last of the extended returns are filed, and this is the stretch of the year when we'd ...
10/16/2026

October 15 has come and gone, the last of the extended returns are filed, and this is the stretch of the year when we'd much rather talk to you than send you something to read.

Given the choice between mailing a formal year-end tax memo and grabbing a coffee to talk through where your year is headed, we'll take the coffee every time. The returns still get done right and the deadlines still get hit. It's more that most people's experience of a CPA is a stack of documents once a year from someone they wouldn't recognize at the grocery store, and we'd rather be the firm you actually know, the one you can call in October with a half-formed question about December and get a straight answer from a person who remembers what you do for a living.

If that sounds like the relationship you've been wanting with your accountant, come say hello: https://thompsonflaherty.com/contact/

Most of the contractors you paid this year will need a 1099 from you right around the end of January, and the easiest ti...
10/15/2026

Most of the contractors you paid this year will need a 1099 from you right around the end of January, and the easiest time to collect what goes on those forms is now, while everyone still answers their email.

Each 1099 needs the contractor's legal name, address and taxpayer ID number, which is what a Form W-9 is for. In January that turns into a scavenger hunt through old invoices and a text to the guy who fixed your roof in March and has since changed his number. In October it's a polite request and a few days of waiting.

While you're at it, check how those payments are coded in your books so the totals are right when the forms get prepared. That's the kind of cleanup we handle as part of monthly bookkeeping: https://thompsonflaherty.com/accounting/

#1099

Since 2018 the 20% deduction on pass-through business income came with an expiry date, and a lot of small business owner...
10/14/2026

Since 2018 the 20% deduction on pass-through business income came with an expiry date, and a lot of small business owners planned around it as a temporary gift. It's permanent now. Congress removed the sunset in last year's tax law.

So the question now is whether your business is set up to keep it.

Here's where we see Illinois and Missouri owners lose it without noticing. Once your income passes the threshold, the deduction starts depending on the W-2 wages your business pays. A profitable sole proprietor with no employees pays none, so above the line the deduction can shrink to nothing. The same business as an S-corp, paying the owner a reasonable salary, has wages on the books and gets some of the deduction back.

The profit and the owner are the same in both cases, and the structure is what changes the answer.

We wrote more about the thresholds and the Illinois and Missouri rules here: https://thompsonflaherty.com/section-199a-qbi-deduction-illinois-missouri-small-business/

Your employee lives in Edwardsville, works from home three days a week, and sits in your downtown St. Louis office the o...
10/13/2026

Your employee lives in Edwardsville, works from home three days a week, and sits in your downtown St. Louis office the other two. Which of those days does the city's 1% earnings tax apply to?

Just the two. The tax follows where the work physically happens, so for a hybrid schedule somebody has to track which days were inside the city limits and which weren't. Fully remote and never sets foot in the office? Nothing to withhold. Lives in the city? It applies to all their wages, wherever they earn them.

The part that trips up owners who've just opened a St. Louis location is the order of operations. You register with the city before you start withholding, not after the first payroll goes out. And St. Louis County isn't St. Louis City, so a Clayton office is a different conversation entirely.

We wrote up the whole thing, including what to do if you've been missing it: https://thompsonflaherty.com/st-louis-earnings-tax-what-the-1-percent-really-costs-your-business-and-employees/

A question for the S-corp owners: when did you last change the salary you pay yourself? This year, last year, or the wee...
10/13/2026

A question for the S-corp owners: when did you last change the salary you pay yourself? This year, last year, or the week you made the election and never touched it again?

We ask because the answer matters more than it used to. Your salary is what the IRS looks at when it decides whether you're paying yourself reasonably, and now that the 20% QBI deduction is permanent, it also affects how much of that deduction you keep once your income passes the threshold. A number picked three years ago for a business half its current size is usually off in one direction or the other.

There are still a few payrolls left in 2026 to adjust it if it needs adjusting. If your answer was the third one, the longer version of how salary and the deduction work together is here: https://thompsonflaherty.com/section-199a-qbi-deduction-illinois-missouri-small-business/

The truck you order in December and pick up in January is a next-year deduction, however you paid for it.With full bonus...
10/09/2026

The truck you order in December and pick up in January is a next-year deduction, however you paid for it.

With full bonus depreciation back on the books, a lot of Metro East small business owners are planning a big equipment purchase for the end of the year. Reasonable. The detail that gets missed is that the deduction belongs to the year the equipment is placed in service, meaning it's on site, set up and ready to use. The year you signed the order doesn't count, and neither does the year the deposit cleared.

So a December decision is often a January deduction, and if the point was to shrink this year's bill, it missed.

If equipment is on the list, October is the month to order it, while delivery and setup still have time to land before December 31. Which method to use once it lands, Section 179 or bonus, depends on your numbers, and that's a conversation worth having before the order goes in: https://thompsonflaherty.com/tax-business/

Year-end tax planning is only as good as the numbers it starts from, and in October a lot of small business owners are p...
10/08/2026

Year-end tax planning is only as good as the numbers it starts from, and in October a lot of small business owners are planning off books that stop somewhere around June. We'd much rather sit down with you in November looking at nine closed months than at three closed months and a hopeful guess about the rest.

Closing September means the bank and credit card accounts are reconciled through the 30th, the uncategorized pile is empty, and the things you've been meaning to ask us about (that one big deposit, the loan payment that got coded as an expense) actually get asked. It's about as exciting as it sounds, but it's the difference between a plan and a hunch.

If the books have drifted, October is a good month to catch them up, and it's work our team does every month for Metro East businesses: https://thompsonflaherty.com/accounting/

Address

219 2nd Avenue, Ste B
Edwardsville, IL
62025

Telephone

(618) 656-6010

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