Services
Structural work an owner does once — entity setup, cost segregation, 1031 timing, R&D credits, buy-sell agreements — that shapes what the business is worth and what gets kept.
Overview
Consulting at Joel Friend & Associates isn’t a separate service line. It’s how we handle the questions that come up in the course of doing your tax and accounting work. When an owner asks whether to switch from an LLC to an S-corp, whether to expense a $200,000 machine in year one or spread it, or how to structure a sale to a partner five years out, those are consulting questions with tax and accounting consequences.
The work is transactional in the best sense: a decision gets made, documents get drafted or reviewed, filings get made, and the outcome shows up on a return years later. Every one of these decisions is on our normal engagement — no separate consulting retainer, no scope-creep upsell.
What we don’t do: business coaching, org-chart consulting, or strategy decks. If it doesn’t involve tax code, accounting standards, or a specific number, it isn’t our lane.
What’s Included
Reclassifying components of a building out of the long default recovery period into 5-, 7-, and 15-year property. Land improvements, specialty electrical, and finishes move; structure does not. Pays off on a purchase, an expansion, or a major renovation.
S-corp elections, LLC conversions, and multi-entity setups for owners who need the right legal wrapper around the operating business, the real estate, and the intellectual property.
Sequencing sale and replacement so the exchange qualifies. Coordination with the qualified intermediary and identification-period math down to the day.
Federal and Florida credits for manufacturers, software teams, and process work — assessed against the statutory four-part test rather than a vendor’s enthusiasm. Documentation built to survive an examination.
Valuation clauses, trigger events, funding mechanics, and tax treatment on a partner’s departure. The document you draft calmly now that you don’t want to negotiate in a crisis.
Gifting strategies, installment sales, and staged transfers for an owner handing a business to the next generation or the next partner. Multi-year, tax-aware, coordinated with estate counsel.
Who It’s For
The consulting work only makes sense in a book of business where we already know the operations, the numbers, and the people. That’s why the four industries we work in are the same four you’ll see on the industries menu:
How It Works
Email, phone, or on the next quarterly call. If we don’t already have the underlying numbers, we ask for them the same day.
One-page memo covering the tax mechanics, the accounting treatment, and the range of outcomes with actual dollar figures — not “it depends.”
Filings, elections, drafts of documents where we’re the right party, and coordination with your attorney where they are. Then it’s in the return.
Mechanics
Buy a commercial building and the default is to depreciate the whole thing over 39 years. Residential rental property runs over 27.5 years. But a building is not one asset. It is a structure plus a large amount of equipment, finishes, and site work that would qualify for much shorter recovery periods if anyone separated them out.
A cost segregation study does that separation, supported by engineering-based documentation. Typically:
Shifting basis into shorter classes accelerates deductions into the early years, which is where they are worth the most in present-value terms. On buildings with substantial site work or specialty systems, studies commonly reclassify a meaningful share of depreciable basis — enough that the study pays for itself several times over in year one.
Mechanics
The R&D credit is aggressively marketed and frequently claimed on activity that does not qualify. An activity has to clear all four parts of the statutory test, not whichever one sounds closest.
Shop-floor process improvement often qualifies and is often missed, because the people doing it call it “figuring out the line,” not research. The hard part is rarely eligibility — it is contemporaneous documentation, which has to be built as the work happens rather than reconstructed at filing.
Note also that the treatment of research expenditures has moved more than once in recent years, and the interaction between the credit and the deduction rules affects the net benefit. We work the current-year position rather than a remembered one.
Who Runs This
Questions about anything on this page go straight to the person who runs this work — not a contact form queue.
Joel Friend, CPA
Managing Partner
[email protected]