Mountain View, California
A lot of Mountain View businesses run on contractors rather than staff, and invoice on delivery rather than monthly. Both make the books harder than they look, and both are easy to get wrong quietly.
Self-check
Worth reading if you pay people on 1099s. Getting this wrong means back taxes, penalties and unpaid benefits, and it’s usually discovered long after the fact.
If you decide when they start, when they finish and when they take breaks, that looks less like a contractor and more like a schedule.
Someone whose entire income comes from one business, year after year, is in a different position to someone with a roster of clients.
Laptops, tools, software, a desk. A contractor usually brings their own.
If someone on a 1099 sits beside someone on payroll doing the same job, that’s hard to explain later.
Project work with a scope and a finish date reads differently to an arrangement that’s been running for three years.
Not just what you want delivered, but the method, the process and the order of it.
None of this is the legal test, and no single point decides it. California applies its own rules and they’re stricter than the federal ones. If two or three of these sound familiar, it’s worth a conversation before it becomes a bill.
Cash flow
On a cash-basis view, the month you did the work looks terrible and the month you got paid looks excellent. Neither is what happened.
Accrual accounting records what you earned when you earned it, so the months stop lying to you. For a business billing on delivery, that’s the difference between planning and guessing.
accounting and monthly closeServices
Books that show earned revenue, not just banked cash.
Pay runs on Mountain View’s own wage rate, when you have staff.
Returns prepared and filed by a team with an Enrolled Agent.
Monthly close and statements you can act on.
Visit us
Our office is on South Bascom Avenue in Campbell, about twenty minutes down the 85. Most of the work is remote, so the distance rarely matters, but there’s somewhere to go if you’d rather talk in person.
You need 1099 tracking rather than full payroll, which is simpler. But you also carry the risk that someone you’re treating as a contractor is legally an employee, and that’s a liability sitting quietly in the background. We’ll flag the ones worth looking at.
California applies its own rules, and they’re stricter than the federal ones. It turns largely on how much control you have over how and when the work gets done. We’d rather go through the specific people you’re unsure about than hand you a rule to apply yourself.
Yes, above the state rate and on its own schedule. It applies to work performed in the city regardless of where your business is registered.
It’s the main reason we’d suggest accrual accounting. Billing on delivery means cash and earnings drift apart, and a cash view will make good quarters look bad and bad ones look fine.
Daily takings reconciled to the till, card settlements, tips, sales tax, and payroll on Mountain View’s own rate. The parts that eat an evening a week if nobody else is doing them.
Other Bay Area cities we work in.
Get in touch
Tell us how your team is set up and how you bill. We’ll tell you what’s worth fixing and what isn’t.
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