Speaker - Nancy Cox 11/14/13

I’m a CPA with the Bonadio Group. Everyone knows what a CPA does….so, I’d like to explain how The Bonadio Group and I are different. I grew up outside of Pittsburgh and worked at KPMG in Pittsburgh for 3 years out of college. When I decided to marry a West Seneca man, I thought it was time for a career change along with the move to Buffalo. Starting at The Bonadio Group 8 years ago was the best decision I have made professionally.

Tom Bonadio started our firm 35 years ago, around his kitchen table with one partner and his mother as the firm’s administrative support.  Since then, we have grown to 380 professionals in 9 offices throughout New York State (one in Vermont).  We are CPA’s, Consultants & More. The “& More” part comes in because we strive to, not only deliver a quality product for traditional accounting and tax services, but also to be a value added business partner capable of helping with everything from set up of the business to succession planning and everything in between. As discussed above, we have grown substantially through strategic mergers and acquisitions, as well as organic growth throughout the years. However, our motto is simple:

 Big Firm Capabilities, Small Firm Personality

The lion represents our big firm capabilities, which means we have the big firm resources available. The kitty represents our small firm personality, which means you will always have the small firm care.

As noted above, our firm provides many services – please see our website, www.bonadio.com for more information. One service that I find interesting is cost segregation studies. Real estate owners and investors use cost segregation studies (CSS) to accelerate overall property depreciation in order to produce a current income tax benefit. Basically, we go into a building and identify the nonstructural components (e.g., light fixtures), assign costs to the components, and increase the owner’s depreciation values by lowering the components’ tax life. Faster depreciation results in tax savings for the owner much earlier than the usual 27 to 39 years. I showed an example where a $8M hotel had tax savings of approximately $220,000 over the life of the building due to the time value of money.

Personally, I primarily provide audit/review/compilation and tax services to a variety of clients such as – individuals, small business owners, auto dealers, real estate developers, hotels, broker dealers and employee benefit pla