Last February, I watched Mark, a self-employed contractor from Lakewood, walk into my office with three grocery bags full of crumpled receipts, faded invoices, and bank statements held together with coffee-stained rubber bands. “I’ve been putting this off since January,” he confessed, not making eye contact. “My wife said either I deal with this or she’s filing for divorce.” Four hours and two pots of coffee later, we’d untangled his tax situation, finding nearly $7,400…
The moment is seared into my memory. It was 2 AM, my kitchen table buried under receipts, spreadsheets scattered like fallen leaves around my laptop. Coffee cup number four had gone cold hours ago. This quarterly ritual of financial panic had become my norm as a business owner, with accounting representing nothing more than a dreaded chore and persistent source of anxiety. “There has to be a better way,” I mumbled to no one in…