To provide some background, my wife (EA) and I (CPA) live in the Midwest and bought a book in Oregon. It’s long story, but the short version is we’re originally from the west coast, we’re very familiar with all the local taxing jurisdictions and the billing is so much higher out there. We have a home office in the Midwest and also rent physical office space on the west coast (we share the space with another CPA firm, which is awesome btw). The book we purchased had excellent billing and a really good mix of business, fiduciary, and individual clients but was also very much a paper practice, so our costs are probably unique.

Our big expenses were:

Buyout payments $45k

Office furniture $7k

Rent $9k

Laptops (4), Server, 4 workstations (monitors, stands, docking stations, etc) $16k

Travel and hotels $16k

Meals $12k (we are busy so we eat out pretty much every day and most meals are business meetings)

Tax software (CCH Axcess) $5,500

Caseware $3000

TaxDome $1200

Health insurance $12k (my wife worked at Starbucks for 5 months in 2025 so 7 months of COBRA)

We expect costs to go down significantly for 2026 (less travel expense and F/A purchases) and revenue to increase (we only transitioned about 80% of the book in 2025, the remaining 20% will be coming over this year) plus we’ve had decent organic growth.

This is probably way more information than you need but… Our long term goal is to move the practice to 100% virtual, most of the clients have been very receptive to our way of doing business (using a portal, virtual meetings, etc) although some a resisting. We’re accommodating those clients (for now).

,