Today’s I’ve got on the show, who is a CPA and the founder of CPA On Fire, a tax and accounting firm specializing in working with online entrepreneurs. Over the last few years he has been working very closely with Amazon FBA and other eCommerce sellers to help them with the challenging aspects of accounting and taxes specific to eCommerce sellers.

What you’ll learn:

Can you take us to the beginning before you started your accounting firm, where did your journey begin?What’s the story of how you became the official cpa for entrepreneur on fire?

• How many employees he has


• How  Amazon sellers should setup their business.


• How to big sellers legally save a lot of money on taxes


• What’s tax deductible in our e-commerce businesses


• How Donald Trump Saves on Taxes


• Distributions to owners vs. payroll


• Sales tax and set the record straight. Should we paying sales tax to all the states where FBA is at, or just our state tax


• What software tools do you recommend a seller should use. And WHY

And lots more.

Show notes coming soon.

DAVID ALADDIN: Welcome to the show, Josh.

JOSH BAUERLE: Hey. Thanks for having me.

DAVID ALADDIN: So, can you take us at the beginning before you started your accounting firm? Where did your journey begin?

JOSH BAUERLE: Yeah. So I kind of worked in several different accounting fields, I guess I did work at a Fortune 500 company out of college, doing some cost accounting. I moved into public accounting doing taxes for bigger businesses. I did some financial advising and I finally realized that all these jobs weren’t the problem. I kept thinking if I got this new job that would be the job I’d like. But I finally realized that I just didn’t like being an employee so by 2012 I went out and founded my own firm and I started specializing in working with online entrepreneurs and that’s  kind of slowly evolved into really working closely with eCommerce sellers and especially Amazon FBA sellers so we got here.

DAVID ALADDIN: How long were you doing the job thing for?

JOSH BAUERLE: I did, let’s see. I did two years out of school at the Fortune 500, I did another two years at a public accounting and then a year at financial advising. About five years.

DAVID ALADDIN: Five years.

JOSH BAUERLE: Yep.

DAVID ALADDIN: So 2007-ish?

JOSH BAUERLE: Yeah. Roughly. Yep.

DAVID ALADDIN: And so when you were like wanted to quit your job was that at that time one of the hardest things to do?

JOSH BAUERLE: Yeah. It kind of came up random. It actually when I was doing the financial advising, the guy I was working for, he wanted to acquire other financial advising firms. And I said, hey, I have my CPA license why don’t we just acquire another CPA firm and we can turn those into financial advising clients. He was all on board for that and we found one that we really liked and he then kind of got cold feet and backed out at the last second and I was like, you know what? I’m still going to go through with it, I’m going to take it over. So I was working with this guy and it was kind of, he was an older guy, he’s looking in to get out of his practice. He basically just let me run the whole practice and I get x’ed him out of the total whole revenue that came in. Then he said, and beside if you want to build your own stuff on the side you can keep all of it. So I started doing that for him while just slowly building my side business and it get to the point where he kind of wasn’t being reasonable for what he want to charge me to buy his, but I felt I’ve built mine enough that I could finally go out of my own, so.

DAVID ALADDIN:        Yes.

JOSH BAUERLE:            It’s kind of a hybrid way of going out on your own.

DAVID ALADDIN:        So it was a totally different like industry going on while we’re all building our eCommerce businesses.

JOSH BAUERLE:            Right. Yeah. It’s a little different.

DAVID ALADDIN:        What—if you don’t mind me asking, what kind of side cut did he give you? Like percentage?

JOSH BAUERLE:            So it was—yeah, so the first year it was 26% of gross revenue. And then the second year it was 35%.

DAVID ALADDIN:        Nice. Was he doing over seven figures or kind of like a small firm.

JOSH BAUERLE:            No he was. It was kind of funny. He was doing, he did about $150,000.

DAVID ALADDIN:        Okay. Very cool.

JOSH BAUERLE:            Yeah. But it was funny it was like, I don’t know. Feel like H&R Block, or anything like that style. Like in there boom, in half hour I’m done with their tax, put everything out give it to me, go. My days were like 14 hours straight of boom, boom, boom, boom, boom doing taxes.

DAVID ALADDIN:        I wish I could do my taxes in 30 minutes.

JOSH BAUERLE:            That’s a—I wouldn’t advise going the route to someone who does it in 30 minutes but I will tell you that that taught me a lot about doing it because that customer sitting there right in front of you, you can’t be like oh, ask somebody like this and you’ve got to figure it out. And I learned more in those two years that I ever did.

DAVID ALADDIN:        What’s the story with you becoming the official CPA on Entrepreneur on Fire?

JOSH BAUERLE:            Yeah. So that happened when I really started focusing on doing my own stuff it was when Entrepreneurs on Fire first came out. And I was listening on the podcast and I emailed John, and I said, hey, I have my own tax business. If you need any guest on your show, I’d be happy to talk about how I’m building my business, and he wrote back right away and said I don’t need any guest but I need a CPA so it was perfect timing. It worked out well. I did all his stuff for free and in exchange he kind of advertised that I was their CPA and it got to the point that I’m now on their show once a month.

DAVID ALADDIN:        That’s awesome. That’s straight hustle. Just by reaching out to one guy, it has launched this whole other brand for you.

JOSH BAUERLE:            Yeah, exactly. I tell people I can’t guarantee reach out to someone the first time and it’s going to work out like this? But if you keep reaching out to people, something good’s going to eventually happen.

DAVID ALADDIN:        I think so too. It’s like the little small stepping stones that you’ve done, you’ve created your own, you start doing it for yourself for like two years and then now you started reaching out to people and it’s like one thing led to the next like you wouldn’t have, like your brand is slightly based on like the Fire Brand.

JOSH BAUERLE:            Right.

DAVID ALADDIN:        Which is awesome, it gives you a lot of credibility, too.

JOSH BAUERLE:            Yeah. Like you said it all builds off each other I mean if I have approached you and I don’t have all these experience on Entrepreneurs on Fire website and or podcast and the Amazing Seller podcast, you’d probably just say, this guy just want some from my podcast, like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s proof that you’ve done it before. So one builds off the other like you said.

DAVID ALADDIN:        Okay. So let’s get into accounting for Amazon Sellers and eCommerce Sellers.

JOSH BAUERLE:            Yep.

DAVID ALADDIN:        It’s like where did you begin there? So I guess let’s start at the beginning like how just sellers set up their Amazon business like legally?

JOSH BAUERLE:            And to be wise? Yes that’s a good question. It is an important question. Keep in mind though that I’m only a CPA, I’m not an attorney. So I might be discussing the tax among other things so there’s definitely  legal ramifications as well.

DAVID ALADDIN:        Sure.

JOSH BAUERLE:            But the one thing that people going to need to understand from a tax perspective is I get to hear people all the time saying oh, I’m going to open an LLC and so I can get all these write offs. And the thing you need to understand is LLC is no different than a sole proprietor. It has a zero tax benefits. In fact the IRS doesn’t even recognize an LLC you are still a sole proprietor if you’re the only owner of that business.  So don’t go form an LLC thinking you’re going to save on taxes especially if you’re in a state like California where they’re going to charge you $800 a year just to have that LLC in place.

Now it could be they’d get benefits from that and talk to your attorney about that but if you’re just looking for the tax benefits there’s no benefits from the sole proprietor in the LLC. So what we tell people is you’re basically choosing—when you’re first getting started your just fine. You can go as sole proprietor, if you do want to form that LLC to actually just make things a little more official, totally fine. In fact the LLC offers a little more flexibility to go into other options so I have no issues with that as long as you understand there are no tax benefits.

So if you’re just getting started, you don’t have much coming in yet, maybe you’re not showing a profit yet you’re just fine to go with that sole proprietorship or go with that LLC, whatever you prefer there. Once you start hitting $30,000-$40,000 per year or more in profits, and just to be clear when we say profits we mean after all of your deductions  or expenses so your cost for a good  sold, your advertizing, your Amazon fees, everything in there. When all of that is accounted for, if you have $30,000-$40,000 left at the end of the year, now is the time to start considering a