March 2019 by Areen M.
As a local business owner with 30 years of experience, we began growing quickly and I was no longer able to manage our bookkeeping and day to day financial forecasting. I was referred to Orin of Consultance Accounting Services from my local bank in order to manage our company financials, bookeeping, and cash flow management. Originally, we did not see the value in the high fees that Consultance was charging when they put together our initial proposal. They came in considerably higher than competitive businesses, and originally we ended up declining the proposal Orin had provided. Orin gives a great sales pitch and is extremely persistent with winning over people in order to provide his accounting services, and I must say he did a fantastic job selling his financial plan to us. Made it seem so seamless and pain free - something business owners can only dream of when having to manage such large sums of money going in and out on a monthly basis. I made it very clear to Orin what the purpose of our partnership would be, and what my problems were, and he assured me that I would never have to lose sleep over having to manage all of the financial aspects of running the business due to the fact that we have a lot of product moving internally between separate entities and there must be a well through out system in place. After quite some time of mulling whether or not I should hire Consultance, I finally caved and agreed on the proposal to move all of our financials over to Consultance Accounting Services. Originally, Orin and his assistant approached us during on-boarding with a fabulous power-point presentation of all of the services they were going to provide in addition to how we would be transitioning everything from bank logins, to Quickbooks files, to POS integration and so on. Our first issue actually occurred when I noticed right off the bat Orin and his staff were essentially ignoring credits and debits in the bank accounts, and immediately cash flow became an issue (especially since now they were adding their exorbitant fees on top of our expenses). Basically, our cash flow issues were greatly exacerbated given he was deducting his fees and not even paying attention to the accounts to see when payroll, rent, loan payments are coming out, and was creating an even larger cash flow issue for our company. The main purpose for hiring Orin and Consultance was to prevent this sort of cash flow issue. Not once did Orin do his due diligence to even look at the chart of debits and payments to see how they should be managed. Our accounting went from being a problem to an absolute mess instantly. The amount of overdraft fees I paid in 1 month was over $2,000. UNACCEPTABLE! The only things that was being done in accordance with the agreement was the payments he was deducting for his services - those were being done like clockwork. I had a very serious discussion with Orin after the first month notifying him that the purpose of me hiring him was to keep us financially sound and if there were conflicts to communicate them to me. This was absolutely not the case, and Orin acknowledged that he would comply moving forward. Once we got through that fiasco, we moved on and Orin immediately deployed his assistant to basically take her time to slowly and individually add the chart of accounts (which should have been an easy import from our existing Quickbooks file) and the login information for various accounts etc. Basically almost 2 months of working together, and all we got set up was integrating the bank accounts and credit cards into Quickbooks online (something that is done very easily without the need for a "professional"). I was helping them basically instead of them helping me. 30 days pass by, and still I have no access to their coveted Quickbooks Online profile, no access to bill.com (it appears Orin is an authorized reseller of all these add on services which also come with fees). I began to wonder why there was so much time in between when I would send them emails, and when I would see any actual progress withi
