Practical guides for small business owners, international founders, STR operators, and healthcare professionals — written by people who do this work every day.
Every foreign-owned US LLC must file Form 5472 annually. The penalty for missing it is $25,000 — flat, no warnings. Here's exactly what it is, who needs to file, and what happens if you don't.
If you're a non-US resident who owns a US LLC, there's a form sitting quietly in the background of your business that most founders never hear about until something goes wrong. Form 5472 is an IRS information return — not a tax form in the traditional sense, but a reporting requirement. It exists so the IRS can track financial activity between a US company and its foreign owner. The penalty for not filing it is $25,000. Flat. Per year. With no warning letter before it hits.
If your US LLC has a single owner and that owner is not a US citizen or US tax resident, you almost certainly need to file Form 5472 every year — even if the company made zero dollars, even if it had no activity at all. The filing requirement is triggered by foreign ownership of the entity, not by profit, revenue, or US-sourced income. A dormant LLC with $0 in transactions still needs to file.
Form 5472 reports "reportable transactions" between the LLC and its foreign owner. This includes capital contributions (money you put into the company), distributions (money you took out), loans either direction, and payments for services or expenses. Essentially, any money that moved between you personally and your LLC during the year needs to be documented and reported on this form.
The $25,000 penalty applies per form, per year, and the IRS does not send a reminder before the deadline passes. There is a "reasonable cause" exception, but it requires demonstrating that you exercised ordinary business care and prudence — simply not knowing the requirement existed is rarely accepted on its own. Founders who miss multiple years can find themselves facing penalties that are multiples of $25,000, often discovered only when they try to sell the business, refinance, or work with a new accountant.
The form itself is short — one page — and filing it correctly takes a competent preparer under an hour once your books are organized. The real risk isn't the form's complexity; it's not knowing it exists until it's already late. If you formed a US LLC through a service like doola, Firstbase, or Stripe Atlas and you're not certain whether your 5472 has been filed for the current or prior years, that's worth checking now rather than later.
US bookkeepers charge $40–75/hour. Here's what that actually costs monthly, what you get for the money, and what the nearshore alternative looks like.
A US-based bookkeeper typically charges $40 to $75 per hour, depending on experience and location. For a small business with a moderate volume of transactions — say, a service business with one bank account, a handful of vendors, and monthly invoicing — a bookkeeper usually needs 10 to 20 hours per month to keep things current. That's $400 to $1,500 per month before you've added payroll processing, AP/AR management, or any advisory time.
Most US bookkeeping services land in one of three tiers. Basic monthly reconciliation and categorization runs roughly $300–600/month for very simple businesses. Standard bookkeeping with reconciliation, reporting, and some AP/AR support runs $600–1,200/month. Full-service bookkeeping with payroll coordination, sales tax filing support, and monthly financial review calls runs $1,200–2,500/month. Pricing scales with transaction volume, number of accounts, and whether you need industry-specific knowledge (inventory, multi-location, etc.).
At the lower end, you're often getting software-driven categorization with minimal human review — fine for very simple businesses, but mistakes can sit uncorrected for months. At the mid and upper tiers, you're paying for a person who actually looks at your numbers, catches anomalies, and can answer questions. The jump in price between tiers is mostly about attention, not software — most providers use the same tools (QuickBooks, Xero) regardless of price.
Nearshore bookkeeping — delivered from Mexico, for example — offers the same QuickBooks/Xero-based service, the same attention to detail, and the same timezone availability as a US provider, typically at $300–800/month for the equivalent of what would cost $800–1,500/month domestically. The reason it works is straightforward: the work itself (reconciliation, categorization, reporting) doesn't require US-based labor costs, but timezone alignment means communication doesn't suffer the way it can with providers 10+ hours away.
Whatever you pay, three things matter more than the price tag: how quickly someone responds when you have a question, whether your books are reconciled monthly (not "caught up" once a year before taxes), and whether you can get a clear answer about your cash position without waiting days. A $400/month service that responds same-day beats a $1,200/month service that takes a week.
Platform payouts, cleaning fees, host service charges, occupancy tax — STR income is messier than it looks. Here's how to reconcile it cleanly every month.
On the surface, short-term rental income looks simple: a guest books, you get paid. In practice, what lands in your bank account is a net figure — after platform fees, after host service charges, sometimes after cleaning fees are deducted and other times when they're paid separately. If you're running multiple properties across Airbnb, VRBO, and Booking.com simultaneously, each platform calculates and times its payouts differently, which makes "what did I actually earn this month" a surprisingly hard question to answer from your bank statement alone.
Airbnb typically pays out within 24 hours of guest check-in, already net of their host service fee (usually around 3%). VRBO's payout timing and fee structure differs. Booking.com often operates on a "collect at property" or invoiced commission model entirely separate from the other two. If you're recording "deposits" as revenue, you're understating your actual booking revenue and overstating your expenses — or missing the fee expense altogether. The fix is recording gross booking value as revenue and platform fees as a separate expense line, which requires pulling data from each platform's payout reports, not just your bank feed.
Most US jurisdictions charge some form of occupancy or lodging tax on short-term rentals, and the rules vary by city and county — not just state. In some markets, Airbnb collects and remits this tax automatically. In others, the host is responsible for registering, collecting, and filing it directly. The tricky part is that this can vary property by property even within the same operator's portfolio, and getting it wrong creates liability that often surfaces years later during an audit or a property sale.
The cleanest approach: at month-end, pull the payout/transaction report from each platform (not just your bank statement), record gross booking revenue and platform fees as separate line items, match cleaning fee income and expense if you charge guests separately, and reconcile the net of all that against what actually hit your bank account. Do this per property if you manage more than one, so each property has its own P&L — this is the only way to know which properties are actually profitable once you account for mortgage, utilities, and management time.
If you're managing one property casually, a spreadsheet might be enough. Once you're managing multiple properties, multiple platforms, or properties on behalf of other owners, the reconciliation work becomes a real monthly task — usually a few hours per property if done by hand, more if it's been neglected for a few months and needs catching up. This is exactly the kind of recurring, detail-heavy work that's well suited to being handled by a dedicated bookkeeper rather than squeezed in between guest turnovers.
Running your own practice means insurance reimbursements, Medicare reconciliation, equipment depreciation — all on top of seeing patients. Here's what your bookkeeper should be handling.
Most bookkeeping services are built around a simple model: money comes in from customers, money goes out to vendors, reconcile the difference. Medical practices break this model immediately. Revenue doesn't arrive when the service is performed — it arrives weeks or months later, from multiple insurance payers, often at amounts different from what was billed, with adjustments and write-offs that need to be tracked separately from the original charge. A bookkeeper who treats insurance payments like ordinary customer payments will produce books that don't reflect reality.
When you bill an insurer, you're recording a charge — but what gets paid is often less, due to contracted rates, and the payment itself can arrive 30 to 90 days later, sometimes bundled across multiple patients in a single deposit. Proper practice bookkeeping needs to track the original charge, the contractual adjustment (the difference between billed and allowed amount), the actual payment, and any patient-responsibility portion separately. Without this breakdown, your "revenue" numbers will be meaningless for understanding what your practice actually generates.
Medical practices often involve significant equipment purchases — diagnostic equipment, dental chairs, imaging devices — that represent real cash outflows but aren't simply "expenses" in the month you buy them. These need to be capitalized and depreciated over time, or in many cases, eligible for accelerated deduction under Section 179 in the year of purchase. Getting this right affects both your monthly P&L (which should reflect the ongoing cost of using the equipment) and your annual tax position (where the timing of the deduction matters significantly).
Even a solo practice often has at least one or two staff — a hygienist, a medical assistant, front desk support. Payroll for a practice needs to account for regular wages, any overtime in a clinical setting, and often benefits administration. While the actual payroll processing is usually handled by a dedicated payroll service (Gusto, ADP, etc.), the bookkeeping needs to correctly record payroll expenses, employer tax liabilities, and any benefits costs in the right categories — and reconcile what the payroll service reports against what actually left your bank account.
At minimum, monthly bookkeeping for a self-employed physician or dentist should separate clinical revenue (by payer type if possible — insurance vs. self-pay), track the gap between billed and collected amounts, properly categorize equipment purchases for depreciation, reconcile payroll, and produce a P&L that actually reflects practice profitability — not just "money in minus money out." This is the foundation that makes year-end tax preparation straightforward instead of a scramble, and gives you a real answer when you ask "is this practice actually making money."
Wyoming is the most popular US state for non-resident LLC formation. Here's why, what it costs annually, and what compliance you need to stay on top of.
For non-US residents forming a US LLC, Wyoming has become the default choice for a few concrete reasons: no state income tax, no requirement for the owner to be a US resident or citizen, strong privacy protections (member names generally aren't part of the public record), and relatively low ongoing costs compared to alternatives like Delaware. None of this means Wyoming is "better" in some abstract sense — it means Wyoming removes friction that doesn't add value for a small non-resident-owned LLC.
Initial formation in Wyoming runs around $100 in state filing fees, whether you file yourself directly with the Secretary of State or through a formation service (which typically adds their own fee on top, often $100–300). The ongoing cost that matters is the Annual Report fee, which for most small LLCs is a minimum of $60/year, due on the first day of the anniversary month of formation. Beyond that, you'll need a registered agent — a Wyoming-based party who can receive legal documents on your behalf — which typically runs $50–150/year if you're not physically present in the state.
An EIN (Employer Identification Number) is required to open a US bank account, file taxes, and generally operate the LLC. For applicants without a Social Security Number, the IRS requires the EIN application (Form SS-4) to be submitted by fax or mail rather than online — this is the single biggest friction point for non-resident founders, and the reason services like doola exist. Processing via fax typically takes 4–8 weeks, though it can occasionally be faster. There's no way to expedite this through the standard process; patience (or a service that's run this process many times before) is the only lever.
For a non-resident-owned single-member Wyoming LLC, the recurring annual obligations are: the Wyoming Annual Report ($60 minimum, due on your formation anniversary), registered agent renewal (if using a third-party service), Form 5472 with a pro forma Form 1120 (the IRS information return for foreign-owned LLCs, with a $25,000 penalty for non-filing), and the Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) report with FinCEN, which is a one-time filing unless ownership changes. Missing any of these doesn't typically shut down your business immediately, but penalties and complications compound the longer they go unaddressed.
Delaware is the traditional choice for companies planning to raise venture capital, due to its well-established corporate law and investor familiarity — but it comes with a $300/year minimum franchise tax regardless of revenue, which is overkill for most small founder-owned LLCs. New Mexico is the cheapest option, with no annual report requirement at all — but it's less recognized by banks and payment processors, which can occasionally create friction during account opening. Wyoming sits in the middle: low cost, widely recognized, and well-suited for the vast majority of non-resident founders who aren't planning an institutional fundraise.
Most small businesses set up QuickBooks wrong — wrong chart of accounts, wrong bank feeds, wrong tax settings. Here's how to do it correctly so month-end never turns into a fire drill.
QuickBooks ships with a generic default chart of accounts, and most small business owners never touch it — which means every expense gets jammed into broad categories like "Office Expenses" or "Miscellaneous" regardless of what it actually is. Six months later, when you try to understand where your money is going, the data is useless. A properly set up chart of accounts reflects how *your specific business* actually spends and earns money — enough categories to be meaningful, but not so many that data entry becomes a guessing game every time.
Connecting your bank account to QuickBooks is the easy part — the setup that actually matters is the bank rules that determine how transactions get auto-categorized. Done poorly, you end up with hundreds of "Uncategorized Expense" transactions piling up, which someone then has to manually sort through at tax time. Done well, the majority of recurring transactions (software subscriptions, recurring vendor payments, regular transfers) are categorized automatically and correctly the moment they hit your feed, leaving only genuinely new or unusual transactions for manual review.
QuickBooks offers "Classes" and "Locations" as ways to tag transactions for additional reporting — useful if you have multiple business lines, multiple properties, or multiple locations and want to see profitability broken out by each. For a single-location, single-line-of-business operation, turning these on adds complexity without benefit. The right setup depends on whether you'll actually use the resulting reports — if nobody's going to look at a "profitability by location" report, don't build the infrastructure to produce one.
If your business collects sales tax, QuickBooks can track and help you remit it — but only if it's configured for the correct jurisdictions from the start. Getting this wrong doesn't just create a one-time cleanup; it means every invoice issued in the meantime may have the wrong tax treatment, which compounds the longer it goes unnoticed. This is one of the areas most worth getting right during initial setup rather than fixing later, since unwinding incorrect sales tax on historical invoices is genuinely tedious.
A QuickBooks file that's set up correctly needs roughly 30 minutes a month to stay current: review and categorize any transactions that didn't auto-categorize, reconcile each bank and credit card account against its statement, and glance at the P&L for anything that looks obviously wrong (a bill posted twice, an expense in the wrong category). Businesses that skip this find themselves, eight months later, facing a "catch-up" project that takes days instead of the 30-minute increments it should have been all along.
We're writing new guides every week. Check back shortly or browse all articles.
Book a free 25-minute call — we'll give you a straight answer, whether or not you end up working with us.