Whether you’re considering a big purchase, making investments, or just want to optimize your finances, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you take control, plan ahead, and maybe even celebrate tax season like you’ve just won the Super Bowl.

Welcome back to the Empowering Entrepreneurs Podcast! Glenn Harper and Julie Smith explore how proactive tax planning for entrepreneurs makes tax time stress-free—starting now!

Instead of letting April 15th become a source of anxiety, they're here to show you how it can just be another day—with the right strategies in place.

Glenn and Julie give you practical tips like maximizing your retirement contributions, mastering tax loss harvesting, leveraging donor-advised funds, and making the most of charitable giving. They also touch on new opportunities provided by recent tax legislation and remind you why staying connected with your advisor year-round is key to avoiding last-minute stress.

This episode is brought to you by PureTax, LLC. Tax preparation services without the pressure. When all you need is to get your tax return done, take the stress out of tax season by working with a firm that has simplified the process and the pricing. Find out more about how we started.

Moments

00:00 "Tax Planning for Smart Savings"

05:24 CPA Guidance Starts With Input

06:56 Proactive Tax Planning Tips

09:29 Julie Smith Overview

Here are 3 key takeaways:

• Start NOW: Waiting until April 15th is too late. Early conversations with your CPA or advisor set you up to leverage every tax benefit available and avoid last-minute stress.
• Maximize Your Planning: From retirement plan contributions and tax loss harvesting to charitable donation stacking, there are so many proactive moves you can make before year-end.
• Constant Communication is Key: Keep your advisor in the loop before making big decisions—from buying property to major purchases—so everything is set up for success, not cleanup.

Glenn Harper, CPA, is the Owner and Managing Partner of Harper & Company CPAs Plus, a top 10 Managing Partner in the country (Accounting Today's 2022 MP Elite). His firm won the 2021 Luca Award for Firm of the Year. 

An entrepreneur and speaker, Glenn transformed his firm into an advisory-focused practice, doubling revenue and profit in two years. He teaches entrepreneurs to build financial and operational excellence, speaks nationwide to CPA firm owners about running their businesses like entrepreneurs, and consults with firms across the country. Glenn enjoys golfing, fishing, hiking, cooking, and spending time with his family.

Julie Smith, MBA, is a serial entrepreneur in the public accounting space. She is the Founder of EmpowerCPA™, Founder of PureTax, LLC, COO for Harper & Company CPAs Plus, and Co-host of the Empowering Entrepreneurs podcast. 

Named CPA.com's 2021 Innovative Practitioner of Year, Julie led Harper & Company's transition to an advisory-focused firm, doubling revenue and profit in two years. She now empowers other CPA firm owners nationwide through consulting and speaking, teaching them how to run their businesses like entrepreneurs. Julie lives in Columbus, OH with her family and enjoys travel, coaching basketball, sporting events, and the occasional shopping spree.

Running a business doesn’t have to run your life.

Without a business partner who holds you accountable, it’s easy to be so busy ‘doing’ business that you don’t have the right strategy to grow your business.

Stop letting your business run you. At Harper & Co CPA Plus, we know that you want to be empowered to build the lifestyle you envision. In order to do that you need a clear path to follow for success

Our clients enjoy a proactive partnership with us. Schedule a consultation with us today.

Download our free guide - Entrepreneurial Success Formula: How to Avoid Managing Your Business From Your Bank Account.

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Copyright 2026 Glenn Harper

Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Empowering Entrepreneurs Podcast. I'm Glenn Harper.

Julie Smith.

What's going on, Jew?

For us it's 2026 is coming. So we've got tax season looming. For us we have quite a different mentality on it, right? So for us it's all about being proactive, understanding everybody's situation. We believe that April 15th is just another day and it shouldn't be as stressful as everyone makes it out. So hopefully this episode will help relieve everybody's stress and kind of how you can go into tax season for, for entrepreneurs and for our listeners in regards to what you could do now. So April 15th really has no meaning to you.

What's that? The seven Ps prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance, something like that. That's like a thing it you, if you wait until April 15th to do your tax planning, well it's too late. So what we like to say for our clients, what we execute on is we start that process early in the year, but when we try to get to the end of the year, we kind of know what the clients, what's going to happen with them, we know what bracket they're going to be, what things look like and then we start down that year end checklist of what kind of tax saving things should we be planning for and preparing for. And some of them everybody it's applicable to and some of them it's only a couple things, but ultimately the first thing you want to do is make sure that you're maxing out your employers retirement plan, your elective deferrals, are they going to be a Roth contribution or a traditional in your 401k, make sure you got that set up and make sure your withholdings are right to make sure you have enough tax being paid so you avoid any penalties. Certainly want to look at your portfolio and recognize that you have any losses or gains in there. And if you have gains or even if you don't have any gains, you maybe some losses. We want to do that tax loss harvesting which is when you want to try to offset your gains by selling your loser stocks to offset that so you don't have to pay tax on that. We call it the phantom income that's sitting in your investment account and then sell enough to cover that plus $3,000 because you can always take your losses to the extent of your gains plus take another -3,000 and you carry the rest forward.

It's a wonderful thing to do. So if you had some big gains early in the year, you want to make sure that you utilize that opportunity through the rest of the year. Certainly you want to. Some people are certainly can do their Roth IRA contributions or traditional IRA contributions, but a lot of our clients are in the tweener phase. Right. They may or may not qualify for it. So we have to wait till we do get their taxes done before we can do that. Charitable contributions, that's a huge thing some people love doing that you always take out.

If you have an rmd, always take that and put that directly into a charitable organization. And if you do that, you not only get to, you get to deduct on the front page of your tax return so you don't pay federal and state tax on it. It's great. If you don't have the opportunity with an RMD that you're taking out, you certainly would want to do an itemized deduction for it. But with the new standard deduction so high, it's really hard for a lot of people unless they give a lot of money away to take the charitable deduction. So if you're a big charity person, you're saying, well, I'd like to put away 15 grand a year. Well, why don't you think about a donor advised fund and you put like 50 grand this year so you can deduct it. And then in the donor advised fund each year, you can peel off $15,000, but you got the benefit today.

We call that, you know, charity stacking and donation stacking because it lets you take advantage today versus giving it every year and get no benefit. Why not put it all away today, get the benefit and then dole it out later. So that's always a good one to do.

I mean, I can tell how passionate you are on this. It just really got your blood pressure up.

Well, I just like anytime you can. Again, it's. We call this the low hanging fruit. If you can just do these few things before you're in it, really you can see a difference in your tax return.

Well, and I think this year is a little bit different too, because not only all the things you mentioned that are we've been doing in the past, but now we've got this big beautiful bill that just said, okay, here are five more checklist items or whatever the case is that people are eligible to do to help with, you know, some of this proactive tax planning.

Yeah. And, and it's so hard. Just like everything in the tax code, you hear it and you're like, oh my God, I get to do that. There's always a limit, there's always a threshold. There's always a filing status that you may or may not qualify. That's always me, believe it or not, it's most everybody. So what you want to try to do is, if you're a client of ours, we've sent that out to say these are things you want to look for. But you know, you might be able to deduct the interest on your new car.

Depending what happens. There might be some energy efficient things that you can do. There's all kinds of, maybe your overtime is not taxable. You know, maybe your tips aren't taxable. Maybe you can get the FICA tip credit because you're now a service business like a masseuse or a hairstylist that you don't have to. You can get a tip credit on the tips that you receive as an employer. There's all kinds of things that are in there. And so it's really important that you reach out to your advisor and say, hey, what can I be doing here? And what are the kind of things that would be helpful?

Well, and I think that's really important is most people don't start thinking about taxes till, you know, those tax forms. So start coming out and by the time you're getting the tax forms, it's really hard to do anything. So start now, start looking at or you know, start communicating with your advisor, your cpa, because pulling those levers is really important. But it's really important before year end, not on April 15, because it's really hard to go back in time.

It's always a fun thing to talk about because as, as a cpa, we're here, we're, we're what's called potential. We're waiting for the input from the client to say, hey, I need something, I did something. What should I do? When that call comes in, boom, we put that energy in motion and we can come back to you and say, here's what you should do. We can't guess, we can't think what you might be doing or what you did. We don't know unless you share that with us. And once you share with us, then we start the conversation and then we can go down the path to do all these things and it could be again, income shifting with kids. It could be putting in a retirement plan, taking advantage of some credits with the things of that nature. There's so many things we could do.

Change your entity structure, put in a management, like there's so many things that happen, but we can See some things that you're doing because we do your monthly books, but we don't know what's going on behind the scenes for your personal things that may be part of the business that we can do. So if you're thinking of something or you heard something, please reach out. I can't help.

You need to buy a car before you're in.

Some people like to do that for a nice heavy vehicle. Who doesn't want to get one of those? And again, sometimes it hurts and sometimes, sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It depends on the circumstances. You want to throw a short term rental in. You want to go buy a property on the beach somewhere, make sure that it qualifies. But people go buy it, but they don't know how to set it up and then they come and see us and we're like, sorry, it doesn't qualify. Don't be that person. Reach out prior to doing something so we can say this is how you do it so you'll be successful in it.

So if I could tie all that up with a red bow, please. I think what you're saying is you need to be in constant communication with your advisor, your CPA before you do things so things can be set up properly so that on the back end we're not here to clean up a mess or you can't fully take advantage of the tax code. I also think what I'm hearing is, and kind of the whole theme is start tax season now and be proactive so that come April 15, it is just another day for you because you already know everything that's going to happen. We've been able to pull all the levers. You've been able to plan and be proactive in regards to that. Take the stress out of it. There's no reason to stress about tax season. The only reason you stress about tax season is when you keep putting it off.

And when you put it off, you certainly can't pull any levers or do anything advantageous.

I always look at, I always used to say, like, I don't know if I can say this, but I always look at like the, the tax season is the super bowl, but you're not going to be successful in that big game unless you don't do the hard work prior. And so what we're trying to do.

You got to buy tickets to the Super Bowl.

Yes.

Before it happens, is what you're saying.

Correct. So if you put in the hard work now and, and work through those things and put your Game plan together and look at us as a trusted partner, not just a. A task that files your tax return. Look at us as more like, we're here to help you get a better result. We're here. We put that work in all throughout the year. When we do get to the big game and then tax season, we already know the answer. We already did the hard work.

It's just like, yep, check. We did it all. Perfect. Good job. Way to go. If we don't do that, then we're sitting with the tears of regret and go, oh, if you just would have called me. If we'd have just knew this, maybe next year we can get it.

We.

We don't want to have that conversation. It's the worst conversation to have. We want to be like, hey, well done. Everybody's a hero. Everybody wins on it.

We all want to get the trophy at the end of the super bowl, right?

Everybody wants a trophy, so go buy.

Your tickets now for the super bowl so that we can properly plan for it. And then hopefully by April 15th, we're all holding that trophy from the super bowl, right? We're all just passing it around because we've all, all done the work that it takes to get there.

Maybe it's the Stanley cup because we're all going to pass the thing around.

Maybe that's whatever it is.

Either way, it's all good. Well, that's. I think that's the, probably the biggest thing we can do when we go into your end. And remember, we make the CAD the conversation. Now, again, it's just the conversation on the client's end. On our side, we put the wheels in motion. You just got to answer some questions and have a conversation. We.

We do all this for you and tell you what to do. You don't have to do it. It's not hard. It's just have the conversation sound good. Who doesn't want to do that? Well, hope you all enjoy your holidays and look forward to hearing from you for the year end. And if everybody listening to this, please talk to your advisor and make sure that you're implementing all these things. I'm Glenn Harper.

Julie Smith.