Michael Dolezal & CO, CPAs & Business Advisors

Michael Dolezal & CO, CPAs & Business Advisors No annoying tax professional lingo. Just straight, authoritative and friendly expert advice. We make it our business to understand your business.

We're committed to collaborating with our clients to realize value and savings through effective, ongoing tax and business planning. We emphasize timely communication and working to create and implement strategies which maximize after tax value. We provide customized, comprehensive accounting, tax, and management advisory services to hundreds of businesses throughout Ohio and across the country. W

e provide strategies for reducing tax liability and maximizing profits to ensure success and growth. Give us a call today!

If you own rental property, the difference between a repair and an improvement can directly affect how the cost is treat...
09/09/2026

If you own rental property, the difference between a repair and an improvement can directly affect how the cost is treated for tax purposes.

A repair generally restores the property to its previous condition, such as fixing a leak or replacing a broken window, and may be deductible in the current year.

An improvement typically adds value or extends the property's useful life, such as replacing a roof or remodeling a kitchen, and its cost is generally recovered over time.

The line between the two is not always clear, so it is worth understanding how the work will be classified before the project begins.

If you are planning work on a rental property and want to understand the tax treatment before you move forward, schedule a discovery call with our team: https://scheduler.zoom.us/michael-dolezal/discovery-meeting

Before Q4 gets busy, it is worth taking a quick look at the goals you set for the business at the beginning of the year....
09/03/2026

Before Q4 gets busy, it is worth taking a quick look at the goals you set for the business at the beginning of the year.

Are you ahead, behind, or about where you expected to be?

That answer can tell you a lot about what deserves your attention over the next few months.

Plenty of accounting firms will tell you they work with real estate. Fewer have built the practice around it.Michael hol...
09/01/2026

Plenty of accounting firms will tell you they work with real estate. Fewer have built the practice around it.

Michael holds an Ohio real estate license in addition to his CPA, which is not a common combination, and it is not decorative. It means the conversation about a property does not start with an explanation of how the deal is structured.

Specialization shows up in small ways that add up.

Knowing which questions to ask about a purchase before it closes rather than after. Understanding why an investor’s entity structure matters differently than a contractor’s. Recognizing a depreciation schedule that was set up wrong five years ago. Being able to talk about a 1031 exchange, a refinance, and a partnership buyout in the same conversation without slowing down.

Generalists can get real estate right. Specialists get there faster and catch more on the way. That is the whole argument for it.

Depreciation is a common part of business taxes, but it is not always well understood.When you buy an asset your busines...
08/31/2026

Depreciation is a common part of business taxes, but it is not always well understood.

When you buy an asset your business will use for more than a year, such as a building, vehicle, or equipment, you generally do not deduct the full cost all at once. Instead, that cost is spread over the asset's useful life.

That is depreciation.

The important thing to understand is that depreciation is really about timing. Knowing how and when those deductions are taken can have a meaningful impact on your tax planning and cash flow.

There are four months left in the year, which means there is still time to make decisions that can affect your 2026 tax ...
08/26/2026

There are four months left in the year, which means there is still time to make decisions that can affect your 2026 tax picture.

That may include the timing of equipment purchases, retirement contributions, changes to your business structure, or whether certain expenses should be accelerated before year-end. It is also a good time to ensure your books are up to date so those decisions are based on accurate information.

Some planning opportunities disappear once a transaction has already happened or once the year closes. That is why fall is such an important time to review where things stand.

A year-end tax strategy is much easier to build in September than in March.

There is one piece of tax vocabulary that quietly determines how much you owe, and almost nobody stops to explain it.Bas...
08/25/2026

There is one piece of tax vocabulary that quietly determines how much you owe, and almost nobody stops to explain it.

Basis.

Plainly put, basis is what the tax code treats as your investment in something. When you sell, your gain is the sale price minus your basis, and the gain is what gets taxed. So basis is the number standing between what you sell for and what you owe.

Here is what makes it tricky. Basis moves.

Improvements push it up. Depreciation you have already claimed pushes it down. Closing costs, partner contributions and distributions, and refinances all touch it.

Which means the basis in a property you have held for fifteen years is almost certainly not what you paid for it. When someone sells and gets an unpleasant surprise at tax time, a basis nobody has tracked is very often the reason.

The fix is not complicated. It is just cumulative. Track it as you go, and the number is there when you need it.

Working through this with clients before a sale, rather than after, is a normal part of our work.

"My books are fine."We hear this a lot, and usually it is true. The bookkeeping is accurate. Everything reconciles. Noth...
08/20/2026

"My books are fine."

We hear this a lot, and usually it is true. The bookkeeping is accurate. Everything reconciles. Nothing is missing. And yet the owner still cannot answer a basic question about their own business without a two-week delay.

Accurate and useful are not the same thing. Accurate books tell you what happened. Books that are decision-ready tell you what to do next.

The difference usually comes down to three things.

Whether your revenue and costs are broken out in a way that maps to how you actually make decisions, by property, by job, by service line, rather than lumped into one bucket. Whether the numbers land in front of you within a couple of weeks of month-end, while there is still time to act on them, rather than at tax time. And whether anyone is looking at them with you and asking why something moved.

Plenty of businesses have clean books and still fly blind.

If you have ever had to guess at a hiring decision, a pricing change, or whether you can afford a piece of equipment, that is not a bookkeeping problem. It is a reporting problem, and it is fixable.

Most of what makes rental property tax season easy or miserable is decided months before you ever look at a return. It c...
08/19/2026

Most of what makes rental property tax season easy or miserable is decided months before you ever look at a return. It comes down to what you tracked during the year.

Here are three things that are worth setting up now:

1. Separate repairs from improvements as you spend.
Patching a furnace and replacing the whole HVAC system get very different treatment. Deciding which was which in March, from a shoebox of receipts, is nobody's idea of a good time.

2. Log the days.
If there is any personal use of the property, or you are claiming active involvement, the day count matters. It is also the one thing that cannot be reconstructed after the fact.

3. Keep every closing statement.
Purchases and refinances both. There are deductible items buried in those documents that get missed all the time simply because nobody can find the paperwork.

None of this is complicated. It is just a lot easier in August than in April.

Today is National Financial Awareness Day, which sounds like the kind of holiday nobody asked for until you realize how ...
08/14/2026

Today is National Financial Awareness Day, which sounds like the kind of holiday nobody asked for until you realize how few business owners can answer this one question off the top of their head:

How much cash do you actually have available right now, after payroll, rent, and anything you already owe a vendor this month?

Not the bank balance. The real number.

If you know it, you are ahead of most. If you do not, that is today’s fifteen-minute project, and it is one of the highest-value fifteen minutes you will spend this month.

Happy Financial Awareness Day from all of us!

"Estimated taxes" is a phrase that gets thrown around without anyone stopping to explain it. Here it is in plain terms.I...
08/11/2026

"Estimated taxes" is a phrase that gets thrown around without anyone stopping to explain it. Here it is in plain terms.

If you are self-employed, run an S corp or partnership, own rental property, or earn income that nobody is withholding taxes from, the IRS still expects you to pay throughout the year, not just in April. So you pay in four installments.

The next installment is due September 15th, and it covers income you earned in June, July, and August.

The part that trips people up is that the amount is based on what you actually earned, not on last year’s number copied forward. A strong summer means a bigger payment. A slow summer means you might be overpaying. Either way, it is worth checking before the middle of September rather than guessing.

If nobody has ever walked you through this, that is not a knowledge gap on your part. It is just something the tax code does a poor job of explaining.

Not sure what you owe or whether your estimate is close? We're happy to help you figure it out: https://scheduler.zoom.us/michael-dolezal/discovery-meeting

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Middlefield, OH
44103

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Tuesday 9am - 6pm
Wednesday 9am - 6pm
Thursday 9am - 6pm
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+12164852028

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