Most accountants met cryptocurrency the way their clients did: a client turned up with a tangle of exchange statements and a question the tax code had barely addressed. Josh Cahan met it earlier. He started learning about and investing in crypto in 2017, he writes on a professional directory, and the tax work followed.
For this, Josh Cahan, CPA is a solo practice at 6715-A Fairview Road in SouthPark, and it is the kind of firm that does not generate press releases. What it generates is clients who stay, and a specialty that most one person practices in Charlotte never picked up.
It started as a general practice
The firm describes itself as a local Charlotte CPA practice with more than fifteen years of experience providing tax and accounting services to businesses and individuals. The core work is what a small firm does: income tax preparation and planning, small business accounting, business consulting, outsourced accounting and outsourced CFO services for companies too small to hire one.
The goal, in the firm’s own words, is not only to become a trusted advisor but to develop and implement business and individual strategies that help clients succeed. That is standard language. The clients’ language, in the reviews that appear on our accountants guide, is less standard: tenures of twenty five years, and a preference for one person who knows the whole picture over a firm where the contact changes every spring.
The man behind it
Cahan works alone, which is a choice with consequences on both sides. A client gets the principal every time, on every call, with no associate learning the file. The practice, in turn, is limited to what one person can handle, and the reviews suggest it is handled carefully.
The crypto specialty is the distinguishing thing. Cahan writes that he is very excited for what the future holds for cryptocurrency, and the practice lists cryptocurrency tax preparation as a named service, alongside the conventional ones. In 2017 that was an unusual thing for a Charlotte CPA to invest time in. By the time the IRS began asking every taxpayer about digital assets on the front page of the return, it was a service with a client base already built.
What you actually get
The practice suits a particular client: an individual or a small business owner who wants a single accountant for the long term, and who may have a portfolio the average preparer would rather not touch. Tax planning runs alongside preparation, which is the part of the work that saves money instead of merely reporting it, and the outsourced CFO service gives a growing business a finance function without a hire.
The office sits on Fairview Road at the edge of SouthPark, with the parking that neighborhood offers and none of the Uptown deck fees. The practice is small enough that a new client should ask early whether there is capacity, since a solo firm’s calendar in March is the limiting factor.
The cryptocurrency work is more involved than it sounds. Every trade, swap, stake and transfer between wallets can be a taxable event, exchanges issue incomplete or conflicting statements, and a client who has been active since 2017 may have thousands of transactions across platforms that no longer exist. A preparer who learned the mechanics as an investor knows which questions to ask and which records will be missing, and that is the difference between a return that is filed and one that survives an audit.
The practice’s other listed services, business consulting and outsourced CFO work, are the ones that keep small business clients for decades. A one person firm cannot audit a public company, but it can sit with an owner every quarter and explain what the numbers mean, and the reviews that put this practice on our accountants list describe exactly that: a client who has been with the firm for twenty five years, and a recommendation phrased as a rescue.
The firm’s own summary of what it offers is unusually plain for the profession: tax preparation, tax planning, small business accounting, business consulting, outsourced accounting, outsourced CFO services and cryptocurrency tax. No firm history, no team page, no awards. For a client who wants the person and not the brochure, that is the whole appeal, and the office on Fairview Road has run on it for more than fifteen years.
Why it matters
Charlotte is a banking city with a great many large accounting firms, and the solo CPA is an endangered thing in it. The ones that survive do so by being very good at a narrow set of work for a loyal set of people, and by noticing a change in the world before their competitors do.
Cahan noticed cryptocurrency in 2017 and learned it from the inside, as an investor, before it became a line on Form 1040. That is the kind of curiosity a client wants in the person handling their return, and it is why a one person office on Fairview Road appears on our list at all.