Tax Accountant and Bookkeeping in Miami Beach, FL

Miami Beach runs on visitors. From South Pointe up through South Beach, Mid Beach, and North Beach, the economy is hotels, restaurants and bars, and condo units that spend part of the year as short-term rentals in the buildings where the city allows it. That shapes the tax work in two ways: revenue arrives with tax already attached to it, in the form of sales and lodging taxes a business collects on someone else’s behalf, and a large part of the payroll is tipped.

Most engagements here start with the collection side. We look at what the property or the restaurant is actually charging guests, which of those taxes go to Florida on the state sales tax return and which go to local tourist accounts, and whether the point-of-sale or booking platform is reporting the same numbers the returns will. When the last operator left the registrations messy, we clean up the accounts before we file anything forward.

After that the rhythm is seasonal. Sales tax returns go out on your assigned filing frequency, payroll runs through the season when headcount swells and then thins out, and wage reporting has to reflect tips accurately, because the federal deduction for reported tips is time-limited, capped, and phased out at higher incomes, and it only reaches tips that actually appear on the wage statement. Much of this happens in Spanish, and much of it happens for owners who also file somewhere else.