Terms of Service

1. What these terms cover

These terms govern your use of truearctax.com, the free calculators on it, the contact form, the consultation booking page, and any conversation that follows from them. They apply from the moment you use the site.

They are not the contract for your tax return. Professional work is governed by a separate written engagement letter that names the specific returns, filings, or bookkeeping periods being done, what the fee is, and what is excluded. Where an engagement letter and this page disagree, the engagement letter wins for that engagement.

If you do not agree with these terms, the remedy is simple: do not use the site.

2. Who we are, and what we are not

TrueArc Tax and Financial Services LLC is a California limited liability company operating a tax preparation, bookkeeping, and business formation practice from 7514 Jordan Ave, Canoga Park, CA 91303. Work is performed by Amid Kobakival, the founder.

Credentials, all currently active and independently verifiable: CTEC-Registered Tax Preparer, CTEC ID A-361844, verifiable at ctec.org. IRS Preparer Tax Identification Number. Authorized IRS e-file Provider. QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor. California requires every registered tax preparer to carry a $5,000 tax preparer surety bond; ours is current.

What we are not, stated plainly because the distinctions matter and because the word "Financial" appears in our name:

• We are not a licensed CPA firm. We do not perform audits, reviews, compilations, or any other attest engagement, and nothing we produce should be represented to a third party as one.
• We are not a law firm. We do not practice law or give legal advice. Choosing an entity has legal consequences beyond tax, and those belong to an attorney.
• We are not an investment adviser, broker-dealer, insurance producer, or lender. We do not sell financial products, recommend securities or insurance, or receive commissions, referral fees, or any other compensation from anyone but our clients.

3. Using this site does not make you a client

Reading these pages, running a calculator, sending the contact form, booking a consultation, or having that consultation does not create a professional relationship, and does not put us under any obligation to prepare, file, or review anything.

A relationship starts at one identifiable moment: when a written engagement letter for specific work has been issued by us and accepted by you. Before that point, nothing said on a call or in an email is advice you should act on, and no deadline is being tracked on your behalf.

What does apply before that point is confidentiality. Anything you tell us or send us while deciding whether to hire us is held in confidence and handled under our Privacy Policy, whether or not you become a client.

4. What we do

The practice offers four kinds of engagement, described in full on Services and priced on Pricing:

• Tax strategy and preparation. Business and personal returns prepared together, filed electronically.
• Accounting and bookkeeping. Monthly categorization and reconciliation in QuickBooks Online, catch-up and cleanup work, 1099 preparation and filing, year-end close.
• Business setup and entity selection. Entity analysis on your actual numbers, California formation, S corp elections including late elections, EIN and first-year setup.
• Combined bookkeeping and tax. The two engagements above run as one relationship.

Tax preparation engagements carry a defined set of deliverables that continue past the filing date: all four estimated tax payment vouchers for the following year, calculated on safe-harbor amounts from the return just completed, federal and California, on California's actual payment schedule; one free recalculation of any remaining voucher at your request; an extension with a calculated payment where one is needed; review of IRS or FTB notices on returns we prepared; and, on business returns, an annual reasonable-salary and structure check plus one scheduled year-end planning review between mid-October and mid-December.

What is standard at each tier differs, and the matrix on the Pricing page is the current statement of it. Your engagement letter is the controlling list for your engagement.

5. What we do not do

Some of these are outside our license, some are outside our competence, and some we have simply decided not to sell. The distinction rarely matters to you; the boundary does.

• Running payroll, paying your bills, or sending your invoices.
• Representation before the IRS or the FTB in an examination, appeal, collection matter, or Tax Court proceeding. Reviewing a notice on a return we prepared and explaining what it says and what to do about it is included. Standing in your place before the agency is not, and we will refer you to someone who can.
• Audits, reviews, compilations, or any attest work.
• Legal, investment, or insurance advice.
• Preparation of the following year's returns. That is a new engagement, quoted separately.
• Anything with a deadline we cannot actually meet. We will say so rather than take the work.

When something falls outside this practice, you get a straight referral, not a stretch.

6. Consultations, quotes, and engagement letters

The initial consultation is free, roughly fifteen minutes, by video or phone. No card, no obligation, no follow-up sequence. It is a scoping conversation and general discussion, not tax advice you should rely on.

If the work makes sense, you receive a flat fee in writing before anything begins, and the invoice matches the quote. An approved quote changes only when the work turns into work that was not described when we priced it, for example a second entity appears or a prior year has to be filed before the current one can be. In that case we tell you the new number and get your approval before continuing. If we simply underestimated the job as described, that is our cost, not yours.

The price ranges published on this site are ranges, not quotes. They are current as of the date shown on the Pricing page and change when the cost of the work changes. An engagement already quoted finishes at the number quoted.

7. Fees and payment

• Tax preparation and setup work is billed as a flat fee, due when the completed work is delivered for your signature. We e-file once the return is signed and the invoice is settled.
• Monthly bookkeeping and combined engagements are billed monthly in advance, run month to month, and carry no minimum term and no cancellation fee. Any change to a monthly fee is told to you at renewal, before it takes effect.
• Questions are free, year-round, on every engagement. There is no per-question billing and no "within reason" qualifier attached to it.
• Government costs are not our fees and are not included in them. Secretary of State filing fees, the $800 California franchise tax, the S corp net income tax, and your payroll provider's charges are paid by you, to them.

If an invoice goes unpaid we may pause work and decline to start new work. We will not hold your own documents hostage over a fee dispute: records you gave us are returned on request regardless of what is owed.

8. What we need from you

A return is only as good as what goes into it, and almost every bad outcome in this profession traces to a gap on this list.

• Complete and accurate information, on time. We prepare from what you provide. We do not audit, verify, or independently confirm your records, and we are entitled to rely on them being true.
• Your own substantiation. Mileage logs, receipts, contemporaneous records for meals and travel, documentation of a home office. We will tell you what to keep. Keeping it is yours.
• Review before you sign. You are responsible for the accuracy of your return, for filing it, and for paying what is owed. Signing it is your statement that you have reviewed it.
• Telling us when things change. A new entity, a new state, a marriage, a property purchase, a second business. We cannot plan around what we do not know.
• Meeting the document deadlines in your engagement letter. Material arriving late may mean an extension, and an extension moves the paperwork deadline, not the payment.

9. The free calculators

The Entity Selection Wizard and the Deduction Finder are educational. They produce estimates from the numbers you type, using general California and federal rules and simplifying assumptions that will not match every situation. They are not tax advice, they are not a quote, and using them does not create a client relationship.

Neither tool is gated. Neither requires an email address to show you a result. If you choose to have your summary emailed, that address is used for that one message and nothing else: no list, no sequence, no sharing it on.

Do not make a filing, formation, or election decision on a calculator result alone. Bring it to a conversation.

10. Documents, email, and electronic signatures

Client documents move through a secure, United States-hosted portal. They do not move by plain email, and the contact form is not built to receive them. Do not send Social Security numbers, bank details, or tax documents through the form or by ordinary email. Reply to our first message and you will get a secure upload link.

Email and text are convenient and not fully secure. Using them for routine correspondence is your acceptance of that.

By engaging us you consent to receive documents electronically and to sign them electronically, including Form 8879, under the federal E-SIGN Act and California's Uniform Electronic Transactions Act. IRS rules require identity verification before an electronic signature on an e-file authorization, and we will walk you through it. If you would rather sign on paper, say so and we will accommodate it.

11. Response times

Every message reaches the advisor who does your work. Nothing is screened by an intake desk or routed to whoever is free. Replies come quickly, year-round, including March and April.

That is a description of how the practice runs, not a contractual service level. We do not offer a guaranteed response window, and there is no service credit attached to one. If something is time-critical, call rather than email.

12. If we make an error

13. Limits on our liability

To the fullest extent California law allows, our total liability for any claim arising out of an engagement is limited to the fees you paid us for that engagement. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits or lost business opportunity, even where the possibility was known.

We are not responsible for: additional tax, penalty, or interest resulting from information that was incomplete or inaccurate when it reached us; positions taken at your direction against our advice; changes in tax law, including retroactive changes; the outcome of an examination or the exercise of agency discretion; processing delays, system outages, or errors at the IRS, the FTB, or any other agency; or the acts of a third party you engaged, including payroll providers, attorneys, and prior preparers.

Nothing here limits any liability that cannot be limited under California law, including liability for fraud or willful injury.

14. Records, and getting your documents back

We keep a copy of every return we prepare and the records supporting it for at least seven years, which meets or exceeds what federal and California law require of a preparer.

Original documents you provide are returned to you, and copies remain available to download from the portal during your engagement. Our work papers, internal analyses, and templates are our property and are not part of what is delivered. Portal access is a working tool, not a permanent archive: keep your own copy of every return and every document that supports it.

If you use QuickBooks Online with us, the subscription is in your name from day one. The file and its full history are yours, they stay yours if the engagement ends, and nothing about leaving requires a negotiation.

15. Ending an engagement

Either of us may end an engagement in writing at any time. You pay for work completed through that date; anything prepaid and unearned is refunded.

We may withdraw where we are asked to take a position we cannot sign, where information is withheld or we have reason to doubt what we have been given, where fees go unpaid, or where the relationship has stopped working. If we withdraw mid-return, you get your documents back and a written statement of where the work stands, in time to place it elsewhere.

Ending an engagement does not end the sections of these terms that are meant to survive it, including fees owed, records, liability limits, and dispute resolution.

16. This website: content and use

Everything on this site, including the writing, the calculators and their logic, the layout, and the marks, is owned by TrueArc Tax and Financial Services LLC and protected by copyright. Read it, print it, quote a passage with attribution, send anyone the link.

What you may not do: republish or resell the content, copy the calculators or their underlying logic into another product, scrape the site by automated means, use any of it to train a machine learning model, or present the material as your own.

You also agree not to interfere with the site's operation, attempt to gain access to systems or accounts that are not yours, submit false information through the form, or use the contact form or booking page to send unsolicited commercial messages.

The site and the calculators are provided as they are. We work to keep everything accurate and current, but tax law moves, and a page can be right in August and stale in January. Nothing here is a warranty that the site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or applicable to your situation.

17. Reviews, examples, and published ranges

Client reviews shown on this site are genuine, unedited, and published by their authors on third-party platforms. They describe those clients' experiences. They are not a prediction of yours, and no result is promised.

The worked examples on the Pricing page illustrate how a fee gets built from real drivers. They are illustrations, not quotes, and not a forecast of tax savings. Any figure describing what a structure might save is an estimate that depends entirely on your numbers.

18. Changes, disputes, and the rest

Changes to these terms

We may update this page. The current version is always the one posted here, with the date at the top. Material changes affecting an active engagement are handled through your engagement letter and told to you directly, not made by quietly editing this page.

If something goes wrong

Call first. Nearly everything is resolvable in a conversation with the person who did the work, and there is no layer of account management in the way. If a direct conversation has not resolved it within thirty days, we will go to mediation in Los Angeles County, with the mediator's fee split evenly. If mediation does not resolve it, either of us may take the matter to the state or federal courts in Los Angeles County, California, and both of us consent to that venue. Either of us may bring a qualifying claim in small claims court instead, at any point.

These terms are governed by California law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

The rest

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and everything else stays in force. Not enforcing a provision on one occasion does not waive it. You may not assign your rights under an engagement without our written consent. These terms, together with your engagement letter and our Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us and replace any prior discussion on the same subjects.