By Terri Brechter, CPA|Principal, abip CPAs & Advisors

The window to lower your 2026 tax bill runs from October 15 to mid-December. Here's how to use it.

Every January, I get the same call. "What can we do about last year?" And every January I have to give the same answer: at that point, almost everything is too late.

I'm a principal at abip, and I work on just about every kind of return there is: individuals, partnerships, S corporations, C corporations, trusts and estates, nonprofits. The questions clients ask me most are the same across all of them. How much am I going to owe? And once they hear the number: how do I make it smaller? What can I deduct?

The honest answer is that the best time to ask is right now.

The planning window is open, but not for long

The real season for tax planning runs from the October 15 extension deadline through about mid-December. That's when enough of the year is behind us to see where you'll land, and enough of it is ahead to do something about it. I've done planning in late December, but by then it's crunch time. Mid-December is the realistic cutoff for changes that count for the current year.

A planning meeting is simpler than most people expect. We sit down together. We pull your up-to-date financials, not last year's, this year's through the most recent month. We look at where you are, and then we walk through the strategies that could bring the liability down. There can be a lot of them, and which ones fit depends entirely on your business.

Two things worth knowing this year

Bonus depreciation is back at 100%. Under this year's tax law, the full cost of qualifying equipment, vehicles and leasehold improvements can generally be expensed in the year the asset is placed in service. That can happen any time during the year, but the asset must be in service by December 31 to count for 2026. If you've been putting off a purchase your business needs, this is the year to run the numbers.

Retirement plans come with credits. Retirement contributions are one of the most reliable ways to lower a tax bill and one of the most underused, including by high earners who could easily max out and don't. If your business doesn't have a plan yet, there are federal tax credits for starting one: credits for the setup costs and for employer contributions in the plan's first years. Deadlines vary by plan type. This year's October 1 date for new safe harbor 401(k) plans has passed, but other options remain through year-end, so ask before you assume you've missed the window.

The mistakes I see most

The biggest one is simple: letting the year go by without reaching out or not responding when we reach out to you.
The second is not maximizing retirement contributions. The savings are different for every client, but they range from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, and for some, well beyond.

Then there are the things people think are deductions and aren't. I've had clients who want to take bonus depreciation on a Lamborghini. You can't. There are real rules around vehicles, and buying one doesn't automatically produce a big write-off. S corporation owners who pay themselves $5,000 in salary and take everything else as distributions to avoid payroll tax: that doesn't hold up, because the IRS requires reasonable compensation. Golf with friends isn't advertising. The test is whether an expense is "ordinary and necessary" for the business, and a lot of what shows up on social media doesn't pass it.

What it looks like when it works

A newer client of ours, a small manufacturer with about $4.5 million in revenue, came to us for their tax return. In the course of planning, we saw that the way they build their products likely qualified for the research and development credit, and we brought in our R&D team that specializes in it. The result was a $19,000 credit. That's against $4.5 million in total revenue, not net income, so for a business that size it's real money. It came from a conversation, not from a form.

Why not do it yourself?

Tax law changes constantly. We train on it every year, and throughout the year, because keeping up is our job. It isn't yours. The gaps show up in small places. I've seen people with health savings accounts miss a single checkbox that makes their distributions non-taxable, and pay tax on money that should have been tax-free. Maybe it's $50, maybe it's $300. My question is always the same: why pay the IRS a dime more than you owe? Most people preparing their own return are entering data and hoping the software gets it right. They don't know what they're looking at.

What to do in the next 30 days

1. Get your books current through September. If they aren't, our client accounting team can help.
2. Schedule a planning meeting before Thanksgiving.
3. Make a list: purchases you're considering, retirement contributions you haven't made, and anything that changed this year, such as a new entity, financing, property, or a sale on the horizon.
4. If you own real estate, ask whether a cost segregation study makes sense. It does for some purchases and not for others.
5. If you've built something new, improved a process or engineered a product, ask about the R&D credit.

Where the rest of abip comes in

Year-end planning touches more than the tax return. Our client accounting team keeps the books in categories that make the deductions clear, and works with payroll providers to set up payroll and retirement plans. Our R&D and cost segregation specialists find credits the return alone won't show. And if a sale or purchase is coming, our team wants to hear about it now, not in January.
The window is open from now until mid-December. If you're an abip client, reply to your planner's email or call me. If you're not yet, this is a good month to become one.

Terri Brechter, CPA, is a principal at abip CPAs & Advisors, where she works with business owners, individuals, trusts and nonprofits on tax compliance and planning. She came to accounting by way of hotel management and running the books for a family business, and says the part of the job she likes most is saving people money. Outside work she travels every chance she gets and has visited 49 of the 50 states.

Don’t wait till it’s too late for tax planning. Reach out to Terri at tbrechter@abipcpa.com to see if it makes sense for you to schedule a tax planning meeting.