Meet Our Staff: Grace Tsou

Nov 18, 2021

EARLY-STAGE-STARTUP-TAXES

Lots of kids dread going to math class — but Grace has always been different. She’s had what she calls an “amicable relationship” with numbers since her youth. That made her a perfect fit for a career in accounting. 

As our longest-tenured staff accountant here at ShayCPA, Grace Tsou has played an integral role in our success through the years.

Grace’s background

She was born in Arizona and spent a decade of her youth in Taiwan before moving to New York for her teenage years. Grace stayed here to earn both her bachelor’s degree and her Master of Taxation at Baruch College. 

She joined us as an intern right after finishing her undergraduate degree, but it wasn’t long before she proved herself as a staff accountant. Today, she offers both bookkeeping and tax return preparation to our tech clients with a variety of different business structures. 

Grace plays a key role in ensuring quality, accuracy, and integrity in our ShayCPA services. She reviews the financials prepared by other team members to confirm that they’re correct before going to the client for review. She also trains new team members on a wide range of accounting processes and software solutions. Somehow, she still finds time to field emails to ensure clients’ questions are answered in a timely manner. 

Why you’ll want to know her

Grace doesn’t just like numbers. She also loves puzzles. Together, those two skills make her an ideal person to balance a tech company’s financials. She sees both accounting and tax preparation as akin to sudoku puzzles and thrills in making sure everything adds up correctly. Grace has the ability to take very complex situations and put together schedules and systems to help clients track and organize their books. 

As part of her penchant for orderliness, she ensures all results get professionally presented to her clients. That way, they have clean, concise, and easy-to-comprehend financials to review internally and share with investors. She even enjoys taking disorderly and imbalanced books and cleaning them up, and reconciling them. 

Grace doesn’t stop there, though. To help tech clients succeed as they scale, she provides resources and tips for daily operations and annual tax planning. And if in preparing statements or balancing financials, she needs more information, rather than rushing through or glossing over issues, she always requests supporting documentation. That way, both she and her clients can rest easy knowing their tax returns and financial statements are substantiated and accurate. 

Grace’s credentials

Grace is in the process of securing her Certified Public Accountant (CPA) license. She’s also both a Certified Quickbooks Online ProAdvisor and Certified Quickbooks Online Advanced ProAdvisor.

When she’s not solving puzzles at work, you can find Grace doing puzzles at home, usually ones with 2,000+ pieces. She’s also crafty — Grace knits and crochets. You might find her shopping at the local farmer’s market for inspiration from other people’s handcrafts or at the mall, but looking for home decor rather than cosmetics. 

Grace is a star player on our ShayCPA team. To learn more about her or what she can do for your tech startup, contact us