To the Clients and Partners of Quattro Research Group,
My name is Pablo Guajardo Jr. I am the Managing Principal of this firm. Before I entered the accounting/finance profession, I served in the United States Marine Corps. Before I attended NYU Stern for my Master of Science in Accounting, I studied Economics at the University of Houston, where I learned how markets actually behave. Which is to say, not the way textbooks promise. I am a CPA candidate (Q4 2026), an Ironman competitor, and someone who has spent his adult life in environments where precision under pressure is not optional and the consequences of poor preparation are not theoretical.
I mention this not as a credential but as context. The way I think about accounting — the discipline required, the refusal to cut corners, the belief that the standard is the standard regardless of who is watching — those did not come from a textbook. It came from experience in institutions that do not tolerate ambiguity in their record-keeping and do not accept “good enough” as a deliverable.
This letter will explain how we think about our business, the problem we set out to solve, and how we intend to solve it. I will be as direct as I can.
I will start with the problem, because the problem is the reason we exist.
The accounting profession in the United States is, by most measurable standards, failing the people it is supposed to serve. Not the large corporations — they have compliance departments, internal audit teams, and the budget to hire any of the Big Four firms. The people being failed are the ones who built something complex enough to need serious accounting but not large enough to command serious attention.
I am talking about the business owner who started with one LLC and now operates through four. The real estate investor whose portfolio sits in a holding structure that made perfect sense when the attorney set it up but that no bookkeeper has been able to account for correctly since. The family that runs an operating business through one entity, holds property in another, and has a trust for estate planning purposes — and whose accountant treats each of these as if they are unrelated clients.
These people are not underserved because accountants are bad at their jobs. Most are perfectly competent at what they were trained to do. They are underserved because the firms they hire were built for simple books — one entity, one bank account, one tax return — and have never rebuilt their operations to handle genuine complexity. When a client’s structure outgrows the firm’s capability, the firm does not say so. It patches. It improvises. It does its best. And the client discovers the cost of that arrangement not in a monthly report, but in a letter from the Internal Revenue Service, or in the realization that nobody can actually tell them how much money they made last year across all of their businesses after accounting for the money moving between them.
This is not a technology problem. I want to be direct about that, because the rest of the industry is telling a different story.
PwC invested $1 billion in artificial intelligence last year, with the stated goal of automating entire audit engagements by 2026.1 Thomson Reuters reports that 95% of accounting professionals believe AI will become central to their workflow within five years, and that 41% are already using publicly available tools like ChatGPT in their workflows.2 McKinsey’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, now describes his firm’s headcount as “60,000 — but it’s 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents,” and expects to reach a one-to-one ratio within eighteen months.3
I do not doubt any of these numbers. What I doubt is whether any of it helps the business owner I just described.
Research from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business examined what happens when AI enters accounting workflows. The answer was instructive: AI amplifies whatever competence already exists. Experienced professionals become faster and more precise. Less experienced professionals become faster at accepting outputs they do not fully understand — including outputs the system itself flagged as uncertain.4
The implications of this are not subtle. A firm that could not properly consolidate five entities before AI can now produce the same inadequate work in half the time. The technology made them more productive. It did not make them more capable. For the client sitting across the table, the difference between those two things is the difference between clean books and an audit.
Quattro Research Group was started because I believed — and continue to believe — that there is a large and growing population of business owners, real estate investors, and families building wealth whose accounting needs have outgrown the firms they work with, and who have no satisfactory alternative.
The large firms will not take them. The small firms cannot serve them properly. The software companies have built tools for the simple case and marketed them to the complex one. And the result is a gap. Not a gap in technology, but a gap in competence, infrastructure, and willingness to do the work the way it should be done.
Our thesis is that this gap can be closed by a firm that is built, from the beginning, to serve complexity. Not a firm that learned to handle complexity after years of serving simple clients. Not a firm that bolted on multi-entity capability as an afterthought. A firm whose fundamental architecture — how we track transactions, how we close periods, how we store documents, how we maintain the integrity of the books — was designed from day one for the client with five entities, not the client with one.
That is what we are building.
Let me tell you what we actually do, in terms that do not require an accounting degree to understand.
We keep your books. All of them. Every entity, every bank account, every transaction — maintained by one team, in one system, to one standard. When you have four LLCs and a trust, you do not get four disconnected sets of books and a phone call in March asking for documents we should have had in January. You get one integrated picture of your financial life, kept current throughout the year, with your returns being assembled continuously rather than in a frantic burst during tax season.
When money moves between your entities — and in complex structures, it always does — we track it properly. Loans between related parties are recorded as loans. Management fees are recorded as management fees. Distributions are recorded as distributions. When the books are consolidated, those intercompany transactions are eliminated correctly, so the financial picture you see reflects what actually happened, not a version inflated by money moving from one pocket to another.
When a contractor receives more than $600 in payments from you during the year, we know — because the system tracks cumulative payments to every vendor and flags the threshold. If we do not have a W-9 on file for that contractor, you will hear about it long before 1099 season arrives. If we do our job correctly, you never hear about it at all, because the W-9 was requested when the vendor was first paid.
When a period is closed, it stays closed. The books for January do not quietly change in September because someone found a more convenient number. If a correction is needed, it is made visibly, documented, and preserved in the record. This is the same principle that governs publicly traded companies. We apply it to your businesses because the integrity of your financial statements matters whether you file with the SEC or not.
And when supporting documents are required — receipts, contracts, invoices, acknowledgment letters — they are stored, linked to the transactions they support, and retained for as long as the law requires. Not in an email thread. Not in a shoebox. In a system that will not permit them to be lost or discarded prematurely.
I realize that none of this sounds revolutionary. It sounds like what accounting is supposed to be. That is the point. For clients with complex structures, what accounting is supposed to be and what they have been receiving are two very different things. We are closing that gap.
I should say a word about how we charge, because it is relevant to understanding our incentives.
Most accounting firms bill by the hour. The more complex your situation, the more hours are required, and the more you pay. The firm has no structural incentive to invest in systems or processes that would make the work faster, because faster means fewer hours, and fewer hours means less revenue.
We rejected this model from the start. Quattro operates on fixed engagements. You know what you are paying before the work begins. This means that every investment we make in better systems, better processes, and better infrastructure directly benefits both parties. You get the same quality of work at a predictable cost, and we get to serve more clients without sacrificing the standard.
I do not claim that our model is right for every firm. But I believe it is right for ours, and I believe it aligns our interests with those of the people we serve in a way that hourly billing fundamentally does not.
A note for those who evaluate our work from a regulatory or institutional perspective.
Our engagement methodology is designed around examination readiness at all times — not in response to examination. Every engagement operates under the same controls framework: immutable audit trails, enforced separation of duties, systematic period controls, and continuous substantiation of expenses under the applicable provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. Our work is informed by the standards set forth by the PCAOB, current FASB guidance — including recent ASUs on segment reporting and revenue recognition — and SEC disclosure requirements where applicable. We do not maintain one standard for large engagements and another for small ones.
I will not describe our systems in detail. The architecture is proprietary, and we intend to keep it that way. What I will say is that if you examined our books tomorrow — any client, any period — you would find them in order. That is not a marketing claim. It is the operating standard, and it is the hill we have chosen.
The year ahead will be consequential for our industry and for the business owners we serve.
The Corporate Transparency Act has introduced beneficial ownership reporting requirements that affect virtually every LLC and corporation in the country. The IRS has increased audit rates for partnerships and S-Corporations. FASB continues to expand disclosure requirements. State tax rules grow more aggressive with each legislative session.
For our clients, none of this is a reason to simplify their business structures. These structures exist for good reasons: asset protection, tax efficiency, estate planning, operational clarity. The answer is not to retreat from complexity. The answer is to ensure that the complexity is properly accounted for, continuously, by people who built their practice specifically to do so.
The acceleration of AI adoption in the profession will widen the gap between firms that are genuinely capable and firms that are merely fast. The Stanford research suggests as much.4 We expect this gap to become visible to clients over the next two to three years, and we intend to be on the correct side of it.
We are expanding our capabilities this year in consolidated reporting, compliance monitoring, and tools that give our clients direct visibility into their own financials. The details are proprietary. The results will speak for themselves.
I will close with a personal note.
I understand that choosing an accounting firm is, at its core, an act of trust. You are handing someone the most complete picture of your financial life and asking them to handle it with competence and integrity. Many of you have been let down before. I do not take that lightly.
We are a young firm. We have more to prove than to celebrate. But the foundation is built correctly, the principles are sound, and the work we do every day reflects both. We would rather grow slowly and maintain the standard than grow quickly and lose it.
Thank you for your attention, your trust where it has been given, and your consideration where it has not. We look forward to the work.