Finance: LLC, the Helper, and the Show Sheet
This sits under the curriculum, not inside the 13 modules. Use it when you are ready to stand the business up: an LLC, a helper at the table, and a sheet a CPA can file from. It is not tax, legal, or payroll advice. A CPA in your state confirms the election, the hire, and the return.
Least friction
Stay an LLC. Do not elect S corp to make show season easier.
Your store name is a trade name, a DBA. The legal entity is the LLC. There is one employer, one EIN, and one set of books. An S corp election is Form 2553 on that same LLC. It does not create a second company. It does not give you a new place to hire someone.
S corp taxation can reduce self-employment tax on profit above a reasonable salary. It also forces payroll, quarterly payroll returns, and a salary you can defend. That is more paperwork than a spreadsheet. Elect it later, only if a CPA runs your actual net profit and the tax savings beat the payroll cost. Do it after a year of real numbers, not before the first busy season.
Until then: single-member LLC, taxed as a disregarded entity, DBA unchanged, one business checking account.
The second person at the table
You do not hire him "under the S corp" or "into the DBA." The DBA is a name. The LLC is the employer, with or without an S election.
If you set his hours, hand him your inventory, and tell him how to sell, he is an employee. Put him on payroll through the LLC. A cheap payroll service is the low-friction version. Paying him in unrecorded cash, or calling him a contractor so you can skip withholding, is the version that gets reclassified.
Do not add him as a member unless he is actually an owner. Ownership means an operating agreement and a share of profit. A day rate is wages. Those are different decisions.
The sheet the CPA gets
S corp status does not simplify inventory. This does.
One tab per show. Deposit the cash into the business account. The sheet and the bank statement should tell the same story.
| Column | What you write |
|---|---|
| Date, show, table fee | The booking |
| Item or lot | Enough to identify it. A lot cost is fine for a $5 binder stack |
| Cost basis | What you paid, including sales tax you actually paid on that buy |
| Out | Quantity loaded in the car |
| Back | Quantity still in the tub that night |
| Sold | Quantity, price, cash or card |
| Bought | What you acquired, what you paid, cash or card |
| Trade | Both sides, each at a cash number you would have taken |
| Helper | Hours or day rate, paid from the business account |
| Other cost | Gas, supplies, card-processing fees |
| Sales tax | Tax collected at the table, if your state requires it |
Give the CPA that workbook, the bank statements, and the card-processor report. Ask them, for your state, about a sales-tax permit before the first table, a resale certificate on inventory buys, and quarterly estimates if the year is going to owe tax. Those are state-specific. This page is not.
What not to copy
Some vendors run the same tables almost entirely in cash and trades, and treat the profit as money the return never has to see. That is not a structure. It is leaving income off the books.
The patterns, named so you do not stumble into them:
- Show cash that never gets deposited or written down
- Treating "I didn't get a 1099" as "this sale didn't happen"
- Running customer payments through a personal app so the LLC books stay small
- Treating a trade as if nothing taxable occurred
- Paying the helper in cash with no payroll record
- Keeping a clean sheet for the CPA and a real sheet somewhere else
Cash-basis accounting is legal. Taking cash at a show is legal. A trade can still be a taxable event. Income is taxable when you earn it, whether or not a platform reported it and whether or not it hit a bank. Willful omission is tax evasion. Civil fraud penalties exist. Criminal exposure exists if it is deliberate. A CPA cannot honestly prepare a return from books that were built to hide the number, and you are the one who signs.
This page does not explain how to make omitted cash harder to see. Do not ask the course for that. Deposit the money. One sheet. Helper on payroll. Trades logged at a cash number. Hand the CPA the real year.