Hernan Puentes, CPA

Hernan is a good guy, but the frustrations of working with him largely outweigh the benefits. On the one hand, he is sharp enough to grasp oddball issues and provide meaningful advice. On the other hand, he’s a big-​time flake and can be careless, too. Frankly, it’s all pretty unprofessional. Emails go unanswered, projects go uncompleted… I have no idea how anything ever gets done.
If you’re going to work with him, my best suggestion is to lay some ground-​rules about responsiveness, and make sure nothing you need is time-​sensitive.

Hernan is a life-​saver and someone who really knows his stuff. We’ve used his service since we moved to California: I highly recommend him!

Hernan is an awesome CPA who really knows what he’s doing. We used to do our taxes ourselves, but last year we knew we would owe some money, so we wanted to go through a professional so that we wouldn’t pay more than necessary. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to find a CPA, so we just went to H&R Block. What a mistake! We had to do just as much work as we would have done preparing our own, plus we had to pay them the same fee a CPA would get, plus they gave us false advice regarding the rules about withholdings. This year we bought a house and wanted to get a real CPA. Our Realtor recommended Hernan because he knew we were very analytical and detail-​oriented. Hernan re-​did our taxes for the previous year so that he could estimate what our withholdings should be this year. He found over $ 1,000 in taxes that we had overpaid last year! He immediately filed the refund paperwork and was able to get us our money back. I’m so glad we are in Hernan’s hands and not the hands of stupid incompetent H&R Block! That reminds me I need to go write a review of H&R Block…