About Us

Hi there! We are Patel Bookkeeping, your trusted partner in accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, and tax compliance right here in the central Pennsylvania area (Dauphin, Cumberland, York, Adams, Perry, Lebanon, and Lancaster counties).

If you prefer cities, then we are talking about Harrisburg, Camp Hill, Mechanicsburg, Dillsburg, New Cumberland, Etters, York, Hershey, Lebanon, Lancaster, York and a few others that we missed.

Additionally, we are QuickBooks certified 🙂

Our mission is simple: Your Financial Success. We are dedicated to helping you organize your current financial affairs in a way that maximizes the market value of your business to an impressive 20 times SDC – a far cry from the three times you might get from a typical business broker. Our approach is designed to assist you in achieving a generous 7 to 8-figure exit/retirement nest egg while minimizing taxes.

Why Choose Patel Bookkeeping? We understand that trusting someone with your money and business is a significant decision. Allow us to introduce ourselves and our approach.

Three-Pronged Approach: We believe in a three-pronged approach that benefits you and your business.

Firstly, we take a creative problem-solving approach tailored to meet the unique needs of you and your business.

Secondly, we play the long game, ensuring you get the most out of your business, not just financially, but also in leading a pleasurable life filled with good health and minimal stress.

Lastly, we maintain an attitude of persistence, providing personalized attention that works with the quirks and unique setup of your business.

Please keep reading for real-life examples.

Community is at our core, and we are proud Central Pennsylvania natives. Let me tell you a story. Once, there was a little boy who moved to America at the age of 15. Now, that boy is all grown up, married with children (not the Ed O’Neill version from television, at least not most nights when the kids are behaving).

I came to America at the age of 15 with my mom, dad, and younger brother. This photo was taken, I think, four or five years before we landed at JFK in the summer of 1996.

I graduated from high school here and served for a few years with the 928th Finance Detachment in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

I went to Penn State for both my undergrad and grad school. Undergrad was a double Bachelor’s in Finance and Marketing, and grad school was a double Masters – an MBA in Finance/Quant track and MS in Information Systems/Machine Learning.

Jess, my better half is a lifetime member of American Mensa, the high IQ society, and I never would’ve found that out if not for a drinking game/bet between us. We met at the Starbucks on Rt. 22/Jonestown Road, Harrisburg, on a cold fall evening when she decided to skip her college class, and I just happened to be there.

Jess comes from an Army family; being an army brat, she moved around all over America, but her most formative years were spent in Killeen, Texas and Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

I started investing in the stock market and buying rental properties shortly after meeting Jess and getting my first real job.

My family and extended family also have deep roots in the area. Everyone from my dad’s side lives within a 20-minute drive from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

One person that I’m especially fond of is my uncle, Kiran Patel.

He came over here back in the seventies for higher education and put down roots here. It is only because of him that I call myself an American today. In addition to being a great human being, he’s also a business wizard; quite the visionary mastermind.

He got together with some friends way back in the day, and they started buying small motels first and then large hotels. Eventually, it became a pretty big operation. He was the one who convinced all the partners to come together and take the partnership, which was a real estate investment trust, public.

In 1999, Hershey Hospitality went public with the ticker symbol HT on the NYSE. At its peak, the company had a market cap of almost $1.5 billion dollars. Not bad for a simple engineering student from India getting together with a few friends he made in a foreign land.

HT is now a privately held company. In the summer of 2023, the board agreed to a buyout for a 60% premium over the then-current stock price—a happy ending indeed.

He’s also been actively involved in some other big projects locally. Just to name a few off the top of my head, they bought a historic building near Inner Harbor Baltimore and turned it into a boutique hotel.

If you ever get a chance and take a few turns behind the big building of Hershey Med Center, you will see that there’s a small residential community tucked away called Alpine Hills. There are very nice-looking, posh new condos and single-family homes that have sprung up.

His most recent venture was putting up a brand new Best Western at the edge of Hershey, transforming a few old row homes into a 60-room class A property.

Sorry for the digression but back to the story.

I have lived here in central Pennsylvania ever since I came to America. Believe it or not, this is the longest I have ever lived in one place—28 years to be exact.

I call this place home and know it like the back of my hand and I love everything about this place. It’s home now.

Anyway, to make a long story short, this is how the germ of an idea for Patel Bookkeeping was born. You see, in the fall of 2022, we sold one of our rental properties, 227 Cocoa Avenue, right smack in the heart of Old Hershey, Pennsylvania.

We sold it at the market peak for a $100,000 profit, and not only did we not get a tax bill on it, but we got a $15,000 federal tax refund from Uncle Sam.

I even made a video about it. You can watch it below

Now, because I have experience creating Excel models of asset price behaviors, I was able to have a good handle on what was going on in the market, even though interest rates had been going up for some time. Due to the rate hikes, my model forecasted that house prices would continue to peak until Christmas 2022. I’m sorry to say that I was off by a few months (see the screenshot from FRED below).

In all seriousness, I don’t think we could have timed that any better. We averaged a 33% annualized return on our money on this deal.

Just as an aside, if you take $100,000 today and grow that at 33% for a decade, you end up with almost 2 million dollars. After two decades, you will have about 30 million dollars, and if you can keep that going for three decades, you’ll have an eye-watering 520 million dollars.

So naturally, I felt like I had put up a big win on the scoreboard and wanted to share it with my favorite person. I shared what I had done with my uncle, the founder of Hershey Hospitality/my hero/the OG, and showed him my Excel model.

He looked at it and sat there for a minute; at first, he didn’t believe me—I could see it in his eyes. You know, he jokes that his motto is, “I’m from Missouri; I’m from the Show Me State; you’ve got to show me.”

So, he asked me to create something that he thought was difficult on the spot. He asked me to make a Monte Carlo simulator and calculate the IRR for an options LP that he was running for his accredited investor friends.

It took me about half an hour, but I did it and showed him how it worked. At that point, he urged me to go public with my gift (pun intended—get it because he took Hershey Hospitality public) and encouraged me to make a business out of it. So, here I am.

I made a pretty detailed video about how to make your own poor man’s Monte Carol simulation in Microsoft Excel.

You can watch the entire video below

There were other signals too over the years.

My coworkers always asked me for help with their retirement planning and what to do with their 401k.

I remember there was this one time when I was talking with my neighbor. Now, he’s already a gifted mechanic, but I could tell that he wasn’t understanding what I was saying at first when I told him that I was planning on opening up a Roth IRA for my newborn son.

All I had to do was put in $6,000 once, and I would virtually guarantee that my son would be a millionaire in his 50s—you know, kind of like Ron Popeil: set it and forget it.

There was another time when I was sitting in a class, and the professor asked us to calculate the odds of a random event, say a 50/50 chance of a catastrophe, combining with four other random events with the same probability of happening.

The question was to figure out the odds of such a disaster with five catastrophes happening at the same time. I raised my hand and said about 3% or 1:32. She looked at me wide-eyed for a minute and then asked me if I did that in my head, that is, calculate the probability. I said no; I just cut it in half five times because it’s the same thing, at which point she started chuckling.

I sincerely hope I’m not coming across as bragging, but I feel like I’ve always just been good with numbers and keeping things organized all my life.

I’ve been able to put that to good use to help me and my family have a good life, and I’d like to do the same for you, your business and your family.

I feel like this is what I’m meant to do—to help small businesses thrive right here in the central Pennsylvania area.

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