Thursday, January 21, 2010

Photo by Clarke Davis

Dianne and Paul Heinen have reached a 40-year milestone in providing accounting services for the community at Paul Heinen and Associates in Valley Falls.

Valley Falls accounting firms reaches 40-year milestone

by Clarke Davis

Paul Heinen was working for an accounting firm in Topeka and doing a few tax returns in his home when he decided to make the break and open his own office in Valley Falls.

It was January 1970 and his first location was a basement office below the Headwaters Hotel on the corner of Broadway and Sycamore. A fire has destroyed that portion of the building in years since.

He had garnered two business accounts, Darveaux Construction and the local newspaper, when he opened for business but he called it “slim pickings” for a couple of years. Most of the larger, long established businesses had accounting services, so the firm had to wait for new businesses to come along or out-of-town firms to find it.

He filed 60 or 70 tax returns that first year and was told by another accountant to expect the number to double each year. He was right. It would multiply over the years to a high of 850.

With the advent of the Internet and the ease for some to file electronically, that number has fallen off some in recent years — at least for the simpler returns.

Once in awhile someone who hasn’t filed a tax return for four or five years will bring him some work that make’s life more interesting than usual, such as a box of papers and receipts.

The federal tax code has neither shrunk nor simplified over the years, he said.

“It’s gone from bad to worse,” he said, reaching for an older copy of the Internal Revenue Code, the tax bible with 9,424 pages. He now accesses it on his computer.

Paul’s Bookkeeping and Tax Service, the firm’s original name, was the first business in town to acquire a computer, an Olivetti that operated off an 8-inch floppy disk.

It was a $40,000 investment for the computer and software back in 1973. A greater amount was spent two or three years later for an upgraded model, a BRD, that ran off two 8-inch disks. Those systems would serve the business into the 1980s when personal computers with internal hard drives would become more common place.

Paul’s wife, Dianne, a nurse’s aide who had been employed at the hospital in Winchester for 10 years, came to work with her husband in 1972.

Her intent was only to work a few weeks. Linda Heinen, a sister-in-law who was working for the firm at that time, was pregnant and managed to work through tax season up to April 14, a day short of the annual tax deadline date.

Dianne came to work to fill in and is still there. Her duties consist of data entry, doing company payrolls, and billing water customers for some rural districts.

The couple purchased the building they are now in on the south side of the 300 block in October 1979 and moved out of the basement office.

Paul is a 1959 graduate of Valley Falls High School. After graduation he farmed a year and ran a couple of routes for the Meyer Milk Plant, first a route hauling canned or raw milk and then a retail route serving area stores with dairy products. He then spent 4 1/2 years at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Topeka, before going to work for Mize, Hauser & Co., a Topeka accounting firm.

Heinen is an enrolled agent with the IRS for the purpose of representing clients and with his continuing hours of education has become accredited as a tax preparer and a business and tax adviser. He is also a licensed insurance and annuity agent.

He has also maintained an office open on a part-time basis in Holton during tax season for the past 20 or more years.

Both have been active in the community. Dianne has served on the school board, been active in the Chamber of Commerce, and headed up the town’s sesquicentennial celebration in 2004.

Paul was a member of the Jaycees, which raised the funds and installed the town’s Christmas lights back in 1968 or ’69. He continued his dedication to that cause after the Jaycees folded and said he joined the Lions Club only after it promised to continue supporting the project.

The couple raised four children and have nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild.