Shrewsbury owns the company that sells you electricity.
Not Eversource, not National Grid — SELCO, a town department. It repriced every class at once on 1 March 2026, and whether that cost you 4.5% or 21% comes down to a rate class most owners have never looked up. Nine miles north-east, in Hudson.
Green Books Inc. is a Highly exceptional Business. Ms. Johanna has been taking care of my books for several months now and we are very pleased with her work. She is very knowledgeable when it comes to business taxes, and also how to apply certain expenses to our advantage.
Her personality is very pleasing and down to earth, but her Professionalism and Communication towards our Business has been beyond Compare. I Highly recommend Ms. Johanna and Green Books Inc. You will be Very Happy with her results.
We were referred to Green Books by a friend, and we’ve been using them for the past two years. She was honest, straightforward, and clear about what she could do for us. We were extremely pleased with the service, and she truly went above and beyond to help our family.
We’ve used others in the past, but it always felt like just a drop-off and pick-up service with no real connection or understanding of our situation. With Green Books, the experience was completely different.
I highly recommend Green Books. They have saved my family a significant amount of money when we truly needed it most. 🙏🏽
Desde que conocí Johanna me soluciona todo y me contesta siempre los mensajes , anteriormente ni me contestaban estaba con otra contable , Johanna muy profesional me encanta
Four things here that are not true one town over.
Two of them run out of the same building on Maple Avenue. One is a utility the town owns outright. And one is a state rule that only bites if a form was never sent.
There is nobody else to buy electricity from.
SELCO is not a supplier Shrewsbury chose. It is a town department that sells power, internet and cable, and on 1 March 2026 it repriced every class at once. Households went up 3.5% and ordinary commercial accounts 4.5% — but General Service 1 went up 11% and General Service 2 went up 21%, and a new General Service 3 was added underneath them for the largest industrial loads. Which of those numbers landed on you depends on a rate class most owners have never looked up, and there is no competitive supplier to move to. If electricity is one line in your books, a 21% step change reads as a bad month.
The plumber’s toolbox is exempt. The dentist’s drill is not.
Shrewsbury publishes that line itself, and it is sharper than most towns bother to be: small tools that fit in a toolbox, for a plumber, a carpenter or an auto mechanic, are exempt — while a dentist’s drill, an x-ray machine, the chairs in a barbershop and the furnishings of a doctor’s office are taxable, at the commercial rate. The rate is $11.50 per thousand for FY2026, down from $12.04, and being one of the lowest around is exactly why the filing gets skipped. It should not be. Where no list was brought in by the date on the assessors’ notice, state law says no personal property tax gets abated at all — unless the board finds good cause, or the bill runs more than 50% over what a timely list would have produced, and even then only the part above that comes off.
Here the zoning check happens to you, not before you.
The Town Clerk at 100 Maple Avenue takes the filing through the town’s own portal: $25 for four years, $10 to amend or discontinue it, a dollar more to have the certificate posted to you. Sign at the counter with identification, or get it notarised if it goes by mail. A zoning review runs inside that process rather than ahead of it and can add up to seven days, which is a real difference from towns that send you to the Building Department first. One thing is worth diarising: renewal reminders go only to certificates obtained after 1 November 2025. Anything older simply reaches its fourth birthday and stops.
Your health inspector answers to three towns.
Food permits here are not issued by a Shrewsbury-only board. The Central MA Regional Health Department works out of 100 Maple Avenue and covers Shrewsbury, Grafton and West Boylston, with Shrewsbury as the host agency — so the department enforcing your permit is one the town employs. Every category is its own application through the town’s permitting portal: brick and mortar, plan review before a fit-out or a significant alteration, mobile, temporary, residential and cottage kitchen, wholesale. The same department also enforces the plastic bag and polystyrene bans, which arrive on your books as a packaging cost rather than a health one and are easy to file as neither.
None of these ever arrives as a bill you can settle and forget.Which is precisely why they get missed.
The bookkeeping itself, in full. And the two towns on Shrewsbury’s eastern line: Northborough and Westborough, each researched on its own documents.
Three the town has no say in
The four above stop at the town line. These three do not — they are state law, they read the same in every town on the list, and two of them reach past the company to you.
The stylist who quits on Friday is owed everything on Friday.
Not on the next run, and not once the commission sheet has been reconciled — the day they go. In 2022 the Supreme Judicial Court held that an employer who pays late has no good-faith defence: three times the wages, plus interest and the employee’s legal fees, even where every dollar was paid before anyone sued. Accrued vacation counts as wages too. A payroll built on commission, tips and people who come and go is the hardest one to total accurately by Friday, which is exactly why it is the one that ends up late.
Source: M.G.L. c. 149 § 148 · Reuter v. City of Methuen, SJC-13121 (2022)Renting a chair does not turn someone into a contractor.
The state assumes your contractor is an employee until proven otherwise, and the prong that settles it is the second one: the work has to fall outside what your business normally does. Cutting hair in a salon does not fall outside it. Neither does a hygienist on a 1099 in a dental practice, or a clinician seeing your patients, in your rooms, on your schedule. A booth-rent agreement records an intention; what the state weighs is how the day actually runs.
Source: M.G.L. c. 149 § 148B — the three-prong testA professional corporation gets dissolved the same way anything else does.
The annual report is due on the anniversary of the day the company was formed, which is not a quarter end and not a date anybody diarises. It costs $500 by post or $520 online and carries no late fee — so nothing is ever sent to chase you, and there is no penalty notice to tip you off. Miss it two years running and the Commonwealth can dissolve the company administratively. That gets discovered at the worst possible moment: renewing a lease on Route 9, selling the practice, or filling in any form that asks whether you are in good standing. Putting it back costs $100 plus every report that was skipped.
Source: Secretary of the Commonwealth · M.G.L. c. 156C § 70
You work directly with the person doing the work.
One desk, and it is the same desk every time — Certified Bookkeeper, IRS Authorized e-File Agent and Notary Public, working from Hudson, nine miles north-east of Shrewsbury. Close enough that a question about what the assessors count as taxable gets answered by the person who would file the return.
The parts owners actually feel
The things that change once somebody is actually keeping the record.
Clarity, then growth.
Green Books Inc works with established businesses that got busy and let the record slip — not because anyone was careless, but because there was never a system and never an hour. You will not be told off for how far back it goes.
Book a consultationThree steps, no lecture.
- 01Tell me where things standA conversation about the business, the books, and how far behind they are — if they are.
- 02Catch up and clean upWhatever is outstanding gets brought current and organised before anything ongoing starts.
- 03Keep it currentMonthly bookkeeping, payroll and filings, so nothing has to be reconstructed later.
- ADP
- Paychex
- Gusto
- QuickBooks
- Xero
- Paylocity
Asked and answered
My books are months — or years — behind. Can you still help?
Yes. Catch-up and clean-up work is a core part of what I do. Many of the businesses I work with are established and doing good work, but their finances fell behind through lack of time, guidance, or proper systems. My approach is structured, detail-driven, and always judgment-free.
Do you work with clients in Spanish?
Yes. I am a bilingual professional serving Massachusetts, and I work with clients in both English and Spanish so that communication is clear at every step.
Can you prepare both personal and business tax returns?
Yes. I work with individuals and businesses to prepare and file returns in compliance with federal and state requirements, filed electronically through the IRS e-file system.
I am starting a new business. Can you help me set it up?
Yes. I assist with LLC formation, business registrations, and setting up the foundational systems a new business needs to operate properly from the start.
Do you offer notary services on their own?
Yes. Notary services are available by appointment for both personal and business documents, handled confidentially and in accordance with state requirements.
Where are you based, and who do you work with?
The office is at 131 Coolidge St Ste A3, Hudson, MA 01749, and I work with businesses and individuals across Massachusetts.