Friday Feature: Homeschool CPA
The foresight Carol Topp had in creating HomeschoolCPA has been tremendously helpful to education entrepreneurs who are stepping up to offer new learning options for families.
Carol Topp was ahead of her time. She started homeschooling around the same time as she became a certified public accountant. “I passed the CPA exam and thought, now what?” she recalls. She wanted to keep homeschooling, and her husband’s job was good enough that they didn’t need a full-time income from her. “I started sitting on nonprofit boards and then I realized, ‘Oh my goodness. The homeschoolers need this information that I’m learning about nonprofits.’ So I basically combined the three worlds of my knowledge of nonprofits from sitting on boards, my accounting knowledge from being a CPA, and then my experience of being involved in homeschooling and homeschool co-ops.”
The eventual result of Carol’s brainstorm was HomeschoolCPA, which she launched in 2006. She says it started slowly—initially, it was just a blog where she answered questions that people would e‑mail her. Before too long, Carol turned her blog posts into books; Homeschool Co-ops was published in 2008 and was probably the first full-length book on the topic. Realizing that people learn and consume content differently, she added webinars, a podcast, and phone consultations to her offerings.
“It’s a brand new world to a lot of these homeschool parents (usually women). They come from all kinds of backgrounds,” Carol says. “They don’t know how to start a nonprofit. They don’t know how to work with the board, how to recruit the volunteers, and maybe they don’t even know how to manage the money if they’ve never run a small business before.” So her goal was to give them accurate information in a clear, easy-to-understand way.
“I know my clients,” she explains. “You know, I was a homeschool mom. I was in a homeschool co-op. I was in a homeschool hybrid program. I’ve been on lots and lots of nonprofit boards. And I’ve had way too much interaction with the IRS.”
Sometimes the people who reached out to Carol over the years just had simple questions about homeschooling and co-ops. But many needed true CPA services like applying for tax-exempt status or filing annual tax returns. Carol charged an hourly rate for consultations, but she developed packages for services that were frequently needed.
“A big part of my job, especially as I got a little more experienced, is that I would talk to people who had big dreams and visions, but had not yet started homeschooling their own children,” she says. “I would get a lot of these phone calls from a young mom—maybe she’s got like a five-year-old who’s ready to start school and a toddler and a baby on the way—and she wants to start a four-day program on her farm. And I’d say, ‘Okay, let’s slow down. Let’s have you homeschool just your kids for a year, first, to see if you even like this.” Carol loved seeing how ambitious they were, but she wanted them to be successful. So sometimes that meant talking them into slowing down a little bit.
In 2022, Carol semi-retired from HomeschoolCPA—she’s still involved with the website and Facebook groups, but she no longer does one-on-one consultations. To ensure homeschoolers still have support, she brought several consultants into the organization. None of them are CPAs, so they can’t provide accounting services. But they have a lot of experience with various aspects of homeschooling, co-ops, hybrid schools, and more. With the recorded webinars, podcasts, books, and other information available on the website, there is still a lot of accounting-related information available to anyone who needs it.
Evidence of the usefulness of the HomeschoolCPA website even without the personal consultation came from Genevieve Peterson, founder A One-Room Schoolhouse, a recent Friday Feature. “I have to give a shout-out to Carol Topp. She’s the HomeschoolCPA and if anyone is trying to start any type of homeschool group, whether it be a social co-op all the way over to a full microschool, you need to go on Carol Topp’s website,” Genevieve told me. “You can just go on her blog and read her books, and you can do it. Because that’s what we did. We did it for all the legal stuff, the financials, the 501c3, incorporating, insurance—all the information is there.”
Carol couldn’t have predicted how homeschooling, hybrid schooling, and microschooling would explode, especially after COVID-19. But the foresight she had in combining her interests and creating HomeschoolCPA has been tremendously helpful to education entrepreneurs who are stepping up to offer new learning options for families.