Terms of use and disclosures.

These terms cover your use of zerbygroup.com. They are not an engagement, and they are not the agreement under which we do work for a client. That agreement is a signed engagement letter, and where the two differ, the engagement letter governs.

Last updated August 13, 2026.

Reading this site does not make you a client

Browsing these pages, downloading a guide, submitting the contact form, or calling us does not create a professional relationship and does not put us to work on anything. No deadline of yours becomes ours because you sent a message. Work starts when we have both signed an engagement letter that says what the work is.

Until then, do not assume a return has been extended, a filing has been made, or a date is being watched on your behalf.

The information on this site is general

Our guides describe how rules generally work. They are not advice about your situation. We write them carefully and we cite the source where a figure comes from a specific one, but tax and accounting rules change, they sometimes change retroactively, and the answer for your business depends on facts this site does not know.

Do not act on anything here without advice about your own circumstances. If a page and a primary source disagree, the primary source is right.

Fees published on this site

Where we publish a price, we publish the date with it. We will not charge more than a published rate for at least 30 calendar days after the last date we published it. That is a requirement of Treasury Circular 230 at 31 CFR 10.30(b)(2), and we treat it as a commitment rather than a technicality.

A published price covers the service described next to it and nothing else. You are responsible for costs we do not control. Those include filing fees, penalties and interest assessed by a tax authority, charges from your bank, payroll provider or software vendor, and the cost of work outside the agreed scope. If the work turns out to be larger than the price assumed, we tell you and quote it before doing it, not after.

We do not guarantee results

We do not guarantee a refund, a tax outcome, an assessment result, a savings figure, or any particular return on an automation project. Anyone who does is telling you something they cannot know. What we commit to is the work described in the engagement letter, done to professional standards, on the schedule we agree.

Your records

Your records stay yours. When an engagement ends, we return the records you gave us. We keep our own working papers and the copies we are required to keep. We will not hold your own records hostage over a fee dispute.

Payments, billing and cancellation

Client invoices are paid through the client portal. Card payments are processed by a third party payment processor. We do not receive or store your full card number.

• Before work starts. If you cancel before we begin, you owe nothing and anything you have paid is returned.
• After work starts. If you cancel partway through, you owe the work performed to that point. For a fixed fee engagement we prorate it against the stage reached, and we show you the basis.
• After delivery. A completed and delivered return or report is billable in full. If you believe it is wrong, tell us and we will fix our own error at no charge.
• Disputes. Contact us before filing a chargeback. A chargeback raised without contacting us first is handled as a billing dispute under the engagement letter, and it does not resolve any question about the work.

Artificial intelligence work

Our AI practice designs, builds and hands over automations that run on your systems and your accounts. Three things follow from that, and we would rather say them here than surprise you later.

• You own and operate what we hand over. Once a system is delivered and running in your environment, you control it. You are responsible for what it does and for supervising its output.
• AI output needs review. These systems produce drafts, suggestions and classifications. They are wrong sometimes and they are confident when they are wrong. Anything that affects money, a filing, a legal obligation or a person needs a human to check it.
• Some uses carry their own rules. Automated decisions about hiring, credit, housing or insurance are regulated separately and the rules are changing. We will tell you when a use case looks like one of those. We do not give legal advice about them and you should not treat our build as clearance.

We do not send client tax return information to third party AI services for our own purposes. Where a client engagement involves processing their data with a specific tool, that tool is named in the engagement letter and agreed before it is used.

Links, content and limits

This site links to government sources, software vendors and other outside pages. We do not control them and we are not responsible for what they say or do. A link is not an endorsement.

The text, layout and design on this site belong to Zerby Group LLC. You may read, print and share pages for your own use. Republishing our material as your own is not permitted.

This site is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising out of your use of the site itself. Nothing in this paragraph limits what we owe a client under a signed engagement letter, and nothing here attempts to disclaim liability for our own professional negligence.

Governing law and changes

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Illinois, without regard to conflict of law rules. Any dispute about the site itself belongs in the state or federal courts sitting in Kane County or the Northern District of Illinois.

We may change these terms. The last updated date at the top changes when we do, and the version on this page is the one that applies from the date it appears. Questions go to [email protected].