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Accounting built for boutique cigar brands and lounges
Your excise tax is calculated off the price you sell at, not the price you paid the factory. Most brands don't know that, and it's usually the reason a good year on paper never turns into cash. We build the books, the real cost per stick, and the financial strategy behind them.
Title sponsor of the Farmington Valley Cigar dinner at The Country Club of Farmington. 20+ years in CPG, including alcohol brands regulated by the same agency that taxes your cigars.
The problem
Most boutique cigar brands don't have a bookkeeping problem. They have a true cost per stick problem.
The factory invoice is the number you know. Then freight, insurance, and duty. Then a federal excise tax that caps at 40.26 cents a cigar, so on almost every premium cigar it stops behaving like a percentage and becomes a flat cost per stick. Add the months inventory sits aging with your capital inside it. Most brands price off the factory invoice and a guess.
What we do
What we do for cigar brands, importers, and lounges
One team for the full finance stack, from cost per stick to the strategy call about whether the next limited release is worth the capital.
True landed cost per stick
Factory invoice, freight, insurance, and duty rolled into one real cost per cigar and per box, so your margin is a fact instead of a feeling.
Excise-aware margin reporting
The federal cap makes excise a flat per-stick cost on premium cigars, calculated off your selling price rather than the factory's. We model it the way it actually works.
Aging inventory and carrying cost
Cigars sit, and your capital sits with them. We track what aging costs so you can decide what to hold and what to move.
FDA user fee reconciliation
Premium cigars aren't being assessed for FY26, but the invoices still cover the whole cigar class. Disputing yours takes unit counts and the excise tied to them, on a 45-day clock. We produce that data.
Lounge and membership revenue
Memberships and locker rentals are deferred revenue, not cash in the month. We set up recognition, plus humidor shrink and clean POS-to-books.
Cash and working capital planning
Inventory-heavy and excise-heavy means cash out long before cash in. We forecast the gap so a limited release doesn't quietly break the quarter.
Why cigar accounting is different
Excise isn't calculated off what you paid the factory. For an importer, TTB looks at the price you sell at in an arm's-length sale to an unrelated buyer. Sell direct to consumers or to a related party and different rules apply again. This is where we see the most expensive misunderstandings.
Above about 76 cents a cigar, excise stops being a percentage. The federal rate is 52.75% capped at 40.26 cents per cigar, so on essentially every premium cigar it's a flat cost per stick. Pricing models built on the percentage are wrong.
FDA is still invoicing the whole cigar class. FDA has said it doesn't intend to assess user fees on premium cigars for FY26, but it can't tell which excise dollars were premium, so the invoices still come. Getting your share removed means one written dispute a year, inside 45 days, with unit counts and the excise tied to them.
Want to know what a box actually costs you?
Half an hour, no pitch. Bring your numbers or just bring the questions.
Who we work with
Boutique brands, importers, and the lounges building something.
Boutique brands that contract production abroad and import finished goods. Importers and regional distributors. Retail shops, and the newer social clubs bringing in a younger membership on a model that looks more like recurring revenue than retail. One thing we're straight about: we're not a tax firm. We won't prepare your excise returns, advise you on permitting, or represent you before TTB or Customs. You want a specialist for each of those, and we work alongside the ones you have. What we own is everything underneath: inventory, landed cost, margin, cash, and records clean enough that your filings are boring. Rates and rules on this page are current as of August 2026.
FAQ
Questions, answered.
Three things. Excise that caps out and behaves like a flat cost per cigar rather than a percentage, calculated off your selling price and not the factory's. Landed cost that has to absorb freight, duty, and insurance before you know your real margin. And inventory that ages, tying up capital for months. Standard bookkeeping handles none of these well.
We're around the industry — we were title sponsor of the Farmington Valley Cigar dinner at The Country Club of Farmington. On the accounting side, 20+ years in CPG including alcohol brands, which are regulated by TTB, the same agency that taxes cigars, with the same excise mechanics and the same landed-cost problems on imports. Snacks, beauty, and apparel too. The inventory, margin, and cash discipline is the same work.
Quite a lot, and it's the most common setup for a boutique brand. Excise is determined as goods clear Customs rather than on removal from a domestic bonded premises, and the calculation runs off your forward selling price rather than the factory invoice. Permitting questions belong with a specialist. Ours is making sure the cost and sale-price data behind all of it is right.
Both. Lounges have a different problem: memberships and locker rentals are deferred revenue, and recognizing them as they're collected overstates the month and hides the real trend. Add humidor shrink and POS-to-books and you have genuinely different books than a brand.
Start with a $399 QuickBooks Health Check.
We review the file that runs your business, grade it A to F, and hand you a written punch list. No commitment beyond that.