In January 2014, I opened my practice. With a wife, a baby, and a vision to create a CPA firm focused around our clients’ success, I hung my sign and said a prayer. Well, maybe like 43 prayers, but you’ve been there.
I started by myself and quickly added two administrative staff. The firm took off, and before I knew it, I needed to turn my office staff into tax preparers to get the work done. It seemed simple enough to teach them how and where to enter the data into our tax preparation software. The question became, “how do I efficiently catch any input errors made by them?” More than anything, I had to uphold my promise to my clients to deliver a high quality, error free tax return.
As Plato said well before my time and yours, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’
A lightbulb flickered in my head, and I set out to create a tool that would be independent from the tax preparation software, simple to use, and one that could produce an accurate expectation of the tax return as a checkpoint- essentially, an electronic first level review. I needed something that would allow me to go back to the tax return and say, “this is what I expect my results to be.” This is how TaxExact was born.
The impact was game changing.
This new tool quickly became core to our quality control process. Even more, I discovered that it was a very effective way to develop new staff to learn the logic behind creating a tax return- the “how” and “why” behind the tax code. What I expected to be helpful to me to save precious time as the only reviewer in my firm turned into a tool that single handedly has saved our firm tens of thousands of dollars over the years since we started using it. In fact, our firm has yet to receive a single tax notice relating to one of our clients or because of an error made during the tax preparation process!
Collaboration is even more game changing.
I decided other firms could benefit from this tool, so it is now in the final phases of being professionally developed. You and I face the same challenges today: talent shortages, spending too much time on final reviews, getting surprise tax notices that were the result of our errors, managing tax projects efficiently, and finding ways to spend less time on compliance work to focus on higher value services for our clients. Take a look at where we’re going. We want your thoughts and feedback. As a matter of fact, we want you to be part of our journey. If you simply want to stay ‘in the know’ or want to be part of our beta group, sign up with your email on our site: taxexact.co. We’re not spammers, so don’t worry about getting sales pitches in your inbox. Rather, we believe this tool will be tremendously impactful for firms like yours, and we also think your feedback and participation are vital to our success.
Friends, I leave you with a question to consider. How big of an impact do you think human error in your firm has on your clients when they don’t even know it?
