E-Commerce CPA Uses Tax Planning Software

Jeremy Allen is a CPA in Oregon who specializes in serving e-commerce businesses. His mission is to support entrepreneurs who sell online, whether it be with Shopify, Amazon or any other digital platform. He helps these e-commerce businesses with accounting, detailed financial reporting to help scale and forward-thinking tax planning. This past year, the tax planning portion of the firm has grown the fastest. The main reason for this is that Mr. Allen invested in Corvee tax planning software.

CPAs Working Remotely Require Modern Cloud Tools

Working with many e-commerce businesses, Mr. Allen was accustomed to connecting remotely with clients even before the pandemic set in. Nowadays, remote work has accelerated, which only furthers the need for firms to have the right technology to do business efficiently. While Mr. Allen already had some modern CPA cloud tools to do his job, he found none of them could do tax planning like Corvee. 

“I did a little research and found that Corvee was the best tax planning software on the market, bar none,” Mr. Allen said.   

We asked him how his firm got to the place where he was ready to invest in a tool such as Corvee, and he told us a little about the history of his firm:

“I used to work as a tax manager in a small firm. We cranked out around 2,000 returns a year. Just like many firms, that’s what we concentrated on — tax returns. During this time, I knew in the back of my mind I wanted to do something that would provide more value to clients than just preparing their annual taxes. Eventually, I realized that in order to do this I needed to start my own firm.”

As Mr. Allen continued to tell his story, he talked about joining 7 Figure Firms, a growth and development program for firm owners wanting to increase revenue and provide more value to their clients. “7 Figure Firms is a vibrant community of accounting and tax firm owners trying to learn and grow. Each firm owner in the group is looking to beat the status quo of what most accounting firms are doing out there.”

With the help of 7 Figure Firms, between his first and second year in business, Mr. Allen was able to double his business year over year. Then, in the fall of 2020, he found a cloud-based tool, called Corvee, that allows his firm to more accurately and quickly find tax savings for his clients.

Scaling a Tax Planning Business

Having attempted tax planning with manual Excel sheets in the past, Mr. Allen had already come to the conclusion that tax planning was too time intensive to scale. That notion changed when he found Corvee. His staff immediately found the tax planning software intuitive to use, and they were quickly trained on it. “This was the first step in being able to scale a tax planning business,” Mr. Allen noted. “Being able to have staff take on the load rather than me doing it all by myself was a huge relief.”  

More importantly, his firm was able to consistently find an average of $30,000 to $40,000 in tax savings per client, which was far more than what they used to find prior to using the software. Typically, the most common strategies used — the “workhorse” strategies — have been regarding entity selection, the Augusta rule, the home office deduction and the R&D credit. 

With the staff able to do delivery and implementation of tax plans with the help of Covree, Mr. Allen has put his tax manager in charge of reviewing each plan for accuracy. With this process in place, it gives Mr. Allen the time to concentrate on other tasks that he used to not have time for.

Mr. Allen also likes how the software does many calculations behind the scenes so that he and his staff don’t have to. As he explained it, “With some tax software, you end up having to make a lot of calculations yourself and feed those numbers into the software, but this isn’t the case with Corvee. Although you need to make some inputs, nearly all of the calculations are done for you once you have your initial inputs inside of it.”

When asked about the biggest benefit of Corvee, he responded:

“It’s impossible to scale tax planning without Corvee. It’s a no brainer if you want to provide more value to your clients. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that having Corvee is a competitive advantage over other accounting and tax firms.”

With revenue on pace to double again in 2021, he has high hopes going into 2022 with Corvee in his corner. “We’re looking to double revenue again,” he smiled. “Thanks, Corvee!”