How to Increase the Capacity of Your Firm Using Tax Planning Software for CPAs

JR Gramstad is a Certified Public Accountant who has been helping individuals and businesses save money on taxes for the past 12 years. His firm does tax preparation, tax planning, accounting services and bookkeeping. Since the fall of 2020, he has been using tax planning software for CPAs to save clients even more money on taxes. Here is his experience of switching from manual tax planning to leveraging tax planner software.

Manual Tax Planning Using Excel Spreadsheets Isn’t Optimal

For a full decade, JR Gramstad worked as a tax preparer for another firm before starting his own tax firm in 2015. Looking for innovative ways his new firm could save clients money, he began offering his clients tax planning, but these tax plans were done with Excel spreadsheets and manual calculations.

At the time, it was the only way to do tax planning because technology had not yet advanced for tax planning software for CPAs to automate the process.

Doing tax planning the “old-fashioned” way is time consuming. Calculating tax plans manually is a slower process than automating calculations with software. As Mr. Gramstad noted, “The manual way wasn’t streamlined, it wasn’t always accurate and it took a whole lot of my valuable time.”

He further explained how tedious that process can be. Creating 20+ page Powerpoints every time you do a new tax plan is not an optimal process, even though at the time it was necessary without access to tax planning software for CPAs.

“Tax planning without software was a huge undertaking,” Mr. Gramstad said. “It was a long process, but it was also a big, jumbled-up mess of systems. It was difficult to streamline and even doing a few tax plans completely brought my firm to its capacity.”

Tax Planning Software for CPAs Increases Tax Firm Capacity

Mr. Gramstad revealed that since implementing Corvee Tax Planning software, his firm capacity has greatly increased.

“I can do 10 times as many tax plans as I could before,” he smiled. “Looking back, not having the software extremely limited my capacity. Not just in the time I spent doing each tax plan, but in the savings I could find. Corvee also helps me secure more savings for clients.”

He is seeing 30-50% increases in savings for clients on average compared to when he was manually doing tax plans: “Basically, by using tax planning software, I cut down my time per plan and increased my revenue…not to mention the extra value my clients are now getting.”

With his tax firm preparing around 1,500 tax returns a year, he has currently done tax plans for about 10% of his clientele. “There’s still a lot of room for more growth,” Mr. Gramstad explained. “And I am really enjoying being able to plan out for so many clients how to reduce their taxes rather than just prepare a return.”

Even Mr. Gramstad’s close rate has increased on new clients, which he credits to the software’s ability to quickly create a professional tax planning proposal that he sends to the prospects. “I close now about 75% of the time, as opposed to around 30 to 35% before I had Corvee software.”

This new close rate is accelerating his firm’s growth trajectory, which has already seen 100% year over year growth in revenue.

We asked him: What are the biggest benefits to using tax planning software for CPAs?

“The deliverable the software creates gives me all the relevant data to give to the client. It’s tremendous. It’s a nice-looking final product that doesn’t cost me any time to make. It’s way more polished than anything we did on our own in the past. The client sees it’s ironclad and is excited to implement the strategies.”

As for me, I’ve learned more about all the tax savings strategies that are out there since using this software. I highly recommend it, Corvee is an incredibly powerful tax planning software that will give high value to your clients and help your firm make more revenue.”