Tax Planning Software for CPAs Drastically Reduces Time Spent Tax Planning

Daren Anderson’s firm specializes in tax planning for business owners. He also offers tax prep, but usually only as an add-on for his already-existing tax planning clients. Here’s his story on how tax planning software has enhanced his firm.

From 32 Hours to 2 Hours

Mr. Anderson used to manually tax plan for clients, which typically took between 8 and 32 hours, depending on the complexity of the plan. He would conduct an interview with a client and put his notes in an Excel spreadsheet. He would then find the strategies that applied and calculate the  numbers. Finally, he would spend energy creating a final deliverable, which was painstakingly put together in a PowerPoint presentation and exported to a PDF file. 

“Sometimes, I’d realize there was a little error and have to go back and make a correction, which entailed doing the whole process all over again,” Mr. Anderson explained. “I struggled with formatting problems to make the deliverable consistent and nice-looking.” 

While this process wasn’t optimal, it worked. However, Mr. Anderson knew there could be a better way. He soon found it with tax planning software for CPAs. 

Automated Tax Planning

Mr. Anderson quickly became more efficient when he stopped manually tax planning and began letting technology assist in his efforts. “If it wasn’t for Corvee, I’d still be spending a ton of time doing a bunch of frustrating formatting stuff for one-off reports,” he explained. “It was taking me 10X as long to create finalized deliverables compared to now.”

He continued, “With tax planning software for CPAs, you can create beautiful looking PDF proposals and final tax plans with just a click of a button, all formatted neatly and completely customizable.” 

The possibility of quickly creating a proposal to send a prospect has significantly raised Mr. Anderson’s closing ratio:

“I used to rarely even bother with sending a tax planning proposal to a client who was on the fence. Now, it’s simple for me to make a proposal—I’m able to create it while I’m on the phone with them and send it over immediately. This works well when I’m discussing a possible tax plan with a prospect but the other owner or spouse isn’t on the call. Typically a wife might say she has to talk to her husband about it, but now I can send her an exact, detailed proposal for him to look over,” Mr. Anderson explained.

He went on to explain that in the past, whenever someone told him “I need to talk to my partner/spouse,” his closing ratio was around 10%—which is not a good outlook. Today, since he is able to immediately send a tax planning proposal during the sales call, his closing ratio has increased to nearly 50% after the “I need to talk to my partner/spouse” stall.

That’s why easily being able to generate proposals is one of Mr. Anderson’s favorite features. He added, “There are a few things I’ve asked the Corvee developers to add and they’ve done it. No other kind of software I’ve had has done this. You can’t call Microsoft and ask them to add a feature to Microsoft Word, but Corvee listens to their users.”

The New Normal for Tax Planning

Mr. Anderson has grown his firm from just himself two years ago to a growing team: two full-time tax planners, two full-time tax preparers and a virtual assistant to help with administrative tasks and LinkedIn marketing. Tax planning software for CPAs has allowed him to take himself out of the process and build an efficient system. The software has empowered him to increase his staff’s capacity. “Corvee makes it possible for staff that are not CPAs to do tax planning.”

He describes that system like this:

“I have the tax planning software screen open and have a Zoom call on another screen. As I talk to a client, I can input some data and easily tell them how much money they can save for the upcoming year. Once they realize the value, I send an engagement letter, or if they aren’t yet convinced, a proposal which is quickly generated within the software.”

Once he has all the information he needs and calculates the savings with a few clicks of a button, he creates the final deliverable and sends it to the client. “I have a templated email with a couple bullet points for implementation, and it has a link to the tax planning software portal where their tax plan is saved. They can view it and download it. I also schedule a call to discuss with them any details or questions they have about the tax plan.”

This process is working well for Mr. Anderson. Instead of trying to acquire several tax preparation clients and upsell them to tax plans, he simply looks for tax planning clients who naturally want to do their tax preparation with him afterward.

“Using tax planning software for CPAs is a great learning tool, allowing me to become more comfortable with advanced strategies. The software shows you how to do the calculation, describes each strategy, and also describes it in a way that the client can understand easily. I can’t recommend this enough for anyone who does tax planning.”

With Mr. Anderson finding 30% more savings for clients on average by using the software compared to manually tax planning, the end result is less time and energy spent working in his office and more savings for his clients.