Video: Using Technology to Deliver Efficiencies and Elevate Your Tax Clients’ Experience | Duration: 5524s | Summary: Using Technology to Deliver Efficiencies and Elevate Your Tax Clients’ Experience

Transcript for "Using Technology to Deliver Efficiencies and Elevate Your Tax Clients’ Experience": So much for having me. I'm so excited to spend the next 90 minutes or so with you. We'll be talking about using technology to deliver efficiencies and elevate your clients' tax experience. My name is Alenisha. I'm a CPA. I'm the founder of ACE Group, and I'm also a mom. It's my favorite title of all the titles I have. I started a firm called Ace Group where we empower small business owners to run strong and sustainable businesses. And while we love working with small business owners, small businesses are run by individuals. So, yes, we also help individuals with their tax and advisory needs. I've won a few awards most recently the, top 200 CPAs, in America by Forbes, which is exciting, and the 2024 top 50 women in accounting by Ignition. I'm a participant in the ProConnect customer council for Intuit. That's their tax council, and I'm entering my almost last year on the council. I'm a mentor at Montclair State University. That's my college alma mater. I loved it so much. I went twice, And, I think it's important to mention to you that I measure success by the amount of control I have over my time. I think that helps to set the stage as to why I operate the way in which I operate. So let's talk through what the agenda looks like for the next few moments we get to share together. We'll go over some little housekeeping items. We'll set the stage and talk about the current challenges that our industry faces. And then, of course, the solutions. How do we get past the hurdles that we face on a day to day basis, how technology fits into those solutions, and then I'll share with you some implementation strategies and quick wins because I love for people to have, like, a next step or a to do list, not to create more work for you. But something so that you can take away from this and immediately start to implement it and gain some quick wins to get you on the path to leveraging the technology that you choose. So, housekeeping. A recording of this presentation will be made available to you. You'll use the same login that you used to access this webinar today shortly after this session concludes. Just note that you will not be eligible for CPE or CE credit, by watching that recording. You must watch this webinar live to get credit. You can chat with other attendees here, using the chat box. You'll be able to answer your polls right from this platform. So to get to the polls, you'll go to the polls tab, and I'll tell you when there's a poll. I'll announce it. I'll say it loud. I'll give you some time to get to the poll, but you'll just access it from the polls tab and then you'll click your answer to submit it. You'll know that you click the answer when the text color changes. So it'll go from black text to purple text. That means that you submitted the poll. For purposes of getting CPE credit, and this webinar is only eligible for CPE, but for purposes of getting that credit, the answer doesn't have to be right. There's no right answer for credit. So just make sure that you select and answer and then you'll get credit for answering the poll questions. If you have questions about product, content, if you're having any tech issues, please use the q and a tab. So you see chat, poll, q and a, sorry, docs. In q and a, use the q and a tab if you have any questions. For any documents like the slides, you'll access those from the documents tab. And toward the end of this session, there'll be a survey that pops up. I'll remind you about that survey, but please feel free to submit it. Give us your feedback. It helps us to know what content to provide to you, what's most helpful. As I mentioned, this session is eligible for 1 and a half CPE credits. It is not eligible for IRS CE credits, but I hope you'll still stick out with me, and hang out even if you're not eligible for CEE credits. You do need to answer the polls to get credits. So please attend for a minimum of 50 minutes of each hour to receive the CPE credits and answer polling questions. A minimum of 1 poll per hour is what's required, but it'd be great if you could answer all the polls. And as a reminder, you must be here live in attendance to get that credit. Your certificate will be emailed to you within 48 hours. They'll use the email address that you registered with, so pay attention to that one. And if you do not get it within 48 hours, check your junk or spam before you email the protax_training@intuit.com email to troubleshoot where your certificate may be. Alright. So, a little legal jargon because that's just the name of the game here. This session is educational in nature. It should not be construed as tax advice. You will learn a ton of information here, but it is all educational. So where where does the future of tax firms lie? It is tech driven. I don't think that's any surprise to anyone here, but 91%, nearly every accountant will say that technology helped them support their clients' evolving needs, and our clients' needs are evolving so rapidly. This game though is not just about survival, it's about thriving. And I think for a long time, accountants have been in survival mode. And I'm not just talking about through the pandemic. I'm talking about in general, we have literally just been doing what we need to do to survive because there's so much work, and we'll talk about what those challenges look like. I wanna start seeing us thrive. So if you are ready to thrive, let's future proof our firms together with intentional design, intentional efficiency. We wanna power our processes. So here's my story. Those are my super cute kids that you see there. I started this business in 2016. The a n ace group was 1 month old. So technology for me was not a want. It wasn't a nice to have. It was an absolute need because I literally needed to work from anywhere. Anywhere that I had access to the Internet, anywhere that I could take my laptop, whether that was swim class, at the park, at my parents' house. I worked from anywhere. So cloud based technology for me was first to solve my own problems and to create a level of flexibility and efficiency. Later, it involved to the enhancement to our clients' tax experience, and this came in handy especially in March 2020. I don't have to go into many details. You were there. You know what happened. But all 3 of my children were doing remote learning from different laptops. Both of my parents got COVID pretty early in the pandemic. My mom spent nearly 3 weeks in a coma. The majority of my team, opted for unemployment, which I totally understand. It's much easier to wash your groceries with gloves and bleach, but you don't have to worry about work obligations. And clients still needed help. They needed help with PPP and PUA and EIDL and every other acronym you could come up with. So in 2020, it's no surprise that we operated a 100% remote from March 16th through the end of the year. This was seamless for us because even prior to the pandemic, we worked on a very hybrid flexible schedule. So you could come in the office if you wanted to. I happen to like having an office. I I live and work 2 minutes apart, so this sort of creates a little separation. But for the team to be a 100% remote for clients to not be able to come into the office, there was no adjustment because that's what our clients were already used to. So we could focus on what we thought would be the toughest tax season ever until we got to 2021. And that's when we realized we were in the toughest tax season ever because that's when we started working on those 2020 tax returns. And that was when we learned in February, in March, in April. That's when we learned that people relocated. They bought houses. They sold houses. They grew their family. They got married. They got divorced. They became self titled day traders because the Internet told them they were a day trader. They were crypto experts. They opened businesses. They opened businesses in Delaware. The EIN said they were single member LLCs. The formation documents suggest that they were corporations. It was a lot. It was a lot, so much so that we stopped taking on new clients. We just said let's get through this tax season and let's just readjust everything that's happening here. We decided that we needed to lead with accounting and advisory because we were so stressed about the surprises that had come up. The number of profit and loss statements that clients had put together that required figure out to fix all during the busiest time of the year. So we said no more of this. Advisory is required. I know we have offered it to you temporarily or we've offered it to you sort of as needed or ad hoc. This has to be a permanent offering. It has to be a paid offering, and we can't let clients continue to decline it. We have to just build it into our service package. So we thought about what we have been hearing for years from clients. We ask every client when they do a consultation, why are you looking for a new account? And and they would all say something to the effect of, I just feel like I'm missing something. Right? I talk to my accountant once a year, but I need their help throughout the year. I need more advice. This is what clients were saying to us when they were coming to us. And then it became clear. The solution they need is also the solution we need. We need a stronger relationship. We need increased communication. We need to be able to provide them with proactive advice. We need to be able to support them before they make the the decision so that we are not always being the cleanup people or the people that are constantly delivering bad news because that's what it felt like we did for all of 20 21's tax season. So that launched our 3 year plan to turn this business on its head, totally revamp it, change our service offerings, change our website, change our communication to our clients. That didn't mean that we lost clients. We reduced our client base by probably about 30%, but we doubled our revenue. And what did that allow us to do? By 2023, we were taking a trial on a 4 day work week and we were able to do that for a year round period starting in 2023. We have virtually no extension season. Extension season is filled with people who are, waiting for the last minute to gather documents. Typically, business owners who don't have financials put together and they need to gather receipts. And by solving those issues throughout the year, we were able to eliminate the number of extensions we did. So I think this year, we probably had about 10 returns on extensions and half of them were, related to me. So I'll still take that as a win. We still work a 100% remote. I actually happen to enjoy working from an office. As I mentioned, I'm 2 minutes from my home, and I share a physical office with my husband who works at a separate business. So this is a matter of convenience for me, but my team members who happen to be all moms love to work from home that works with them, and we have not made any changes there. But this shift did allow us to reduce the tax season stress and enhance our client service without sacrificing profitability. We are actually better than we were, in those previous years. Some non work accomplishments that I'm most proud of, and I think this is important because I've already mentioned to you that I measure success based on the ownership of my time. I was PTA president for 3 years, way back when my kids were a little younger. I've been class parent for every year. I'm a mentor at my alma mater. I serve as, subject matter expert for entrepreneurship, and I help them with accounting, matters and career coaching, all those sort of things. And I maintain a very strict monthly massage schedule. And that's something I'm super proud of because I have habitually been the kind of person that put myself off during tax season, and I've learned that that is simply not healthy because tax season is not only two and a half months long. It's actually much longer. Fast forward to 2024, the date on this check says April 13th. And this is a very, not so pleasing picture because I'm in my gym clothes. But, this is a fitness competition at my gym. I have always quit the gym during tax season. I'm not saying it's healthy. It's not something that I've been proud of, but I simply could not balance both the gym and tax season until this year. Not only did I not quit, I won a fitness challenge as an accountant during tax season. That's April 13th and I'm still at the gym at April 13th. That is what having the power to choose has done for me. That's what the efficiency has done for me. I don't think everyone is in it for the money. I don't think everyone is in it to constantly just grow bigger, bigger, bigger. I think what leveraging technology does is just gives you back the power to choose. What will you do with the additional time, with the additional capacity, with the conserve mental energy, what would you like to do with it? And for me, it was maintain a massage schedule and stick to the gym. So that's where I am today. So what are our industry's current challenges? What's the problem that we're all facing? Clients and employees expect a modern, efficient experience and we need to use technology to deliver on point solutions, but there is just not enough time. I can't tell you how many of us are constantly talking about the lack of time that we have. So this is a problem that we are all facing. There's just not enough time. There's the detailed data entry. There's repetitive manual processes. There's high touch client interactions. You have new client consultation calls. You have document gathering. You have back and forth email for missing documents all year. You have to create work papers. There is just not enough time in the day. There are not enough people. Right? The AICPA 2023 trends report noted a 36% drop from 2016 to 2022 in first time candidates taking the CPA exam. Any accountant will tell you that, maybe not any, most accountants will tell you that they are simply struggling with getting people, quality people to do the work and to have the level of expertise that they need. So we have a a people issue and the issue is that people aren't attracted to our profession in the way that we need them to be. Clients want more. They always want more. Right? They want more value. They want more clarity. They want more advice. The only thing they don't want more of is a tax liability but there is still not enough time. The problem that we had before, it is not going away. Right? If we are already stretched thin, we're already burned out, there is no capacity left for the high value work that our clients crave. We can also believe that there the standard for service is just too high for a mere human. Right? We're just accountants. How can we do this extra stuff when we're trying to get through the compliance work? When we have so many tax returns that we need to complete and we're doing tax returns from January to October, how could there be more time to do more work? The fact of the matter though is that over 80% of taxpayers, they want a tax pro who can provide advisory services. They want someone who can go beyond just filing tax returns during tax season. And this is according to the Intuit Taxpayer Insight and intelligent intelligence brief. This does link if you wanted to check out that full survey. What's another problem we're facing? Clients wanna share their documents in the way that works best for them. If that's fax, mail, unsecure emails, sliding it under your door, putting it in your mailbox at home, they wanna give you the documents however they want to give it to you and in whatever order. Some documents via fax, I'll mail you some other documents in a few weeks and they want you to be the one to compile it. The problem with that is that the future of the firm doesn't use paper. That's not an option for the future of the firm and that's because it's very difficult to scale when you are dealing with a lot of paper. Right? What we're looking at is a firm that, think of think of a firm as like a lawyer. Right? If your lawyer told you, hey. We have these pressing deadlines, and I need to get this information in in a timely fashion, a secure fashion. Right? So that I can meet the deadline, so I can file whatever it is that you've gotten yourself legally into. You would have no problem getting those documents into an attorney in whatever manner the attorney said it because you've got a deadline and there are things that hang in the balance. The same applies for our profession. We need our documents in a specific way, in a way that doesn't require us to do an egg hunt to find it so that we can put that focus back on accurately preparing tax returns and helping our clients with proactive tax planning. That's where we can help them the most. More paper leads to more security concerns, more security concerns. There's more data entry errors because if you've got a lot of paper, you're you're keying that stuff in. It's not coming to you electronically. There's more mailing. People who receive paper documents tend to then mail the tax return back to the client. Mailing means you gotta print the tax return. You gotta store copies of the paper documents. All of that to me just sounds like more money, and that's exactly what it translate to. More money for whatever reason does give me more headaches. This all leads to your firm being less scalable. 70% of taxpayers will tell you that they actually prefer uploading documents to a single consolidated location. This is helpful to them because it gives them one central place to get it, but it's helpful for you because after tax season when they're looking for their w two, you don't have to get the email that says, hey. Could you send me back the document that I sent you? You could just let them go back into their portal and grab the document that they're looking for. So the number of emails and requests that your team's gonna get for documents that the client provided you, eliminate it. Those things are all like the little annoying things that happen after tax season that you would no longer have to be, involved with. For larger growing firms, the volume of documents can be overwhelming and if your firm is looking to embrace remote work, the elimination of processes that, like, require paper, that's absolutely necessary. Another problem that we face, you need a cohesive firm brand and a communication standard, but each employee on your team has a different level of knowledge. Their communication method differs. So how your client will receive your communications depends on who it is that they're talking to. Ineffective communication cycles can create a frustrating experience for your team members and also for your client. Right? Clients need proactive communication. They need standardized communication, and your team needs a way to be able to push that out. Almost 3 quarters of taxpayers express a preference for tax professionals to send automatic reminders about required documents and next steps. I know, as professionals, we feel like the client knows what's coming up. They know April 15th. It's not their 1st day on earth. They know when the deadline is coming up. But similar to how we feel like we have so many deadlines and they're all bumping up against another, the client's out there living too. And it can get overwhelming especially when you have internal deadlines. For us, the IRS's deadline has nothing to do with our deadline because as I mentioned, I run a team of moms and that filing deadline typically bumps right up against, spring break for our children. So we don't file tax returns on April 15th. So I don't care what the IRS said the deadline is. Your deadline to get documents into us, for example, for an individual is March 10th unless there's some extenuating circumstance or you're waiting for perhaps like a k one that hasn't been released yet. But if that's not the case, we need it by March 10th. And in order for our client to meet that deadline, they need to be receiving reminders from us much sooner than that. And if we can do that, we alleviate that pressure that we feel in April to start rushing and getting things done in a manner that is not going to produce accuracy. So we've reached poll number 1. This is poll number 1. This is me announcing poll number 1. What is your primary reason for attending this webinar? Is it to earn free CPE with me? To explore new solutions? To solve a specific problem? Just general interest how you could leverage technology, smooth out your own clients' experience, or is it other? As a reminder, to answer this poll, you wanna go to the poll tab in the top right navigation, and you wanna select your answer. When you selected it, the text is gonna turn purple. That's how you know you selected it. This is important if you're looking for CPE. So if you are a CPA and you're looking for CPE credit answering these polls, very important, you'll get a few of them. So I'll give you a few seconds to answer the poll. And if you've answered your poll already and you wanna give me a little intel on why exactly you joined, what is the problem you're facing, what's the new solution you're interested in, After you've turned your answer purple, feel free to go ahead and chat with me and give me the additional information. And I'll give you about 10 more seconds because I care about my fellow, accountants out there needing CPE. So go ahead and get your answer in. Alright. I'm gonna close out this poll in 54 321. So for anyone that selected that I'm here to explore some new solutions, I'm here to tell you some new solutions. Okay? So where is the solution? Hint. Hint. It's in the graphic. It's in the cloud. The solution is in the cloud, and let me tell you why. Invading and experimenting to find the right future forward techno technological solutions for your firm going to help push you forward. The reason why I'm hiding highlighting the right solution is because every solution is not right for every firm. And I think it's important that we take a step back especially from, the webinars and and sales programs and the demos that we do. Step back and figure out what works for you. That's where the experimenting part comes from. Figuring out what your firm would best benefit from, what your team, what your clients would best benefit from. It's not just picking, what works for everyone else and just hoping you're gonna get the same results because that's simply not the case. Migrating to a cloud based operation. I cannot tell you how instrumental this has been in keeping up with the way things change. We can't really plan for a pandemic. Right? We we just can't plan for that. But having cloud based technology in place helped to soften the blow of what a pandemic did for us. I think without cloud based technology, had COVID landed on us and losing half of my team, I think that could have very easily been the end of these group just like that. But the fact that we didn't lose any time, any setup time, take your computer home, you're already used to working from home anyway. The technology did not go anywhere. We didn't have to worry about doing any updates. Simply being in a cloud based operation helped us to thrive during COVID when we needed every bit of brain energy we had left, to figure out where to get mask from and, disinfect them once we can no longer find Lysol. So I'm a huge believer in operating in a cloud based, environment. The solution involves saying bye, right, to paper and solutions that require in person meetings. Although I love being in an office, I don't need to be in this office to get my work done. And that's because everything is on the cloud. It's not even on a specific computer, and that's the beauty of it. I could literally pick up at any computer so long as it has a big screen and it's fast, and has a mouse because I need a mouse. So long as it has those things, I can continue to work. So it will require us to say bye bye to paper, say bye bye to solutions that absolutely require you to be in person with your client or even your team members. It's saying hello to redundancy elimination because as accountants, we enter data a lot. We enter repetitive data a lot, and that can save you 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. If you could shave off 45 minutes a day by just not inputting data over and over again, you increase accuracy. You're gonna give yourself back some good mental energy because you're not just doing the same things over and over again, and you're gonna create the capacity you need to do what you choose. Right? Be it grow your firm, be it provide those high touch touch interactions with your clients, or join the gym. You're gonna create the power to choose for any of those things. Customated and automated outreach to clients. Clients want to hear from us. We want to talk to clients. We just don't always have the space. Right? The capacity to do it. The solution involves having a way to communicate them in a custom and also an automated way. The solution involves time saving efficiencies that improve tax return accuracy because all of this is nice. Operating in a cloud based environment is lovely. Providing advisory services, fantastic. But if you can't provide accurate tax return preparation, if you can't get the compliance part done, then the other things, of course, will struggle. So we need to find ways to do it just quicker and more accurately. We need bespoke box to reduce monotonous work. Right? What is it that you could automate so that the human on your team does not have to do it? Where could you benefit from, gaining efficiencies by using a bot? And then elevating the role of an accountant from solely providing compliance support to an advisory partner. And this requires education on our part. We have to educate our clients. We have to educate taxpayers in general about what our role is and what it could be. People don't like being surprised. People get very confused with tax law regulation. Accountants get confused with tax law regulation and we've had a ton of changes over the past few years. So, we have to work with our taxpayers to help them understand how could we best support you. This is within our realm. We are able to help you avoid the surprise, avoid the penalty, avoid the interest. But if they don't know that we do that, then they don't know to come ask us for that. So I'm gonna launch a second poll question because we have very exciting things coming up. I wanna make sure that I get this second poll out to you. This is me announcing poll number 2. What percent of your your clients currently receive paid advisory services from your firm? So what percent of your clients pay your firm to receive advisory services? And I know advisory is very broad, But whatever it is you currently consider advisory, is it less than 10% of your clients that are paying for it? 10% to about a quarter? A quarter to half or more than half? How many of your clients pay for advisory services? As a reminder, to answer this, you're gonna go to the poll tab in the top right navigation, and the text will turn purple when you select one of these four options. There is no right or wrong. There is also no judgment. So pick the one that, feels most accurate for your firm and go ahead and submit. And I'll give you another 10 or 15 seconds to get your answer in if you are looking for CPE credit. If you have already answered that question and you wanna chitchat with me, feel free to pop in the chat what your firm considers advisory because I think we all have a different definition of it. So feel free to share with the other attendees, what you consider advisory to be, and I'll make sure to check and chime in there. I will close the poll in 10,987,654,321. So are you ready to bring your accounting practice into the future? And I am not saying this to say your firm is in the past. I am just saying are you looking to move it forward, more forward in the future from wherever it is that you are. If so, we've got to talk about what the solutions look like. What are the right tools? What's the right automation? What's the right bot for your firm? We'll start with cloud based technology because I don't know how many times I had to tell you, like, this is where it's at. You pick the technology but cloud based is where it's at. You need cloud based technology that aligns with expectations. So in general, the benefits of cloud based technology, no hosting and no hardware. This is big for me. I'm the kind of person that doesn't even update her iPhone if it doesn't happen automatically at night. If my son didn't do it, I don't know what, software download I'd be on. I just don't need the extra work of having to do it myself. Automated technology automatic technology updates, which are also automated, which gives you baked in time savings. This is also huge. This means that your team will always be working on the most up to date software without any work from you or your tech department, assuming you have a tech department. We don't. So we don't have to worry about a tech department coming in and taking everyone's computers to put, the latest download of a software. That does not have anything to do with us. They're doing it in the Intuit verse, and that's perfectly fine for us. Your team has 247 access. This is especially important if you have a remote team or you're considering working remote. Giving people the flexibility to access software at a time that works well for them. There's no, downtime where people can't log in to the software. It's gonna always be available for them. Specific to Intuit for ProConnect, ProConnect is the cloud based, tech tax software. That's the software that our firm solely uses. ProConnect is gonna give you the ability to view the status of tax returns across multiple offices. One screen, you look at your dashboard and you can see where every tax return stands. Of course, this assumes that you're using the feature that would allow you to do that, and I am going to show you that today. You have chat and phone support. Again, if you're like me, I don't even buy clothes from places that don't let me return the item. If I can't return it, I don't want it. So chat and phone support, super important to me. And this would be great especially if you have a team. They can use the phone and chat support as opposed to always having to come to, their manager. Integrated features to support your end to end tax workflow. I'll talk to you a little bit more about this. What I will say though is that we literally send our engagement letters, send our organ I our organizers and our document request list, prepare the return, talk to team members about the return, review the return, talk to the client about the return, send the return for signature using knowledge based authentication, get the return back, file the return, get e file confirmation, store the return. Justin Proconette. I know firm owners who use 4 or 5 or 6 software to do that. We use one platform, and that can all be done right in ProConnect. I will show you as much of that as I can from a demo account. I think this one is underrated, but there's unlimited data storage at no additional cost. We pay to store everything. We pay to store our photos. We pay to store our documents. You don't pay extra to store anything in ProConnex. And you can share those documents back to your clients securely. You can share those documents like the tax return. You can send that securely right from ProConnect. You can save a copy of it. All of that can be housed there. So we use that as, like, our backup for tax documents. And as of January 1, 2025, access to Intuit tax adviser or ITA will be available at no additional cost for ProConnect users. Okay? It's a win for us ProConnect users. We are definitely up. We won't be paying anything for I ITA into a tax adviser as of January 1, 2025. So here are my favorite ProConnect features. I've used ProConnect from day 1. I initially started using ProConnect because they used to advertise for it in QuickBooks Online and because I was a QuickBooks Online user. Trying ProConnect felt like a natural progression when I decided to incorporate tax services into our accounting services. Link will probably always be my first favorite feature. Link is, I think, so underrated and there are so many things that you can do with it. Link is built in. There's not an extra fee to use link and this is going to allow you to send your engagement letter, send your checklist, send your document request list to your client all within ProConnect. I'm gonna show you what this looks like, but your client will receive this secure link, and they'll be able to input their answers to the question, sign their engagement letter, upload documents, and then they can mark it as done. Your client can chat with you. So a lot of times we have clients who say, oh, I need more clarity on this or I'll be back to upload this. They can chat there and we can chat back with them. That's all housed within link, and then you can see link on the side of your screen, kind of like a drawer, while you're working on the tax return. So you can use your 2nd screen. I'm a big fan of a second screen if you have 3 screens. You can keep that all on one screen and now you can look at other things on your other screen. So I will show you what link looks like. The mark is done feature is new ish. I wanna say maybe 2 years old or so, but this has revolutionized how we queue up tax returns. The mark is done feature, allows your client to indicate that they believe they're done providing documents. And the number of hours my admin has saved in the the constant emails, are you done? Are you ready for us to review? So many emails. So many texts. We let our clients know as part of our client education. We start sending emails and videos and tutorials as early as November or December letting clients know, here's how we will know when you're ready for us to review your, documents. You must mark it as done. We can see when this mark is done. It'll be time stamped, and that's how we know that we should begin looking at it because our goal is to reduce the number of touches. Again, we want to conserve our mental energy for what actually needs it. So we will not look at that unless a, you have a question or b, you've let us know that it's done. So we can see if someone's put a chat and has asked us a question, and we identify those and we answer those questions daily, but we will not actually start working on the tax return until the client has marked it as done. And when we're looking at our internal deadlines, for example, I believe for this past tax season, it was March 10th, somewhere around March 10th. We see exactly who's uploaded by March 10th, and those are the clients that we guarantee completion. After that, we do continue to work, until our internal deadline for filing tax returns has come up. But we only guarantee filing for clients who have inputted their documents, answered their checklist, signed their engagement letter, and marked it as done as of that specific date. So very underrated, tiny, tiny button, but will change the game for you if you struggle with queuing up tax returns or doing a bunch of check ins. The ability to import data right from ProConnect is also major. Don't worry. I will show you what this looks like. But it's like having a little robot working before you. So you're you're almost reviewing the return while you're preparing the return because that ability to import sort of operates as a preparer for you, and you can import a bunch of documents, w twos, 10 90 nines, k ones. You can import 10 90 eights. You can import a bunch of documents, which means that you are doing less data entry, less redundant entry, and you're increasing the accuracy because now you're just checking it as opposed to keying in a bunch of numbers when you're very tired. You have the ability to flag numbers or cells to review. This is also super helpful because everyone knows what this looks like. You do a tax return. You put it down. You come back to it in a week or 2, and you have no idea what was open. What did I need to look at? And now it feels like you have to do the return all over again because you don't know what exactly was the issue. By being able to flag the cell, you can go back to, oh, these are the 6 things that I wanted to take a look at. Or if you're talking to your team member, which is my bonus here, if you're chatting with your team member, you can tell them, hey. Go back to this flag. We put an estimate there. Right? So when we get the actual number, make sure that you put the actual figure in there. Or flag this because I'm not sure if this is accurate and I wanted to get additional information from the client. And when that flag is resolved, it will still keep track that it was flagged, but now it's resolved. So you don't just lose sight into what was previously a concern. Love it. Especially for my mom of 3 brain. The integrated esignature workflow is also helpful. There is an extra fee for esignature, and I operate it without paying that fee for, I don't know, let's say 3 years, 4 years. Because I said, oh, I paid for Adobe. Why would I pay extra extra to have the esignature workflow? I could just download my return and put it into Adobe, which did not have knowledge based authentication. Please don't report me. And then I could just follow-up with the client. Make sure that you sign it. Make sure that you sign it. Time. Right? That's what I was missing out on, the time savings. Downloading that return, uploading it into Adobe, dropping in signature boxes, dropping in, initial boxes. That takes time. Right? 10 to 15 minutes per tax return. With the integrated esignature workflow, I can get an esignature request out in less than a minute. It will send the automatic reminders. It has knowledge based authentication. For returning clients, you could skip the knowledge based authentication and instead give them a passcode that you could set, a few digits, you let them know what the code is, and then they go in and sign it. Saves you the emails that ask you what street did they live on in 3rd grade because exactly. So much time saved. The amount of time I save makes the fee that I pay, which I don't even know what it is at this point because it's that worth it. It's not expensive though. The money that I save there absolutely is worth the time because now we have this full packet that's been signed. The client can download it if they choose. It lives in ProConnect for us to have and I did not have to drop in all those little boxes. Right? I could if I wanted to add additional boxes but I didn't have to. That stuff is already templated out. And then the bonus, I know I said fade 5 but a bonus only because this is new but I think it's really exciting. You can now chat with your team members in ProConnect, and I will show you this, in just a moment. But this is nice because it it saves you from having to go somewhere else to Slack. I'm not a huge Slack girl. Right? So I like to be able to chat with team members right from ProConnect. I don't have to leave here and go to Gmail or send an email. I can do that right there and then they'll get an email letting them know they've been tagged in a note. So let's go to a little demo. Now I'm just gonna switch screens. I'm gonna go over to ProConnect. And as I mentioned, I am using a demo account, so there isn't real client data here, but you'll get you'll get the gist of it. So I will stop here, and I'll share my screen with you all. The one that I did with the price, I realized that he didn't owe it on the There we go. He has it. He's not. Perfect. And what you should be looking at is, a screen for ProConnect. This is a demo account, so I don't have a whole lot of control over the data, but I'm gonna walk you through what my favorite, ProConnect features are so that you could see them live and in the flesh. So I was mentioning to you link. Intuit link is built into ProConnect. If you click here, you can access Intuit link and you'll be able to see, like, all of your clients in Intuit. Oh, let me sign in. I suppose I should be grateful that it blocks me out so that I don't have, anyone sneaking into my data. Okay. So Intuit link is built in. It'll be on your left navigation and you'll be able to see everyone that you sent request to in one screen. There's not a whole lot of data here but I'll look at this request here. And actually I'll just do create a new request just so you can see what this looks like. You can send requests for individual or business. Of course, you need an email address to be able to send it. But if I just click this person and click continue, I can select what template I wanna send and you can create your own template. We create a template every year. So we have a 2023 individual organizer separate from 2022 and 2021. And the reason why I think that's super helpful is because you've seen how much the tax law changes. And we're in 2023 and we're preparing some with 2020 return. I still can't remember which year had 2 stimulus or economic impact payments and which one had one. I don't have to remember that though because I have an organizer that was built specific to 2020 and 2021. So if we're doing a prior year return, we will send that specific organizer. But this one just has an individual organizer here. I can use this template. Right? I could also have created my own template. But if I have a specific request for this client, something that doesn't apply to any other client, I can add a new item here. So if I wanted to ask them, please share your favorite color, which I would never ask my client. But whatever the request is, I can drop that in as an open ended question or a yes or no question, and that request will only be added for that client. Similarly, for the document checklist, we have a full template for the documents that we request. If I know that this person has no trust or estate and I don't want them to be bothered with it, I could delete it for that one client. Similarly, I can also add a request, and there's a bunch of documents that they could be or you could just put other. So if it was please provide the receipt for childcare. This would have already been in my template, but just to show you that you can add that one off before you send it to the client. You can check here that you wanted to send a reminder every 7 7 days until they mark it as done. Right? So we will keep reminding you that this is not done until you mark it as done. And this message is templated as well. We could add additional information here. I can't do it in this demo account, but I could have changed the subject or I could change this message if I wanted to for this specific client. Totally separate from the template that would appear here. I publish this. I send the email. It triggers to my client. Hey. You need to take care of some things for us. It's going to ask them to sign their engagement letter. They'll be able to answer the questionnaire and they'll be able to do their document checklist. They will have a button that says mark as done. If for any reason I need to act as the taxpayer, I could answer a question for them. I could also upload a document for them, but, hopefully, you won't have to do either for your client. So I filled in a couple of questions here just so that I can show you what I mean by being able to see the status of a return across the board. For your clients, and I think this is overlooked, these will turn orange when the client has input some data. It's letting you know that that data needs review. What we do is and I'll open a tax return just so I can show you how we actually do this. We'll open the return and then as we are filling the data in, checking the data, we open our little tax organizer. This is gonna put your link organizer right to the right side of your screen and they tell us their current address. When we go to fill in their current address, This is what the preparer would do. They would change that status from needs reviewed to ready for entry. That's our little inside code. A couple of things happened. This is now locked. Your taxpayer can't come back and change this answer without you unlocking it. Right? That's important because I'm an ex auditor, and I think it's super important to know what the client provided and what they didn't. And if you've ever dealt with a client telling you that they did provide you some sort of documentation and you're saying, oh, we didn't get it or they just drop it into some portal and you don't know when they uploaded it. Now you don't know. Did your team forget it? Did the client forget to give it to you? Because we can lock these at the ready for entry stage, which for us is our preparer stage, the client can't change that without us knowing. So if there were ever a situation where it was like, oh, well, I gave you that extra w 2, we know exactly when the client gave it. Because there's a client activity feed that will show us. And because I did this here, you're not gonna see any feed there because I did this just for this, demo. But there would be a list of what exactly the client had done with a date and time stamp. And then if there were anything that the client uploaded later, it's not gonna be in any of these document checklist. It will be in the other tab, and we can see when the client uploaded it. So it just makes it very clear what you received on time versus what perhaps your client may have provided at a later time. And it also helps with, you know, hey. I I got a letter saying that I didn't report some income. You have a checklist here that shows you, oh, well, per the checklist, you did not indicate that you had done that. Right? So we we did not know. Let's say this was 10.99 INT. You said no. We don't expect you to have interest income because you said no. You didn't upload it. So we didn't expect that to be an issue. If you've now figured out that you've forgotten it and we need to make some sort of amendment, Now that can be something that you charge for because it wasn't your error. If you go through here and you mark a few of these off, again, it locks at blue. Once the reviewer has taken a look at it, they will mark it to green. That's our little internal code. When you are looking at the dashboard and you're looking at what your team is working on, you now have the ability to use that color coding to see what's done. You'll get very used to what that color coding means. When I see something like this, I can see that someone is working on it, but it's mostly not done because it's mostly orange, which means it mostly needs review. When I see this move to all blue, I know that it's been through the preparer stage. And when I start to see green in here, I know that a reviewer is working on it. Once all of them have been marked green, which means they've all been input, they've all been reviewed, And I think these little bubbles just get skipped way too often. But if we had done this, your preparer went through it, your reviewer went through it, and they marked them all as they went through. Here is what you'll see. It will change to a green checkbox. This is when we start to see, okay. Great. This one's been totally reviewed and that's just the documents you can the questions. You can do the same on the document side. That's when you start to be able to see exactly where things stand. Right? For us, we would not have even gotten to preparation until we saw it with this status. This little orange dot means that your client has marked this as done. If I think it's not done because I take a look at it and I say, oh, this client hasn't uploaded anything. They're clearly not done. I can mark this as not done and it'll push it back to the client. It'll send an email saying, hey. We think you're still missing some items. But we don't look at returns until they are in this status. This needs review status lets us know it's time for us to start working with that client. Once we've totally finished with the client, we have prepared the return, reviewed the return, discussed it with the client. At that point and this is all done, we would move this to complete. Once we move this to complete, it takes it away from this view because we have complete not shown here. So it helps us to see that list shrink. We can better manage the amount of work that's being done. So that's how that works in link. It's literally one of my favorite, features. I wanna also show you what the documents look like. Your client can upload pictures. They can upload, PDF files. They could upload Excel files. This is a sample w two. So of course none of this information matches. Just a download of a fake w two. I'll show you what it looks like to import it, but you're able to see it right from here. I'm still in the same web based platform and I could see what this w two looks like right from here. I could also choose to download it. I could also choose to rename it because we use, like a reference, naming convention when we're working with the client. So we could very well change that right from here. Change the name of the file. If the client uploaded duplicates, we don't like to delete files. We like to just rename them, but you very you very well could delete it. And if you needed to move it because the client uploaded it and it went to the wrong place, you can just select here where you want to move it and then you just drag it down. The system will just drag it down to the right place based on where you moved it. All of that could happen in link. It's literally chef's kiss. I know that was a lot, but I wanna make sure that you see it. And in the handout, you'll have a slide that'll show you, exactly what link does in the event that you can't see this demo for whatever reason or you're just reviewing the slides without watching this. The mark as done feature, although I can't really show you that here, I showed you what it looks like to not mark it as done. What I can show you is what it looks like when it's marked as done. And you'll have this little orange dot and then the status here will be needs review. That helps you to queue up your work, which I find to be very, very helpful if you need help with prioritizing. The next one is the data import capability. I'm gonna show you this with the open tax return one more time. And I'll view the return here. When I go to open my link, and I I have a w two. I know that I moved this. I'm just gonna put it back. You don't have to do this. Right? It could stay in the wrong place, but I'm an accountant. So, you know, I like accuracy. So when I'm here, I can see that this little lightning bolt has 2. What this is telling me is that there are 2 documents that ProConnect could import for me. I could click here and it'll show me those 2 documents that are importable or I could just go from my regular Intuit link and go one document at a time. If I click here, I will see an image of the document that I'm looking to import and then I can do this. I can switch to all fields, which is what I do because I'm an accountant and I love accuracy. And now I'm like a reviewer because it's already input this information based on what it sees here. So now I'm just double checking with my eyes. I'm not doing a whole lot of keying in. Right? So here I can see that this is from here. I can see the state ID has come from the state ID. The employer name is too long, so I can choose to shorten that so that it fits. The address, it's having some difficulty being this address, so I could drop that address in there. If it were for the spouse and it wasn't checked, I could check that here. So I do have the ability to make changes, but it's already dropped these numbers in. So now I'm just a reviewer. Yep. Looks right. Looks right. I'm just going through and making sure I see what I expect to see here based on the w two. I don't have to type anything. It's done all of that work for me. Once I say that this is correct, I click import, and it'll push that information right over to the tax return. No duplicate entry, no typing and mistyping numbers. I get to just use my eyes and my brain and double check the information, and that information will all come over to here. That's what the data import capability will do for you. It's like your own little robot that you don't pay any extra for, which I absolutely love. The next thing I'll show you is the ability to flag information. So suppose there's information that I just don't know. I don't know why I don't know it. Perhaps the client didn't provide it to me, but I want to, double check it. I wanna come back to it. I can flag by using these 3 dots here and click flag item. What's gonna happen is that if they're going to collect in this flagged items drawer and I could very easily come back to this tax return and see whatever has been flagged. Once I've resolved it, whatever the resolution is, I've looked at what I needed to look at, I've input the number, I can either click resolve here or I can come back here and click resolve item. When I've resolved it, it goes from open to resolved and crosses it out, but I don't lose sight of it. Right? It stays right there. Say it was not resolved and I need to reflag it because I accidentally unflagged it, I can very easily put it back. And then I can come here and I can chat with whoever prepared the return or reviewed it, and I could say check state wages. And then I can tag. I can tag a person. Can you double check what I flagged here? Right? And then I can post that, and that person will get an email letting them know that I've commented to them. I never left the platform. It's it's too good. It makes me so excited. Anyhoo, for the integrated signature workflow, although I can't really show you what that looks like here because this is a demo account, what I will say is you come here, you check your return. Let's say it's all good, which is clearly not. We got some diagnostics there. The diagnostics are also great, just not one of my favorites. And when you go to client authorization esignature, so long as you have credits, you will see how this works. You'll be able to send it to both the spouse and the taxpayer. It'll already be templated, but you can choose to add additional documents and put additional boxes in there. And there is a video here if you wanted to see how this works. Navigate to this in your ProConnect account so that you can watch this short video on how that works. I know that was a lot, but I hope you found that to be helpful. This is a super exciting part of the presentation for me because I absolutely love, these features. So we'll go back to our slides and, let's start here. Perfect. When we talk about time saving and efficiency, 95% of pro connect tax online users reported saving just under 40 minutes using into a link. I absolutely believe you could save 40 minutes not following up with clients, not having to look in 6 different places for documents, not having to have someone in your office who is going from place to place to have to, like, gather documents and then scan documents and then save documents. By just having it all in one place will save you so, so, so much time. 97% of ProConnect tax online users reported saving an average of 30 minutes per tax return when using the data import capability. This is the ability to have the documents like the w two, the 10 90 nines, the 10 98, k ones, not having to retype that information and instead just reviewing and pushing it in the tax return, I absolutely believe you could save a half hour per tax return by just being the reviewer. 93% of ProConnect tax online uses reported saving just over 30 minutes per tax return when using esignature. And as someone who had a workflow who was outside of ProConnect, I can absolutely attest to this time savings. We we achieved this solely by not having to download, upload, drop in boxes, redownload, remind the client to sign. By not having to do any of that, we saved easily 30 minutes. I absolutely think you could do that Just by incorporating esignature data import capability using Intuit link, 90 minutes per return could very easily be saved. 90 minutes per return. What could your team do with 90 extra minutes saved per return? It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. Outside of link, which is my favorite feature, one of my favorite technology efficiencies, There's also practice management systems and automating processes. So when we look at Carbon's practice excellence report, it says that leader firms outpace lagging firms in their use of tools, including workflow and CRM systems by over a 100%. In general, I'm a fan of narrowed down tech stacks. I think we talk a lot about tech stacks and there's constantly some new, technology being introduced. I happen to believe in a compressed tech stack. And I believe that when you reduce the need to switch between technology, you help to reduce that overwhelm. Right? If there are 17 technology, platforms that your team has to use and switch between, it can be a bit overwhelming, especially when we're talking about your core process. If you could narrow that down and have those software speak to one another, you will save yourself so much time and so much energy. Our tech stack, because I think it's important to share what we use. I think we learn from what others do. Of course, do your own research, but we only use QuickBooks online accountant for bookkeeping. I think this is super important that you know what QuickBooks online accounting can do, because I think people overlook this. 1, you can do QuickBooks online ledger, which is new. And if you have not heard about ledger, let me make sure that I tell you, how important ledger is. It's $10 a month. We're accountants. I know cost matters. So you can use QuickBooks Online Ledger for, like, your cleanup clients or your clients with just a few transactions. Clients that bring you bookkeeping through throughout tax season when your brain is already fried and you have no time to think about doing, cleanup or catch up bookkeeping. For $10 a month, they can have a QuickBooks online subscription, which you'll manage, and you have access to bank feeds. You have access to bank rules. And if you are a QBO user, you know how important these are to getting efficiencies. You don't have to do it in Excel because in Excel, you've gotta create a process. Right? You've gotta download transactions. You've gotta reformat. You don't really get the benefit of using rules like you would get in QuickBooks online, and you can use that subscription to get them caught up. Or if they're a client that has, like, very few transactions, like, you know, a real estate holding company or something like that, you can keep them on QuickBooks online. Your team is familiar with QuickBooks online. If they need to, upgrade at any time, unlike the self employed model, which is like there but not really there when it comes to, going to upgrade it, they're like 2 separate platforms. QuickBooks Ledger is in that ecosystem where you could upload upgrade with the click of a button. So you could start this client on QuickBooks Online Ledger, $10 a month, get the benefit of bank fee, get the benefit of bank rules, get them caught up throughout the year where you could properly advise them and where you actually have time and capacity to work on it, and you can remove that workload from tax season. Literally game changing. If you haven't looked into QuickBooks online ledger yet, please please do. By us only using QuickBooks on online accountant and specifically even telling our clients which level to use, we have the same platform across all of our clients. Our team can focus on learning one platform. They can get really familiar with one set of reports, and it just helps to, change from that constant switch of, like, oh, this person's report looks this way. This person uses Word. This person uses Excel. No. No. No. Everybody's reports look the same, and we can create workflows and work papers that are consistent. You also have the ability to do the prep for tax feature, which I also think is overlooked in QuickBooks on nonaccountant. And you can use the prep for tax feature even if you leave this webinar and don't decide that you're joining me on broken net tax online. You still could use the prep for tax feature to create standardized work papers. Again, you will save your team so much time and energy not having to constantly switch but the between what your clients provide you and instead having a set of work papers that looks the same for every single client. ProConnect tax online, that's what we use for tax prep. You already know all the reasons why I know and love ProConnect tax online. We use ITA or Intuit tax advisor for our advisory workflow, and I'll show you what Intuit tax advisor looks like in a moment. We use Ignition for our proposals and for our billing. During COVID, we had this weird time where we didn't raise prices for, like, 2 or 3 years for some clients because there was so much going on for them and for us. I never wanna be in a position where we ever forget to renew clients, send them new proposals, do out of scope work for no additional cost. Gone are those days. Ignition helps us to manage that, and it does integrate with QuickBooks Online. We use HubSpot as our CRM. I love HubSpot. It's literally been game changing for our firm. It helps us to connect with our clients in a meaningful way and to store notes and to be able to see emails across all platforms. So we love HubSpot. And then we use a sign up for project management. This is very helpful for managing our day to day task, reallocating task for our monthly clients, training because we attach a little Loom video to every task so that if another, I don't know, pandemic were to land upon us, being able to transition network would be that much easier by having that video, which is not super polished. It's just someone going through that that process and showing you on video where it goes. That that has been so good for us when it comes to training new team members and transitioning work. So that's what our integrated tech stack looks like. Another solution that we need, we need intuitive streamlined workflows. Our workflow, as I mentioned, is QBL, QuickBooks online, to PTO, ProConnect tax online, to ITA. That data transfers seamlessly in that order. The data goes from QuickBooks to ProConnect and then to ITA. This creates a consistent workflow and work papers using that prep for tax feature. And, again, you can use that even if you're not using ProConnect tax online, although it does get much easier when you do use ProConnect tax online because you can push that data right from QuickBooks online into ProConnex. You don't have to input the schedule c or the 1065 or the 11 20 s or I suppose the 11 20 except we don't do c corp returns. That data all gets pushed in. You don't have to print the p and l and then go and key in those very numbers into your tax software. You map it. You map it once. You modify as needed for new accounts, and then that mapping stays year over year. So you put in the work 1 year, and then you've got that in place for years to come. Once you've done the return in pro connect tax online and you filed it, that prior year tax data will become available as your baseline and into a tax adviser without you having to upload or enter additional data. Right? One more time where we're not having to key in the same data that we already put in QuickBooks online. It's gonna immensely reduce your data entry errors. It's gonna reduce your data entry in general, and it's going to increase your efficiency and accuracy. And most important, because this is all I really care about, conserving my mental energy for what I need it most for because you're not doing the same things over and over again. So artificial intelligence and smart software, also part of firm solutions. I think it's important to address this because I believe a lot of times we believe our clients don't want us to use the technology, but they would never walk into, like, a big box store and say, like, do my tax return on paper. That that's not what they're looking for, and I don't think they want that from us either. We have to just put that in our mind. Your client would rather pay you than pay the tax authority, than pay the IRS or the state. They value your ability to give them advice that pertains to their specific matters. Right? Google and TikTok can give them general advice, probably advice that will land them in trouble. You know their situation. There is a little known secret when it comes to tax advisory, and that's that it's not just for your client. It helps you, and it helps your firm. It's gonna eliminate surprises. It's gonna get you involved in the decisions that impact them as they're making the decisions, not after they made it. So instead of them coming to you and saying, hey. I took out money from my retirement, and don't worry. I did set aside the 10% tax, so I'm good there. You get to inform them that, hey. While you might have set aside 10%, that may not be your tax rate, and you may not have planned for the penalty. Right? You get to tell them that before they make the decision, and now you're not the cleanup person. You're the partner. That allows you to work more efficiently and focus on tax season when we're in tax filing season as opposed to navigating a bunch of surprises during the busiest time of the year. So here's my favorite example of why tax advisory is so crucial, and this happens to us a few times a year. Imagine finding out your client is considering selling their home before they sell, And now you get the benefit of telling them, hey, here's what I'm gonna need you to gather. You're gonna see these documents as you're selling the home. I wanna work on calculating your basis. So you wanna send me your selling disclosures, once you sell. And then I get to create the work papers and calculate any potential gain when you sell the house in October, as opposed to me doing it in February. Maybe I don't even do it in October because maybe you're working on, I don't know, an extension deadline, but maybe you wanna work on it in November. Right? Because you don't have a whole lot going on in November. You have it before the year closes up, so you can recommend an estimated tax payment. You can gather that data when it's fresh in your client's mind. You can get that work paper all drawn up, help your client submit a payment if necessary, ease your client's mind about a payment that may not be due. Maybe they thought it was and it's not due. That all gets to happen during planning season because during the year, it's planning season. And when you get to the tax season, the work paper is already done. You already have all the documentation you need to report the sale on that gain. Your client will pay you for that because that eases their anxiety, that eases their angst. Right? So as I think sometimes we get to tax season and find out, oh my gosh. My client sold their home. I have to hurry up and and gather the information. I need to calculate the basis. And now you end up doing out of scope work at no cost because you feel like this is now just part of compliance, right, when it really should have been part of the planning phase. So just keep that in mind when we start to talk about advisory. So for AI and smart software, here's why it's important. I'm specifically talking about Intuit Tax Advisor here. It's going to provide you with insights and these insights are gonna be based on automatically pre populated data. It came from ProConnect Tax Online and then you can make adjustments to the baseline. I'll show you how that works. Strategy cards, game changer. This is gonna help bridge the gap between what your team currently knows and strategies that they don't yet know. That you haven't had the chance to train them on yet. You get a ton of information and that information can be shared with the client as well. You can create custom strategies. So if it's a strategy in there that is not a strategy that you know and love, you can add that strategy there. You'll get exact calculations based on the current year's tax law. This is big. As someone who's done advisory and tax planning for clients. I've always overestimated. Been a little conservative because I couldn't do exact calculations quickly in a scalable manner. So to be able to do that with a few clicks of a button, game changing. You can create custom tax plans in minutes. I'll show you how this works and very easily demonstrate your value. I think tax advisory comes off as free because sometimes we struggle with quantifying just how valuable this could be. ITA will help you with that, and new strategies are added to the software regularly. So I'm gonna switch so I can show you Intuit Tax Advisor. So I will take these slides down and then I'll show you ITA here. So I could access ITA right from ProConnect tax online. Hopefully, you can see that I switched back to tax online. But if you can't, there is a button that shows tax advisor in ProConnect tax online that will get you right over to into a tax advisor. When you come in it might lead you to the welcome screen or tax plans depending on where you came in from. If you came in straight from tax advisor or if you came from ProConnect. But your welcome screen is super helpful, especially if you're new to ITA or new to advisory. So you are going to get videos down here that will show you how Intuit tax advisor works. You've got some resources on what advisory looks like. How can you get started? How do you chart your path into advisory? You'll get the, sort of like guides. Where do you want to go? Do you want to create a tax plan? Do you want to create a projection? Meaning, just estimated tax payment projections. Do you have questions about, into a tax adviser in general? These will all sort of guide you if you've never used it before. I am going to navigate to plans. And as I mentioned, this is a demo account. So some of the information might look a little weird, but I'm doing my best to make it look as realistic as possible so that I can show you how this works. This information would be prepopulated from a tax return in ProConnect tax online. So when I go to create this tax plan, I'm going to select my client. I'm going to select the return. I'm looking at this in 2024 so I can select the 2022 or 2023 tax return And then I have my 2023 actual or baseline based on actual figures. Our process is to use the conversation that we have with our client during tax filing season and the conversations we've had before that to start adjusting that baseline on our own. We wanna do a little pre work before we talk to our client to start evaluating some strategies. Something I want you to know about ITA, at least for our firm, it didn't necessarily introduce us to new strategies. What it did do was make it easier, quicker, and more scalable for us. It gave us a level of accuracy that we couldn't achieve on our own using a copy of a tax return or excel or our calculator. It just made it that much easier for us to do it with actual figures, using our projections from our client, but actual figures and in minutes. It also gave us an ability to create a takeaway. We we had no takeaway before ITA. It could be an email or some spreadsheet, but the client really can't decipher that spreadsheet well. This gives us a well put together document that we can send our client away with. So So instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time we wanna do a tax plan or help a client understand the impact of a potential tax strategy, we can do that with nearly exact figures in minutes. So now we can focus our time and energy on those conversations, the conversations that our clients want us to be involved in. They want our advice. They wanna hear from us. We can get off our clock our computer sooner and get to the things that are important to us, and we can be compensated for our work, for helping clients become aware of what potential tax law changes would do or potential changes to their income or their family structure would do. And then we're reducing the surprise that we could potentially have during tax season. This is literally win win for everybody. This is how you convert a client who you only see once a year to a client that you'll see year round. More money, potentially less clients, stickier relationships. Like, it's a win. It's a win for everybody. So back to ITA. For this client, what I see here, the client has wages, from Disney. Last year, they were a 100,000. Let's say my client has since told me, I'm not working at Disney for 2024. I wanna focus all my time and energy on my welding business. I could take that w two out. I did turn off auto calc only for the purpose of this conversation only because every time I change a number, if auto calc was on, it will recalculate. So I'm going to, like, force the calculation once I've done all the changes that I wanted to do. If my client had told me, actually, I am gonna work at Disney for half the year or, I did work at Disney for 5 months out of the year. I could use this W2 projector using their actual W2 and I could project what the income would be for the rest of the year. So I just click on that little calculator and then I pick, Hey, here's my pay stub date. My my client, has a biweekly pay cycle, and then he here's when they're employed. So perhaps they said, oh, I'm only gonna be employed through November 30th. I can very easily change this to November. Change that to the 30th. Put that back to November 30th. There we go. And then I could enter those actual figures here and it will project what my client would make, based on the actual figures and based on the information that I put here using that actual pay stub date. But let's say my client said, no. We're not working at Disney because I wanna put all my energy and all my effort into my business. So alright. Fine. I'm taking that out of your 2024 baseline. I now no longer expect you to have any w two income from Disney. So I wipe that out. I can adjust the state withholding a little lower. I will show you that. You'll see here that I'm only working on federal. For the business income. So my client is apparently a welder, and they tell me, hey. My income is expected to be up 75 k. I could put that all in gross sales so I can get to my answer a little quicker, or I could even split out expenses. So as you see here, I've left these expenses the same, but I can make adjustments here to reduce the expenses. QBI will be computed. They are not a specified trader business. I have no changes here. There's no rental income, but if my client told me there was, I could enter this on my 2024 baseline. These all show me that there was no activity for 2023 in any of these areas. So the only adjustments that I'm gonna make are to my client's business income, and I took away their w two because they said, Alicia, I'm done with Disney. I don't need to work at Disney anymore. I only wanna work in my business. I wanna use all my time there. So then as you see here, I'm not gonna make any adjustments there. I have the ability to adjust adjustments to income, to adjust deductions, to adjust credits. I have the ability to make any of those adjustments based on what it is that my client is telling me. When I get down here, you'll see that these are estimated tax payments and we use this year round. Right? So when we communicate estimated tax payments to our clients, we can adjust what they actually paid. Right? Perhaps they don't make the payment that we said. We could say this is a plan payment or this is paid. They actually made this payment, and then we can adjust the other periods. They didn't pay as much here. So we could say, hey, here's what you should pay for q 2 through q 4, or we could say they didn't pay it at all. Right? So we know that we have to keep that in focus when we look at what the remaining payments need to be. I can make similar adjustments on the state side for my client. Right? So I can do those same adjustments that I made on the federal side. I can make those adjustments on the state side. And as you see here, this layout resembles the same layout as a Maryland state return. We have estimated tax payments here, and I can update my payment status depending on what the client did. So as I'm having those conversations with the client, I'm adding these notes in. Here's our q one 2024, call because we talk to our clients 4 times a year, and Bob said, bye bye Disney. Right? Whatever that note is, I can put that there and that'll save there. If there's an important note that I want my team to pay attention to, I can easily star it. Once I've made the adjustments that I wanted to make here in my pre strategy baseline, I can go over to strategies and you'll see here this big blue box will show you Intuit Assist. If you're just starting out, this is super helpful because you can just chat with it. And we like chat bots. Chat bots are easy. Right? So you can chat with it and say, hey. Can you help me do this for my client, Bob? If you already know what you wanna do, where you wanna just go ahead and explore the strategies that are being suggested, just go ahead and look here on the left side. I'm looking at federal and state, but if I just wanted to look at federal strategies, I could just do that. And now I can look through these strategies. Each strategy has a title. It's gonna tell you what schedule it pertains to. If it pertains to multiple activities, it'll tell you that below. And then it will give you a little explanation. Just enough to pique your interest. You could choose to add that strategy. So my client has told me that they're going full steam ahead with the welding business. Income's gonna increase. Perhaps it's time to consider an escort. Perhaps my client asked me what it would mean to be an escort. When I choose this, it is gonna tell me that Intuit does not do reasonable wage. I have to decide that on my own. We use a tool called RC reports for recent reasonable wages. Let's just assume that I use RC reports and it told me that 77,000, was the reasonable wage for my client. That would allow me to add this strategy and see what the savings would be. I'm gonna scroll through here and look at some of these other status, Some of these other strategies, business use of home pertains to schedule C. Apparently there was no business use of home, which could be accurate or the client could have forgotten about it. But if they do use it, that could have been added assuming they were going to remain a schedule C. Here's a suggestion about their travel because they had travel expenses. This gives me something to talk to my client about. Were you considering investing in assets? Should we be talking about bonus depreciation? It helps to create the agenda and the conversation around how you could best support your client. QBI deduction, section 179. My client is inching up to 60. Perhaps they haven't done the best job at retirement, so I'm gonna toss in there some retirement plan, and I'll see how that shakes out. And then why don't we go ahead and look at what an IRA would do as well? Now just because I've added these strategies, doesn't mean that I'm stuck with these strategies. Right? I could turn it off if my client says, I don't wanna be an s corp. I don't have to lose all of those adjustments I made. I just turn it off. And if the client says I would like to revisit it, I can just turn that strategy right back on. I can see here these details, and I'll make this just a little bit bigger. Tons of information for your team member who may not be very well versed in S Corps. We have an overview, we have research, we have the formulas that are making up the numbers here, And then, of course, we have client materials. You'll see these a little bit later, but we have tons of information already here. No need to switch to some other platform, to some other AI bot. You have all the information you need here. Here's a breakdown of where that savings is coming from. We can see first, and I think this transparency is super cool. 1st, we zeroed out, and I didn't do any of this. The tool did it. But we zeroed out schedule c income that created a $65,000 sort of full savings because there's no self employment income. There's no self employment tax. That's another 27,000 folks savings because we're gonna move that income elsewhere. And then, of course, you lose the deduction for half of the self employment, income tax because we're taking away self employment income. When we change to an s corp, now we have reasonable wages. My client has $77,000 in wages, expects to owe 22,500 in federal wages. The reasonable compensation is subject to payroll taxes, so we have to plan for that. And then what's not subjected is subjected to, wages is just ordinary income. We don't have to pay self employment tax on the distributions that my client will now be taking. So my client, is gonna only see what's left over in ordinary income. You my client will also be able to treat their payroll costs as a business expense. So assuming we have payroll costs of about 6 k, my client's gonna save 1700,000 tax. All in all, my client stands to save about $13,000 based on these facts and circumstances by choosing to be an s corp. There are there are other factors. Right? There's the reasonable comp. There's adjustments to the income if my client assumes they'll make more or less, but when was the last time you were able to calculate the impact of an s corp that quickly at that level of accuracy? Right? For retirement, I can now tell my client if you wanted to contribute to retirement, here's what the savings would be. But here's where it gets really good. I don't have to talk to my client from this screen. I can review this plan with my client after I review it for myself here because this is still my screen when you see the review plan screen. I'll be able to see what changes I made. Anything that I change will now be in green. So I can scroll through here and see the changes that I made. I can see here this is a function of me turning on that strategy, and then I get to the best part. I did not create this report. ITA created this report for me. I can add my logo. I can change this text wherever you see a pencil come up. We can change that text and type in whatever we want this to be. You would have already put that information into your settings, but we can change that very quickly. And it's gonna produce 2 reports. 1 is a proposal. This is what's going to sell my client on my services. I can hide pages that I don't wanna show. I can show pages, by taking the taking them out of the hidden section. I can show my client here's the quarterly estimated tax payments that we're suggesting suggesting you did not pay these. This is the payment that's due on this specific date. This is the remaining tax that'll be due because you didn't make payments here. I can do the same at the state level. I can show them here's what's going to happen if you do nothing and here's what will happen if you employ the strategies that we are suggesting. The income is not changing much. Your taxable income is actually going to be higher with the strategies. But you know what's not higher, client? Your tax liability. If you do nothing, you will pay 54,000 in taxes. If you do what we're suggesting, you'll pay $30 in federal taxes. You have an estimated tax savings client of almost $28,000. To save almost $28,000, how much would you be willing to pay for our services client? And you put whatever your service will be, and it'll automatically calculate the ROI. You give this to your client. It's gonna be very difficult for them to say, no. I would not like to save 27,000. I'll save this so that I can show you the tax plan. This is more detailed, and this is what you're able to show your client to show them exactly what they would need to do, what are their top saving top tax saving strategies based on what you're suggesting. Here's how to get the maximum tax savings. I didn't do any of these calculations. This is all happening automatically. Right? In order for you to save $12,000 by saving in an, a set IRA, you're going to have to put $42,000. So out of out of pocket net is about 29,000. For the IRA, you're gonna put in 8,000, but you're gonna save 23100 in taxes, making your net out of pocket only 56100. You wanna know more about it? Sure. I don't have to go create this whole report. It's all here for me. I can make the adjustments, but this is already here as my base. So I'm doing very little adjustments here. You give this to your client. After your client has paid you your nice fee, you've earned yourself a client for life. So I know that was a lot, but I hope you found that to be helpful. I wanna show you some very quick wins that you could implement. Oh, not here. I want to show you here. Perfect. So things that you could take away, evaluate your current tech stack so you can identify opportunities for automation and streamlining. If you don't currently have a list, create a list of what technology you're currently using and what you're using. Write down how much you're paying for it so that you can determine if it's the right stack for you. But if you don't have that list, please create that list and then identify how many platforms are you currently using or paying for that are included in the Intuit ecosystem or a tool that integrates. Start with cloud based tax tools and client portal solutions. I think this is the easiest place to start if you're looking for a quick win because these both will lead you to a paperless environment and train your staff. Invest in training for your team members. ProConnect into a tax adviser, they both offer tons of free training, live webinars, recorded webinars so that your team knows how to use the tool and get the most out of it. As a reminder, leveraging technology is the key. This is how you will scale services. This is how you're gonna meet the needs of your clients. Shifting to that advisory model will foster a long term relationship and improve your top and bottom line. And becoming more efficient isn't always just to get more clients. It's not always just to increase revenue. Sometimes it's to give you back the power to choose what to do with that extra time. To help you feel more sane and feel like the work you're doing matters more. So whatever that efficiency is for, for you that's what you're looking to achieve. I'm launching poll number 3. This is your last poll and after this will be a survey but focus on the poll first. Would you like a personalized demo or consultation about what you've learned in today's training event? This is poll 3. It will indicate yes, please or no, not at this time. You'll get to the poll in the poll tab in the top right navigation. And once you select yes or no, hopefully you're selecting yes though, it'll turn purple and you will have submitted that poll question. As a reminder, you'll have a little survey pop up after this poll. Please enter that survey so that we know what training is most useful to you on your journey. And I'll close this poll out in about 10 more seconds. 54321. If you're looking for more free training and resources, please access the education resource center. The website is here. You can also read articles on tax topics that are probably important to you, should be important to you. You can access those in the tax pro center. That just went through a nice little revamp. So if you haven't checked it out in a while, please be sure to check out the tax pro center. I think you'll find it very, very helpful. You are not on this journey alone. You have support. You have community. The Intuit accountant support, use this link here to get answers to your questions about tax, about product from Intuit accountants. You can do a ton of searching, bookmark this website if you don't already have it bookmarked, and then explore the community. If you're not sure what you're doing for product or workflow, get some recommendations from the community. You can connect with experts, tax professionals like yourself, like myself, talk to people who understand your struggle, bookmark that one as well. Thank you so much for your time. I hope you found this to be helpful. If you'd like to connect with me, my contact information is below. I hope that this sends you off on a journey that will help you develop the efficiencies that give you back your power to choose while elevating your tax client's experience. I'll talk to you soon. Be well.