Accounting · Client Story
A CPA firm that scaled through tax season without new hires
A regional CPA firm with 14 staff accountants, preparing roughly 600 individual and 80 business returns each season, running on a mix of QuickBooks and Sage across its client base.
-55%cost to serve vs. seasonal hiring
0new seasonal hires needed
-70%reduction in preparer overtime hours
The challenge
- Two consecutive tax seasons had run on sustained overtime, contributing to staff burnout and two senior preparers leaving shortly after filing deadlines.
- Seasonal hires were expensive to recruit for a three-month window and inconsistent in quality, requiring heavy review from CPAs who were already stretched thin.
- Bookkeeping cleanup for messier client files was consistently the bottleneck that pushed returns close to the deadline.
The approach
- Bookkeeping cleanup and workpaper preparation were outsourced to a dedicated team working year-round, not just during tax season, so client books were already reconciled and organized before returns started.
- The outsourced team handled data entry, reconciliation, and first-pass workpaper assembly, freeing the firm's CPAs to work exclusively at the review and filing level.
- A shared intake tracker gave the firm visibility into which client files were ready for review at any point in the season, rather than discovering gaps at the deadline.
Where they landed
The firm retained its full senior staff into the following season — the first time in three years none of its CPAs left after filing deadlines.
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