Custom client portal and practice management web app for tax preparation agency.
World Class Accounting is Miami-based firm specializing in tax preparation, bookkeeping, and other accounting services. Many of their clients are Spanish-speaking small business owners who are rarely familiar with the IRS's complex taxation rules. The company had been operating for nearly a decade with very minimal technology before seeking out Mesh for digital transformation and automation services.
As any accounting firm knows, tax season is the busiest time of year, and this was especially true for World Class Accounting. Their software platform for tax preparation is Intuit's ProSeries Tax, a software that will seem quite antiquated to users of most modern software. While the software simplifies the incredibly complex form-filling system for tax filings, it still requires user to manually enter most fields in each form. For a firm that strives to obtain every deduction in order to maximize the returns for their clients, this meant that WCA spent an inordinate amount of time on each filing, which put an upper limit on the number of clients that they could service in a given tax season. In addition, there was not a good system in place to collect information and documents from clients ahead of time, so additional time was spent in calls and meetings with clients to ascertain such information.
Our challenge was to implement a solution that dealt with the constraint of having to continue to use Intuit's platform for filing taxes while still cutting back significantly on manual entry and client calls, thus reducing time spent on each tax filing.
After understanding the needs of the business and its clients, we conducted research on other tools that existed within this industry and came to the conclusion that the best option would be to build an app using no-code builder Glide that would serve as client portal and practice management tool. Clients would fill out a questionnaire to provide the information and documents for a tax filing, and the tax prep agent would then be able to see that data on their dashboard and be able to copy and paste information over to Intuit's app. While still a manual process, this greatly reduces the time spent entering data into the Intuit software. The goal for the following year is to upgrade to the cloud-based version of the Intuit software so that we can integrate directly with it and potentially completely eliminate manual entry of data, ideally simply requiring an audit of the tax forms by the tax prep agents before filing.
