We spent two sessions with the people who do the work. Two automations give back about 79 hours a month — $37,692 a year, even valuing staff time at a deliberately low $40/h — and you're paying $3,180 a year for software nobody opens. The build costs $3,100.
Each finding was traced to the person who does the work, and each carries the hours it costs. You can check the arithmetic without us.
A CPA exports QuickBooks, reformats it in Excel and saves a PDF — for every one of 22 monthly clients. None of it needs professional judgment; the judgment happens after.
✓ Timed with Laura (senior CPA): 3.0 h per client, first week of every month.
No single place, no checklist, no status. In season the admin spends about 10 hours a week finding out what was already sent.
✓ From the admin's own January–April log; averaged across the year.
About 2.5 hours a week — and 12% of appointments are still missed when a reminder is forgotten.
✓ Missed-appointment rate from the shared calendar, last 6 months.
Revenue by service, client and CPA is already in QuickBooks — it is simply never pulled out. Pricing and hiring are decided by feel.
✓ Confirmed in QuickBooks: 3 years of tagged invoices.
Fit is how well the tool does the job it is actually used for (0–10). Two items cost money every month and do nothing.
| Tool | Used for | Fit | Monthly | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks OnlineAccountant edition | Books, invoicing, tax prep | 8.2 | $0 | Keep · source of truth |
| Microsoft ExcelMicrosoft 365 | Monthly reports, deadlines, client list | 4.8 | $188 | Keep · stop using for reports |
| Gmail + Google DriveGoogle Workspace | Client email, shared files | 6.8 | $105 | Keep · becomes the portal |
| WhatsAppStaff personal phones | Document requests, reminders | 2.8 | $0 | Replace for documents |
| Adobe Acrobat Pro15 seats · 4 in use | Signing and merging PDFs | 7.0 | $300 | Cut 11 seats · −$220/mo |
| Dropbox BusinessFrom a 2023 project | Nothing — last opened Mar 2024 | 0 | $45 | Cancel · −$45/mo |
| Paper & sticky notesEvery desk | Deadlines, to-dos | 1.5 | — | Replace with a shared task list |
Every number on this page comes from these five inputs. Change one and the tape, the findings, the plan and the payback all recalculate.
78.5 hours a month freed, plus software you stop paying for.
Each item has a price and the weeks it takes to earn that price back. Start with one; none of them depends on buying the rest.
Drop 11 unused Acrobat seats and the forgotten Dropbox account. One hour, done by your admin with our checklist.
On the first business day, each client's numbers come out of QuickBooks into a clean PDF and land in the CPA's review queue — not the client's inbox. A person still signs off.
A scheduled n8n workflow pulls each client's P&L and balance sheet through the QuickBooks API, a Python script lays out the same report your team builds today, and the draft is saved to the client's Drive folder with a "ready for review" task. About 90% of the hours go away; the review stays.
Each client gets a Drive folder with a checklist that ticks itself when a file arrives. Appointment reminders go out by text 24 hours ahead without anyone sending them.
An upload to a client folder marks that line of the checklist as received and updates a status sheet the admin can sort by "still missing". Reminders read the shared calendar every evening. SMS runs about $6 a month at your volume.
Revenue by service, by client and by CPA, refreshed daily from QuickBooks. It frees no hours — it answers the pricing and hiring questions you are deciding by feel.
A diagnostic that recommends everything is a sales pitch. These are real annoyances that aren't worth your money right now.
Tools like these run $50–100 per person per month. At 15 people, the checklist and portal above cover most of what you'd use.
Revisit at 25+ staff.
You pay for both, about $1,500 a year in overlap. Retraining 15 people on one suite costs more than that in lost tax-season hours.
Keep both. Re-check at renewal.
Your clients ask few questions and want their CPA to answer them. A bot would save minutes and cost trust.
The reminders handle the routine part.
Nothing goes live during a filing deadline. Your team spends about two hours in training, total.
Fixed prices, no licences to resell you. Pick any line on its own.
Two working sessions, the software audit, this report.
Items 2 and 3, built together in about four weeks.
Item 4. Free to run on Looker Studio.
Fixes, small changes, a monthly check that everything ran. Cancel any time.
You own everything we build — the workflows, the scripts, the reports and the accounts they run in. If you stop working with us, it all keeps running.