I own Hudson Valley Tax Experts, a small tax services firm in Wappinger NY. During the busiest part of our year, February through mid-April, we’re trying to get about 1,100 tax returns done as efficiently as possible. (The rest of the year we’re helping stragglers, folks with unfiled returns or tax debts, tax projections, and other related tasks.)
We use pipelines to coordinate between the tax preparers and our admin staff. For example, we have a main pipeline for a tax return, with color coded statuses to indicate which “team” is responsible: Preparers use a view showing their own pipelines and focus on green-colored statuses. Admins use a company-wide view and focus on blue-colored statuses. Preparers can augment this with a bookmarked pipeline report that lists their pipelines, filtered by preparer statuses, and sorted by oldest update first, so as to not lose sight of any work in progress.
We use groups for keeping track of other data points; for example, when we get to March, we want to know which clients haven’t been in contact yet. In January, we create a “Unseen 2025” group and populate it with all active clients. When a pipeline is created for the current tax year, we remove them from the group. (Manually right now, but it’s on my list of things to automate with Zapier.) Clicking at that group lets us see how much additional might materialize before the tax deadline.
We use Zapier to augment LACRM’s capabilities, so as much client activity as possible gets automatically logged in the client’s record, such as:
- Incoming text messages (SimpleTexting)
- Form submissions (Cognito Forms) - our client organizer, engagement letters, website “contact us”
- Virtual receptionist activity (Jill’s Office)
- Client payments (Stripe)
I’m experimenting with ways to trigger outbound activity from LACRM to Zapier, such as sending an end-of-engagement survey email when a return prep pipeline is closed.
When I left my employer to start this company in 2020, I had several years of experience using CRMs where their capabilities were often outweighed by the frustration they caused (GoldMine - a desktop-based CRM, and later an online CRM built by the firm’s broker/dealer). I evaluated at least a dozen CRMs, including some supposedly purpose-built for tax firms, and rejected most: some for ridiculous pricing, others for awful interfaces, still others for lack of flexibility. LACRM ticked all the right boxes for me from the initial discovery call.