TuskCPA - Enterprise Practice Management Solutions

The accounting profession faces a critical shortage of talent, with university enrollment in accounting programs dropping and a wave of Baby Boomer partners retiring. For mid-sized CPA firms, this talent crunch is existential. They are trapped between rising client demand and a shrinking workforce, forcing them to do more with less. This strain often lands on senior staff, leading to burnout, high turnover, and costly errors.

Our case study focuses on "Landry, Boone & Associates" (LBA), a 35-person regional firm in the U.S. Southeast. LBA was facing a capacity crisis that threatened its growth. While client revenue was strong, profits were eroding. An internal analysis revealed the root cause: a systemic breakdown in workflow.

The Challenge: A System Built on Chaos

LBA's workflow was a fragile, unscalable mix of spreadsheets, email chains, paper checklists, and "institutional knowledge" locked in partners' heads. This manual system created three core challenges:

Core Problems

No Visibility

Partners had no real-time way to see the status of the firm's 800+ client tax returns. Work was tracked on a master Excel file that was constantly out-of-date, leading to partners physically walking the halls to ask, "What's the status on the Johnson return?"

High-Cost Administrative Burden

A diagnostic study found that the firm's professional staff (CPAs and senior accountants) spent an estimated 30% of their billable hours on non-billable administrative tasks: chasing clients for missing documents, cross-referencing spreadsheets, and answering internal status emails.

Critical Staff Burnout

The inefficiency created a culture of chronic stress and long hours, even outside of the traditional "busy season." The firm's staff turnover rate had hit 25%, well above the industry average, and replacing a senior accountant was costing the firm nearly 150% of their annual salary.

The Intervention: A Centralized Digital "Nervous System"

LBA's leadership initiated a 12-month strategic intervention focused on a single goal: reclaiming its "lost hours." Instead of simply hiring more people into a broken system, they decided to re-engineer the system itself by implementing a cloud-based practice management and workflow automation platform.

The intervention was deployed in three phases:

Phase 1: Standardization & Diagnosis (Months 1-3)

The first step was not to buy software, but to understand their own processes. LBA's partners and managers collaborated to create definitive "workflow maps" for their top three services: business tax returns, individual tax returns, and monthly bookkeeping. This process forced them to agree on a standardized set of steps, from client intake to final billing, for the first time in the firm's history. This map became the blueprint for the software's customization.

Phase 2: Implementation & Integration (Months 4-9)

LBA deployed a workflow platform (such as Karbon, Financial Cents, or Canopy). The implementation was not treated as an IT project, but as a firm-wide operational overhaul.

Single Source of Truth: All client tasks, notes, documents, and emails were migrated into the new system. The master spreadsheet was officially retired.
Automated Client Reminders: The system was configured to automatically email clients for missing documents (like 1099s or W-2s) based on a pre-set schedule. This single feature immediately liberated hours of administrative time per week for every accountant.
Visible Capacity: The platform's dashboards provided real-time visibility into every staff member's workload, allowing partners to re-assign tasks from overloaded accountants to those with available capacity.

Phase 3: Mandate & Measurement (Months 10-12)

Technology adoption is the most common point of failure. LBA's leadership enforced a strict "no exceptions" mandate. All work, without exception, had to be initiated, tracked, and completed within the new platform. To ensure compliance, partner compensation was tied, in part, to their team's adoption of the new system.

The Impact: Measurable Gains in Capacity and Culture

After one full year, the results demonstrated that the workflow platform was a powerful boon, fundamentally changing the firm's economics and culture.

✓

22% Increase in Billable Capacity

The firm successfully reclaimed an average of 8.5 hours per week, per professional staff member. This was time previously lost to administrative chase-work. This translated to over 5,000 "new" billable hours for the firm annually, creating capacity for growth without adding headcount.

✓

Reduced Staff Turnover by 60%

The new system's transparency and automation dramatically reduced staff burnout. With clear priorities, automated reminders, and visible workloads, the "fire-drill" culture disappeared. The firm's turnover rate dropped from 25% to 10% in the first year.

✓

95% Reduction in "Status" Communications

Internal emails and meetings to check on work status were virtually eliminated. Partners could now see the real-time status of every job on their dashboard, whether they were in the office or on a client visit.

✓

Improved Client Satisfaction

With a standardized process, no client was "forgotten." The automated system ensured consistent communication, faster turnaround times, and fewer "surprise" filing extensions, leading to a 15% increase in positive client-satisfaction scores.

Conclusion

By automating its workflow, LBA transformed its operations from a source of stress and financial drag into a strategic asset. The intervention not only "fixed" a broken process but also created a more resilient, scalable, and profitable firm.

Rescuing the "Lost Hours"—How Workflow Automation Solved a CPA Firm's Capacity Crisis

Key Results