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175 fixes and a fresh sales pitch: What to verify before you trust Intuit’s promises

Earmark Team · September 1, 2026 ·

Watch the recent In the Know! session, and you’ll see Intuit believes it’s turned over a new leaf. The company now wants to treat accountants as customers rather than as a sales channel. That’s a big claim. And as any good accountant knows, a claim is only as good as the evidence behind it.

In this “Now You Know” recap on The Unofficial QuickBooks Accountants Podcast, hosts Alicia Katz Pollock and Matthew “Spot” Fulton walk through that In the Know session. They cover QuickBooks performance fixes, updated Expert Services, and the features rolling out in Intuit Accountant Suite in August. They view every promise as a claim to verify, not a gift to accept. They welcome the fixes, but Intuit still hasn’t published the changelog that would prove the headline number. The new Expert Services guardrails leave open questions about Intuit’s human reviewers touching client files, and pricing barely came up at all.

175 improvements, but where’s the receipt?

Stacey Blanchard, Product Marketing Lead at Intuit, opened with a poll about speed. She asked how often listeners wished a page, workflow, or report would load faster. Only 11% said they never notice it. Thirty percent said rarely, 40% said at least once a week, and 20% said almost every single time they log into QBO.

Alicia offered a reality check. Before you blame QuickBooks, consider when’s the last time you actually unplugged your router for a minute. A clogged connection may be the real culprit. Matthew observed that pages often load, flash, and reload before they settle. So count “one, two, three Mississippi” before you click that gear icon.

Intuit claims they’ve made 175 “meaningful improvements.” The team framed it with the line, “building new things is only half the job—the other half is listening.”

Several of the fixes are genuinely useful. For example:

Duplicate-transaction warnings now appear before you post instead of after
Suggested bank-feed matches carry confidence icons—a green check when QuickBooks is sure, an orange alert when it’s guessing
Categorization is meant to learn from your own file first, reaching the broader database only when your file offers no pattern
Conflicting bank rules now get surfaced, so you can pick the right one and clean up duplicates
A cleaner dashboard with resizable, reorderable widgets, more than 100 keyboard shortcuts, over 50 report fixes so columns aren’t cut off and pages print as they appear, and extended sign-in timeouts

But Matthew notes, “I would love an actual list of those 175 meaningful improvements, please.” Alicia shared a simple fix: use that empty notification bell in the upper-right corner to post a running changelog. “I think that would go a long way towards consumer confidence.”

For now, she recommends restarting your router before you blame QBO. And if a tab looks timed out but another QBO tab is still active, just refresh. You’re still signed in. And keep asking Intuit for the changelog.

Accountant as customer, or accountant’s lane invaded?

The bigger story is what Intuit now says it believes about you.

Liron Zighelnic, Director of Product, AI-Powered Agents at Intuit, framed her team as “AI plus HI” (human intelligence). Her larger message is that accountants are “our customer, not a sales channel,” and the center of the client relationship.

The Expert Services changes carry weight. Intuit setup experts will coach new business owners for 90 days instead of 30. Intuit Intelligence builds a dynamic “setup hub” shaped around the client’s stated priorities, rather than a static checklist. And a step in the setup flow lets clients attach their accountant’s firm information directly.

Then come the guardrails. A new “Intuit Experts Services” toggle is off by default when an accountant user is attached. Self-serve clients who explore it get a pop-up encouraging them to talk to you first. If they turn it on, you’re notified. And firm-billed files stay off until you enable them.

But Matthew is skeptical. “I thought this is how it was supposed to be the entire time,” he said. And open questions remain. If a client starts their own file with the toggle on and attaches you later, does it flip off? Alicia’s believes it should, “because otherwise none of this has any meaning.”

The August bank-feed change is thornier still. AI takes the first categorization pass. High-confidence transactions post, uncertain ones get flagged to the owner, and a human Intuit expert reviews in the background. As Alicia said, “It means they’re going into our files unauthorized.” Is that a paid service, or free labor that trains the model? Matthew noted, “One thing that never came up during the entire presentation was anything to do with pricing.”

Before you trust any of it:

Confirm the default-off behavior in your own client files
Ask who pays for the human-review layer and whether it’s AI training or a billed service
Press for pricing before you lean on the setup hub

That same verify-before-you-adopt logic applies to what’s coming in Accountant Suite.

The August toolkit: tabs, a unified inbox, and portfolio insights

Adoption is climbing. Alicia noted a real shift since May. Attendees who answer, “Haven’t heard of it,” dropped into the single digits, and the majority are now using it.

Multi-client tabs

These are in Core (free) through August. Keep your Accountant Suite portal open, plus up to five client files in separate browser tabs. Click a transaction in Books Close and the client file opens alongside it. Matthew shared the perfect use case scenario: you’re mid-project when another client calls, so you pop their file open, answer, close it, and get back to work without opening an incognito window.

The unified inbox

This replaces the limited requests area. It gathers requests, receipts, messages, and reminders across every client into one place, reachable from a new inbox button in the upper-right corner. You can filter by client, send email or text reminders, and request information from QBO users, firm team members, or outside contacts who join through a free portal without a paid seat. Smart templates feed Intuit Intelligence, which in one demo caught a mismatch. The transaction was $58, and the uploaded receipt was $25. But Matthew pointed out this will need “tiered levels of control and accessibility, or visibility.”

Accelerate

The higher tier delivers cross-client portfolio insights. Ask Intuit Intelligence to identify which clients had a transaction-volume increase of more than 25% last quarter, and you have a pricing review, capacity plan, or advisory conversation without opening a single file. Version one is high-level KPIs only. There’s no transaction drilldown yet, although it suggests follow-up questions. Accelerate is free until January 2027. Books Close stays separate at $8 per client, with no firm start date for billing.

Start your testing with multi-client tabs, since they’re free and low-risk. Demand Intuit provides clear inbox permissions before inviting outside contacts, and use the free Accelerate window to judge real value before they announce pricing.

Do the homework (or take Intuit’s word for it)

Intuit is asking the profession to believe it has changed. The performance fixes, the “accountant as customer” framing, the new toggle, and the Accountant Suite rollout are all evidence, but evidence a good accountant tests before accepting.

Healthy skepticism is professional diligence. Verify the guardrails in your own client files. Ask the pricing and data-access questions. Hold Intuit to the transparency it hasn’t yet delivered. Do that work, and these tools can free up serious capacity and grow your advisory line. Skip it, and you’re just taking Intuit’s word for it.

So restart your router, then hit play. Listen to the full episode with Alicia and Matthew for every guardrail, open question, and August rollout detail. Then decide which changes actually earn a place in your workflow.

Alicia Katz Pollock’s Royalwise OWLS (On-Demand Web-based Learning Solutions) is the industry’s premier portal for top-notch QuickBooks Online training with CPE for accounting firms, bookkeepers, and small business owners. Visit Royalwise OWLS, where learning QBO is a HOOT!

The country that existed only on paper

Earmark Team · September 1, 2026 ·

Seventy Scottish settlers reached Central America in November 1822, expecting to begin new lives in a thriving country. They’d been promised paved streets, government buildings, a cathedral, an opera house, and farmland that could produce three corn harvests a year. Gold supposedly filled the nearby rivers.

Instead, as Caleb Newquist explains in Episode 117 of Oh My Fraud, “There was only jungle.”

The settlers hadn’t followed a vague rumor. They’d purchased land, exchanged British pounds for Poyaisian dollars, and received documents that appeared official. But Poyais, the country Gregor MacGregor promoted, didn’t exist as advertised.

Its infrastructure existed only on paper.

Before inventing a country, Gregor invented himself

Gregor claimed he was born on Christmas Eve 1786 at his family’s ancestral estate in Glengyle. That story connected him to the MacGregor clan and the outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor. Most historians, however, believe he was born in Edinburgh and was the son of an East India Company ship captain.

His family mythology gave him useful material. The MacGregors claimed descent from ninth-century Scottish kings and used the motto “Royal is my race.” King James VI abolished the MacGregor name in 1603, and the ban lasted until 1774. Gregor belonged to the first generation legally allowed to use it in more than 170 years.

He soon learned to turn status into opportunity. In 1803, when he was 16, his family bought him an army commission for about £450 (roughly £40,000 today). After marrying Louisa Bowater, the daughter of a British admiral, he used her dowry to buy a captaincy. He later began calling himself “Colonel,” “Sir,” and chief of the MacGregor clan without earning those titles.

That pattern followed him across the Atlantic.

One real victory gave credibility to later claims

In 1812, Gregor sailed to Caracas and offered his services to General Francisco de Miranda. He brought a real army commission and exaggerated stories about his experience. Miranda, busy fighting a revolution, “didn’t really have the extra time to run background checks,” Caleb notes. Within two months, Gregor was a colonel.

Gregor did achieve one notable military success. In July 1816, he led his surrounded troops on a 34-day fighting retreat through hundreds of miles of Venezuelan jungle. Simón Bolívar praised the retreat as “superior to the conquest of an empire.”

But Gregor’s later campaigns ended badly. He abandoned the Republic of the Floridas on Amelia Island, escaped an assault on Portobelo while many of his men were captured and executed, and deserted troops again at Rio de la Hacha. Former subordinate Michael Rafter documented these failures in Memoirs of Gregor MacGregor, published in June 1820.

The warning was public before the first settlers ever sailed.

Gregor made Poyais look official

In April 1820, King George Frederick Augustus granted Gregor at least 8 million acres on the Mosquito Coast in exchange for rum and jewelry. The land was real, but it was undeveloped and poorly suited to farming.

Gregor returned to London and transformed it into something else. He declared himself Cacique, or prince, of Poyais and promoted a country with a capital city, a bank, a military, a constitution, paved streets, rich farmland, and rivers full of gold.

Then he surrounded the fiction with convincing materials:

Land offices in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow
Land certificates and government bonds that raised £200,000
Poyaisian dollars printed using the Bank of Scotland’s press
A flag, military uniforms, and government officials
A 355-page guidebook credited to the nonexistent Captain Thomas Strangeways

Each item made the others seem more credible. Yet none proved that the promised country existed. The documents showed how much effort Gregor put into the promotion, not whether his claims were true.

A strong economy made the fantasy easier to sell

Britain’s economy also helped. During the early 1820s, manufacturing and wages were rising while interest rates and living costs were falling. Latin America was the emerging market of its day, with bonds offering returns of about 6% compared with 3% elsewhere.

Gregor’s pitch combined those conditions with familiar human weaknesses: trusting a confident promoter, feeling comfortable with risk during good times, fearing missing out, and wanting to join something exclusive. Doctors, lawyers, former soldiers, craftspeople, bankers, and families all signed up.

Once respectable people began buying land and booking passage, hesitation felt less like caution and more like missing a rare opportunity.

The gap between paper and reality became deadly

The first 70 settlers arrived at the Black River settlement in November 1822. Nearly 200 more came in early 1823. They found no city, government, shelter, or working economy.

Then the rainy season brought mosquitoes, fever, and dysentery. One historical account reported that nine people died within the first few days and 120 became sick. In May 1823, the Mexican Eagle evacuated survivors to British Honduras, but more than half of the settlers ultimately died.

Gregor blamed the people he had placed in charge and presented himself as another victim. He fled to Paris, repackaged Poyais for French investors, and was acquitted after his 1826 trial. He continued selling versions of the scheme into the 1830s. He was never convicted and died in Caracas in 1845, where he received full military honors.

Even more remarkably, some survivors defended him. Gregor’s charisma, along with the victims’ shame and trauma, made it easier to blame failed administrators than to accept that the entire project had been a fraud.

Paperwork should begin verification, not end it

Poyais did not lack documentation. It had certificates, bonds, currency, offices, uniforms, and a guidebook. The tragedy was that those materials looked enough like proof to discourage harder questions.

For accounting professionals, the case offers several lasting lessons:

Confirm claims through sources independent of the promoter
Verify credentials instead of relying on impressive titles
Treat high returns, social proof, and confident answers as reasons for more scrutiny
Take credible warnings seriously, even when they spoil an attractive story

A polished document can still support a fiction. As Caleb concludes, “You can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest.”

Listen to the full Oh My Fraud episode for the complete story of Poyais and Gregor’s remarkable escape from accountability.

Vulnerability, Curiosity, and the Messy Middle of Leadership

Earmark Team · August 28, 2026 ·

At Nancy McClelland’s “Vulnerability as a Strength” panel at Scaling New Heights, the session opened with a word cloud. The question on screen was, “How does it make you feel when you think you’re the only one who doesn’t have it together?” Almost every answer was some version of “poopy” — alone, overwhelmed, not awesome. By the end of the session, the same room answered a different question. “How does it feel to realize you’re not the only one who struggles?” The screen filled with seen, validated, not alone, resilient, community. There were tears in that room. Nancy took a picture of the word cloud.

In Episode 33 of She Counts, Nancy and co-host Questian Telka talk about the two very different sessions they each led at that conference. Nancy ran a panel on vulnerability in leadership. Questian, along with co-presenter Ashley Rhoden, COO of High Rock Accounting, led a session on guiding clients and teams through change. When they compared notes afterward, they realized both talks made the same point. The strongest leadership skill in accounting isn’t having all the answers. It’s being willing to say out-loud what you don’t have figured out and staying curious enough to notice what your team and clients aren’t saying. As Questian put it, “Vulnerability is about recognizing and naming what’s happening inside of us. Change leadership requires us to recognize what is likely happening inside of someone else.” They’re two facets of the same muscle. Here’s how each one works, and why leadership happens in the messy middle.

Why admitting what you’re not good at makes you a stronger leader

Nancy has now run this panel twice. Both times, she started with what she calls a deeply invasive survey designed to reveal deeply rooted feelings and how people cope with them. Then she pulls out the common themes.

Patterns repeated across all six widely admired leaders: Every one had made a costly business decision. Every one had made a major client error. Every one had faced a physical or mental health crisis. The themes that came up included reconciling perception versus reality, building resilience through community, balancing control with letting go, finding meaning in the past, and managing stress and anxiety. These are the same coping strategies often used in cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapy.

There can be a huge gap between how leaders look and what they’re privately carrying. Questian described a friend telling her she “seemed to have everything perfectly together.” She nearly spit out her drink. “I feel like I’m falling apart most of the time.” Both hosts admitted they tend to share the hard stuff only after they’ve worked through it, like the woman who returned to a professional group after a long absence and explained, “It was just too hard to reach out while I was in the messy middle.” When leaders only share mistakes after they’ve been polished into a tidy success story, nobody gets to see the real scale of the failure, or how a person keeps going before they solve the problem.

The panelists were honest and specific about their weak spots, like conflict avoidance so strong it gets in the way, ADHD, the discomfort of hiring and firing, and the desire to be loved that makes holding people accountable genuinely hard.

So how do you admit a weakness without making your team fear for their jobs? Nancy’s answer, drawn from her panelists, is:

Your team already knows where you’re weak. Pretending otherwise backfires.
Name it, then ask for help. “You’re really good at this. I’m not. Do you have ideas for me?”
Invite people with complementary strengths to help shape the firm’s future and offer the same support back. Mentorship goes both directions.

That same self-awareness makes you attentive to what’s happening inside someone else. And that’s where Questian’s session picks up.

Reading the change your client never announced

Questian’s practice is niched in nonprofits, where boards turn over constantly, and the decision-makers change with them. Change rarely arrives as an announcement. It usually shows up sideways:

Slower response times
Canceled meetings
New, unfamiliar faces in meetings
Shifts in who’s making decisions
Unexpected reporting requests
A client simply going quiet

She lost her first client that way. The organization was losing funding, responses stretched out, meetings got canceled, and eventually the executive director called to say they had to tighten their belts. In hindsight, the signs were all there.

Her advice is to meet regularly, build genuine rapport, and ask open-ended questions. What’s new? What’s changed? What are you planning for the next few months? Her questions, not their announcements, surface the most information. Nancy connected this to the “lead with curiosity” lesson from the Reframe conference: resisting the accountant’s instinct to jump straight to a solution. She also passed along a tip from Twyla Verhelst: before your next client meeting, run the transcripts of your last two or three meetings through an AI tool and ask what’s worth following up on. It’s not a substitute for rapport, but it’s a memory aid for when you have more client relationships than you can hold in your head.

This helps you become the person a client calls first. Change stops being a threat and becomes the doorway into advisory work. And as Questian pointed out, it’s far more expensive to find a new client than to grow a current relationship.

The messy middle is where leadership happens

Whether the change is internal, such as new technology, standardized processes, and documented SOPs, or on the client side, the hard part is emotional rather than technical.

Change happens in three parts: ending the old way, the messy middle, and the new beginning. “When you are in the messy middle,” Questian said, “that’s where we lose people and where we fail.”

Resistance almost always traces back to a fear of losing something, whether it’s control, expertise, authority, job security, or identity. Documenting SOPs so a team member can take a vacation without their laptop sounds like a gift until someone thinks, if you create those SOPs, then you can replace me. So get buy-in early, while feedback can still shape the decision. Frame the change as solving their problem. And remember that a launch date doesn’t come with an emotional switch. Questian described one team member who met her with resistance at every turn. She simply kept showing the benefit until they came out the other side and buy-in finally landed.

When a client’s needs shift, name it out-loud. Compare the original scope to the new outcome they’re after. Sometimes scope grows to support a negative. For example, helping a nonprofit evaluate cost cuts or a workforce reduction is a distinct project that deserves its own pricing. Center the conversation on the client’s needs, be transparent, avoid surprises, and lead with sensitivity, especially when the situation is painful. Absorbing unbilled, out-of-scope work “builds resentment,” Questian warned, “and it weakens the relationship.”

And there’s a bigger reason to get good at this. As Nancy argued in nearly every talk she’s given this year, as AI takes on more technical work, empathy and connection are more valuable than ever before. Trust and psychological safety stop being soft skills and start being the professional skills that set you apart.

Two questions to sit with

Nancy summed up her panel in three lines:

No one has everything figured out
Vulnerability doesn’t weaken leadership when it’s paired with responsibility and self-awareness
You build resilience through community

Questian’s take is that relationships and scopes evolve when organizations evolve, and that evolution is an opportunity.

“Resilient firms aren’t built by people who never struggle,” Nancy said. “They’re built by people who don’t hide their struggles.” For women navigating rooms where they’re often the only one without a seat at the table, that reframe can mean pulling up a chair. Transparency is a professional strength, not a liability.

Nancy left listeners with an exercise. Write down every person who actually knows what you’re carrying right now. If the list is short, you’re not letting anyone in. Then flip it and ask yourself, “Whose load can you help lighten?” Or, as the hosts asked on LinkedIn, which side of leadership needs more attention from you right now, being more honest about what you’re carrying, or becoming more curious about what someone else is carrying?

They closed with a line from Nicole Davis, highlighted on one of Nancy’s slides from her SNH panel: “Vulnerability is a strength that the greatest leaders wear with pride.”

Listen to the full conversation between Nancy McClelland and Questian Telka and earn CPE credit for it on the Earmark app.

How to build a bench of accounting talent in 15 minutes a day

Earmark Team · August 28, 2026 ·

A team member resigns during a demanding season. You post the job that afternoon, refresh your inbox for a week, and feel relieved when a résumé with the right title finally appears. Under pressure, it’s easy to let urgency decide for you.

Fletcher Wimbush says the posting isn’t the real problem; the waiting is.

On this episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?, hosts Rachel Dillon and Marcus Dillon welcome back Fletcher, who has helped small CPA firms solve hiring and talent acquisition challenges for more than a decade. His company uses practices rooted in industrial and occupational psychology rather than hiring anecdotes or gut feelings.

Fletcher believes accounting firms don’t have a job-posting problem. They have a talent-market-access problem. To solve it, they can use a repeatable system: Focus, Attract, Compare, and Transition (FACT).

Focus: Define success before searching

Fletcher’s best advice is the old woodworking rule, “Measure twice, cut once.” Skip that step, and you may find yourself going back to Home Depot. Hiring works the same way.

Focus begins with a job analysis. Before recruiting, define the work in clear, measurable terms:

How many returns will this person prepare?
What kinds of returns and clients will they handle?
Which software will they use?
What schedule and workload should they expect?
What behaviors reflect the firm’s values?
What should success look like after one year?

This matters because titles don’t mean the same thing at every firm. A tax manager may have worked only on C corporations, while your firm serves mainly S corporations. That doesn’t automatically disqualify the candidate, but it’s a training need you should understand before hiring.

Marcus describes another common mistake: Instead of defining a role, owners try to “replace Mollie.” But there is only one Mollie. Define the work rather than searching for a copy of the person who left.

Once you know what you need, you can stop waiting for the right person to stumble across your posting.

Attract: Build relationships before a position opens

The accounting profession hasn’t produced enough accountants for almost 20 years, Fletcher says. That leaves a limited number of people with both the education and experience many firms want.

In greater Los Angeles, perhaps a few hundred people qualify for a specific accounting role. In many markets, the pool may be closer to 50. A job posting depends on one of those people seeing the ad, wanting to leave now, and finding your opportunity more attractive than their current position.

“That’s not what’s happening,” Fletcher says. Firms must identify qualified people and contact them directly.

Fletcher says that work should begin “Today. Now. Yesterday.” Experienced talent can take a year or longer to acquire. He recommends building a bench of six to 20 relationships and maintaining it over time.

The process can take just 10 to 15 minutes a day:

Use Google, ChatGPT, or Claude to identify accounting firms in your market
Review those firms’ LinkedIn people pages
Send promising professionals a polite, low-pressure connection request
Invite them to coffee or a short conversation
Stay in touch through LinkedIn, email, text, or phone calls

Employee referrals are another path. Ask a strong team member to name the best person they worked with at a previous firm. Then ask them to make an introduction. Rachel says referral hires have performed well in production, client service, and longevity.

Thank employees publicly for introductions, even when they don’t lead to a hire. Fletcher says formal bonuses can be useful, but they shouldn’t be the main incentive. Good people often want to work with other good people.

Building the bench gives you options. The next step is comparing those options against the actual job.

Compare: Look beyond titles and compensation

Desperation makes it easy to overvalue a résumé or first impression. Rachel has seen candidates with CPA credentials, large employers, and impressive titles require extensive training because they previously owned only one narrow part of the work.

Fletcher keeps a Warren Buffett quote in his email signature: “I hire for integrity, motivation, and intelligence. And if they lack the first thing, the other two will kill you.”

That perspective can open the door to overlooked candidates, including junior professionals and parents returning to work. These candidates may become talented, loyal employees if the firm is willing to develop them.

Money alone may not persuade a strong professional to move. Fletcher says an extra $5,000, $10,000, or even $15,000 often is not enough. Experienced candidates may care more about:

A shorter commute or flexible work location
A manageable workload
Better work-life balance during tax season
Career development
More in-person support instead of isolated remote work

The firm must also describe its business model honestly. A seasonal firm that works long hours and then slows down may suit one person. A CAS firm with steady year-round work may suit another. Both models are valid. Problems arise when a firm sells one experience but delivers the other.

That honest comparison should continue after the candidate accepts the offer.

Transition: Plan the first year before day one

Fletcher frames the goal with a mutual question: One year from now, what must the firm and employee be saying for both to feel good about the decision?

Use the candidate evaluation to identify strengths and development needs. Then create a specific, measurable, and time-bound onboarding plan. Regular check-ins should cover where the employee is stuck, where expectations are off track, and what support is needed.

Rachel’s firm sends new hires a two-week schedule before they begin. It includes calendar invitations, shadowing, observation, and the gradual handoff of simple clients. Candidates have told her that clear answers about onboarding, training, and career development helped convince them to join.

She also asks about ideal schedules, desired hours, and career goals before making an offer. Someone may apply for full-time work but prefer to begin at 26, 28, or 30 hours. Learning that early helps both sides avoid a costly mismatch.

Make hiring part of the growth plan

FACT replaces urgency and guesswork with a process. Focus on measurable success, attract talent before you need it, compare candidates with the real work, and transition new hires through a clear plan.

Listen to the full conversation on Who’s Really the BOSS? Then start with 15 minutes today. Define one role, contact one person you would like on your bench, or ask one team member for an introduction.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 28 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and leaders with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through community, groups, and one-on-one advisory.

How a “secret menu” tax service protects capacity and creates value

Earmark Team · August 28, 2026 ·

One of Rachel and Marcus Dillon’s tax services is missing from their firm’s website. That is not an oversight. It is a capacity strategy.

In a summer 2026 episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?, Rachel and Marcus explain how they built the Tax Advisory Plan (TAP). Their firm stopped accepting annual-only individual and business tax clients around 2018. But strong referrals kept coming from financial advisors, professional partners, and existing clients.

Their first monthly solution, Advice with the Intent to Minimize (AIM) taxes, proved that clients would pay for ongoing access. But at $150 per month, AIM created a new version of the 1040 practice the firm had tried to leave behind.

TAP became the better model, offering higher-value planning, clear service boundaries, and a hard limit on growth.

Better pricing starts with a better definition of value

A monthly engagement doesn’t become advisory work simply by dividing an annual tax fee by 12. Marcus says AIM clients often viewed the service that way: a tax return paid in installments, with team access included.

“What we’re doing is creating a whole new 1040 practice,” he says.

TAP changed the price and the value. The base fee is $500 per month and includes:

Preparing and filing the client’s individual tax return
Two tax projections, generally in early June and late October
Recorded commentary explaining each projection
An invitation to a planning meeting after each projection
Year-round access for questions about financial and tax decisions

That access matters. When a friend suggests using the Augusta rule or another tax strategy, clients can ask the DBA team before acting instead of relying on a web search or an AI tool.

Trust returns and other complexities may increase the monthly fee. Clients with investment or real estate entities can also add quarterly QuickBooks Online support for about $250 to $500 per month.

The best-fit clients are high-income earners, high-net-worth households, K-1 recipients, investors, and people with Schedule C or Schedule E activity. The common thread is meaningful planning opportunities.

That distinction also shapes how the firm brings clients onboard.

Clients usually arrive with life questions

New TAP clients generally pay a one-time onboarding fee starting at $750. Existing client accounting and advisory services (CAS) clients who transition into TAP usually don’t pay the onboarding fee, because the firm already knows their history.

The onboarding fee covers a review of the most recently filed return and a kickoff call with the service team. New or amended returns are priced separately when needed.

Marcus notes that accountants often assume a prospect’s main problem is missing compliance work. Compliance is familiar and comfortable for us. But clients are often worried about a life event, a financial decision, or an uncertain future.

A former client named Jerry illustrates the difference. Jerry left the firm around 2017 or 2018 after winding down his consulting business. His tax return became simple enough to prepare himself. Years later, he contacted the firm after his brother-in-law died in California.

Marcus first assumed Jerry needed a referral for a California trust matter. Rachel took the call and learned that Jerry already had a California attorney and CPA. His real questions involved inherited property, investment accounts, retirement income, his wife’s retirement, and future required minimum distributions.

Within minutes, Rachel explained that moving from a self-prepared return to TAP would cost $500 per month. Jerry continued the conversation and signed a $500-per-month engagement with a $750 onboarding fee within 48 hours.

His last return was a simple Form 1040-SR. Pricing based only on that return would have missed the point. The value was helping him make decisions early.

Once a client signs, the next safeguard is a team-based service model.

A team of 3 prevents partner dependency

Each TAP client works with a tax administrator, tax controller, and director of tax and financial planning. Before the client kickoff, the team holds an internal Sales-Onboard-Service (SOS) meeting to transfer notes and identify unanswered questions.

The client then joins a 30-minute virtual kickoff call. Rachel attends to ensure the service team’s expectations match what she promised during the sales process.

The roles are clear:

Tax administrator: Manages Canopy setup, document requests, engagement letters, organizers, e-signatures, return delivery, and filing notices
Tax controller: Prepares returns when needed, performs much of the review, and helps manage the client relationship
Director of tax and financial planning: Provides higher-level review, technical support, tax updates, and team education

Although the titles may suggest a hierarchy, the administrator and controller often have the most client contact. Clients receive help from the people closest to the work instead of waiting for a partner.

Pricing, payment, and engagement changes go back to Rachel. This allows the service team to focus on serving clients while one gatekeeper protects scope and capacity.

That structure also gives TAP room to support clients through major transitions.

TAP can be an off-ramp or an on-ramp

One longtime CAS client moved into TAP after selling his business. He continued consulting for the buyer as a 1099 contractor, so the firm added quarterly QBO support for his entity.

Three months later, he wanted help tracking sale proceeds, investment accounts, personal spending, and several large purchases. He moved back into a CAS-style engagement, this time for his family group.

TAP can serve several purposes:

An off-ramp after a client sells or closes a business
An on-ramp when personal finances grow into family-group CAS work
A source of continuity during a major life transition
A respectful exit when a client doesn’t want to pay $6,000 per year for planning

However, the model only works if the firm controls how quickly it grows.

A 10-client cap keeps TAP off the website

The firm doesn’t have a TAP growth target. In fact, they accept no more than 10 new TAP clients per year. At the time of the episode, it had accepted two for 2026.

These clients still have individual returns with fixed deadlines. Too many new engagements create seasonal pressure, even if the work is priced well. The cap protects service quality and supports a steady year-round workload.

That is also why they don’t advertise TAP. “I don’t want to have all my calendar filled up with the wrong-fit prospects,” Rachel says. “I need room on my calendar for right-fit prospects.”

The website promotes services the firm wants to scale. TAP remains a “secret menu” option for trusted referrals and existing clients in transition.

Build the guardrails before accepting the work

TAP offers several practical lessons for firm leaders:

Define the planning, access, and outcomes before setting the price
Qualify clients by their planning needs, not just their tax forms
Use a team so the relationship does not depend on one partner
Give one person authority over pricing and scope
Cap deadline-driven work before it strains the team
Advertise only the services you truly want to scale

Growth doesn’t always mean serving more clients. A deliberately limited service can create stronger relationships, more meaningful work, and better use of team capacity.

To hear Rachel and Marcus explain TAP’s pricing, onboarding, staffing, client stories, and secret-menu strategy, listen to the full episode of Who’s Really the BOSS?.

Rachel and Marcus Dillon, CPA, own a national, remote client accounting and advisory services firm, Dillon Business Advisors, with a team of 28 professionals. Their latest organization, Collective by DBA, supports and guides accounting firm owners and teamss with firm resources, education, and operational strategy through Streamlined OS , groups, and one-on-one advisory.