Name: How to Build a Tech-Forward Firm Without Losing the Human Touch
Uploaded: 2026-09-30T19:16:33.367Z
Duration: 1 h 16 s
Description: How to Build a Tech-Forward Firm Without Losing the Human Touch

Transcript for "How to Build a Tech-Forward Firm Without Losing the Human Touch": Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Tracy Brown, and I lead education for the pro tax group here at Intuit. Just wanted to take a couple minutes of your time before the session begins to make sure you're already to get the most out of your time with us today. If you take a look over at the right hand side of your screen, you'll see two tabs that are constant throughout the session today. Docs will contain all of the handouts for today's session. Please feel free to click and save those to your machine for reference either today or at a later time. And the q and a tab is where you'll ask any questions that come up throughout your session today. We have a number of experts staffed in the backstage waiting to answer your questions as quickly as they can. When your speaker launches a poll, you will see a new tab open up for polls on your right hand panel. 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At the end of today's session, a quick survey will pop on the right hand side of your screen and take over that tab panel. Please take just a couple minutes and give us your thoughts on the session today. We really value your feedback and would love to hear what you thought. A couple best practices, please do make sure you're using a desktop or laptop computer over a cell phone. We do recommend using Chrome or Safari over other browsers for the best experience. If you can turn off your VPN or firewall, that could improve your performance. But if all else fails, just refresh your browser. That seems to help resolve any audio or freezing experiences if you have them. A recording of today's session will be available on demand after we wrap. Please use that same link that you've used today to get into the session. And if you have any questions at all, please reach out to us at protax_training@intuit.com, and we would be more than happy to assist. Today's session is eligible to earn credits. In order to earn them, you need to be in attendance for at least fifty minutes and submit responses for at least three of the interactive polls. Certificates will be emailed after today's session concludes within forty eight hours. If you don't see your certificate within that time frame, please email us at protax_training@intuit.com. Your certificates may end up in your spam or junk folder, so please check there if you don't see anything. If this session is eligible for CE, we will submit directly to the IRS on your behalf within ten days. And finally, for our disclaimer, this session is educational in on nature and should not be construed as tax advice. Alright. That's all I have to share with you. I'm gonna hand it over to your speaker. I hope you really enjoy your time with us. Thanks again for joining. Hi. My name is Katie Healy, and I'm the founder of Scaled Accounting Solutions. I'm a CPA, a firm owner, and someone who believes that technology should help us work smarter and more human, not faster and more robotic. How we scale our firms, use more technology, and not lose what makes our firm special, the human side? This isn't just about automation. This is about using tech to give ourselves back the time, presence, and capacity to connect with our teams and our clients. Today, we are going to talk about assessing your firm's needs, optimizing your tech stack, and making tech work for people, and most importantly, using technology to strengthen the human experience. We have included a worksheet download that you can use as we walk through today's webinar so you leave here one step closer to building your tech forward firm without losing the human touch. We are going to have our first polling question to kick things off. What is the primary reason for attending this webinar? To earn free CPE, to explore new solutions, to solve a a specific problem, general and interest or education or other. I'll give you a few moments to make your selections. Let's all close our eyes and take a moment and imagine your firm one year from today. Is it running smoother? Are your clients happier? Are you spending more time connecting and less time keeping up? I want you to jot down or think about what's one process in your firm that feels clunky, chaotic, or time consuming. Go ahead. Write it down. I'll give you a few seconds. Great. Now hold that thought because what we're going to do today is give you a framework, tools, and a mindset to create a tech forward firm without losing the human touch. Before we throw more tools at our problems, we need to get honest about where the problems actually are. Most of the time, it's not the lack of tools. It's unclear processes, manual workarounds, or breakdowns in communication that steal time and erode trust. According to the 2025 workflow and automation report from Financial Cents, over 55% of firm owners still struggle with workflow and efficiencies. That, my friends, is not a tech problem. That is a visibility problem. A clear modern tech stack starts with one thing, clarity. You can't automate chaos, so let's uncover the invisible time thieves in your firm. Before we do this, let's launch our next polling question. Which of the following best describes your firm's current approach to technology? We add tools when a problem comes up, but don't have an overall technology strategy. We have several tools in place, but our systems and workflows aren't fully connected. Our core systems work together, but we still haven't but we still have a manual process and opportunities for automation. Our technology is intentionally designed around workflows with automation handling much of the repetitive work, or that's exactly what I'm here to figure out. I'll give you a few moments to make your selections. Remember, there's no right or wrong answer. Now grab a pen and your notebook. I want you to physically draw your client's journey across the page. Just a simple time line or flow. Start with the first touch point. Inquiry. Then what? Proposal, engagement letter, kickoff call, tax work. Every firm has a different client journey. Map yours out. I'll give you a few moments here because we're going to focus on this shortly. Now I want you to circle the first step that feels like it takes way too long or involves way too many steps. Maybe your time thief isn't tax preparation after all. Maybe it's the five emails it takes to get the missing documents. Or maybe the return sits in review for four days because nobody knows it's ready. Or maybe your team manually creates the same client in four different systems during onboarding. This one simple motion, circling a bottleneck, helps us visualize and name where our tools or processes need to do better. I call this the workflow time thief. This is why we don't start by asking what software should we buy. We should start by asking where's the friction. Once you spot it, you can start to fix it. Now some of you may be just starting out, and all of this feels like it's taking too long. I understand. Start small. One process at a time. The first step to fixing this time thief is to use a simple tech stack inventory table, And I want you to think about this table as more than an inventory of your technology. This is really the beginning of your technology road map. We've identified where your workflow is breaking down. Now we're going to look at what technology supports that workflow, where you have gaps, and where you have overlap, and eventually, where integration and automation can make it better. By the end of this process, you're not going to have a list of software. You're going to have a road map for how your people, your processes, and your technology should work together. These elements in a table allow us to see what we are using, the purpose of the tool, the time impact, as well as the human impact. The first five elements we will look at are tools, owner, purpose, time cost, and human impact. This doesn't have to be extravagant, but you can even use colors or emojis to indicate helpful versus painful. But you can use colors or even emojis to indicate helpful versus painful. You also may want to know any overlapping of tools you may have. Take the time to really dig into this first step. It's important. Now I want to show you what this tool looks like in the workbook you can download. If you haven't downloaded it yet, you can scan the QR code on the screen to get it. Let's say Financial Cents is in my tech stack for the workflow we are focusing on today. In this spreadsheet, the tool would be Financial Cents. The owner, maybe it's my operations person or the firm owner. The purpose, project management and client communication. The time cost, how much time does it take to use this tool? Human impact, what's the impact of using this tool? Does it make it easier or harder for my team and my clients to work together? Prior to mapping out my tech stack, I was working with 12 different apps, but had absolutely no clarity. I decided to run a tech audit when I moved my firm from Side Hustle to a full time gig so I could be sure to set myself and my future team up for success. And I found three tools that overlapped. Eliminating these saved me about eight hours per month. Eight hours. As a solo firm runner, these eight hours saved was a lot of time that I could use to help grow my business. When I did this step, I realized we sent too many emails before we actually had a quick discovery call with a prospect. Our whole goal is to have the human connection with our clients from the moment they are interested in working with our firm. In the chat, I would love to have you share what's one tool or task that frustrates your team or slows down your day. I'll go ahead and give you a moment in the chat. Awesome. There's some great answers coming in. Don't forget, you can use colors or emojis to help indicate helpful versus painful for your team, and be sure to note any overlapping of the tools. And while everyone is still finishing up their answers, let's launch our third polling question. How often do you assess your tech stack? There is no right or wrong answer here, but with how quickly our software changes, leading firms assess their tech stack at least quarterly to ensure new features are assessed and implemented, which may even eliminate other tools. So how often are you assessing this? Never, quarterly, annually, or every few years. To be honest, again, no right or wrong answer. Now that you have identified your bottlenecks and started building your tech stack inventory, let's talk about the technology itself. But before I show you any specific tools, I wanna make something very clear. I don't want you to leave today thinking you need my tech stack. There's a lot of great tools on the market and the right technology for my firm may not be the right technology for yours. What I want you to think about instead are the functions your technology needs to support. When I look at an accounting firm's tech stack, I tend to break it into five major categories. Firm client and project management, client onboarding and engagement, accounting and advisory, tax preparation and compliance, and AI and meeting efficiency. And you'll notice something as we go through these. I'm not evaluating these tools by only asking, does it make us faster? I'm also asking, does it make it easier for my team to do their job? And does it create a better client experience? The right tools don't just save us time. They enhance the relationship between your team and your clients. A tech forward firm uses automation to eliminate friction so humans can show up where it matters most, conversations, advising, and care. That's what I mean by human first technology. Let's start with the center of the firm, client project client and project management. As firms grow, one of the biggest challenges isn't necessarily doing the work. It's knowing where the work is. Who owns it? What's the next step? What are we waiting on? Did someone respond to the client? Is something sitting in someone's inbox that the rest of the team doesn't know about? Your practice management system should create visibility around all of that. For our firm, that's Financial Cents. We use it for project management, workflow, client communication, and our client portal. But the reason it matters isn't because it gives me another dashboard. It's because my team doesn't have to rely on memory to know what's happening with the client and that's human first technology. The system carries the administrative burden so my people don't have to. The next category is onboarding and engagement. And this one is especially important because this often is where clients get their first real impression of what it's going to feel like to work with our firm. Think about everything that can happen between, yes, I wanna work with you and actually starting the work. Proposal, engagement letters, signatures, payment information, billing setup, internal project creation, welcome communication. There's a lot of administrative work hiding inside that process. We use Anchor for proposals, engagement letters, payment information, and billing. That allows us to automate a lot of the administrative pieces. But here's where the human first part comes in. I don't want automation to make onboarding feel generic. For example, I include a personalized video when I send a proposal. The administrative work is done automatically, but the client still feels like we're working with them. They're working with me, not being pushed through the system. The third category is accounting and advisory. This is where technology has changed what we can do as accountants. Historically, so much of our time is spent gathering information, entering information, reconciling information, and producing reports. But the real value isn't producing the financial statement. It's helping the client understand what it means. We use QuickBooks online as the accounting foundation and tools like Intuit tax advisor to help support proactive planning and advisory. The goal is to use technology to get us to the conversation faster. I don't want my team's capacity consumed by moving data around if technology can do it reliably. I want their time spent looking at the information, asking questions, identifying opportunities, and talking to clients. Technology gets the information ready. Humans create the insight. The fourth category is probably familiar to everyone here. Tax preparation and compliance. And when we think about tax technology, I don't think the goal should simply be how do we prepare more returns faster. I think the better question is how do we remove unnecessary administrative work from the tax process so our professionals can spend more time reviewing, thinking, and advising. In our firm, ProConnect is the tax preparation platform. We also use tools like TallyFor and Stanford Tax to support different parts of the tax workflow. Technology can help us collect information, organize it, move data between systems, and reduce repetitive work, but professional judgment stays with us. The technology should make it easier for the accountant to be an accountant. And the fifth category that we are going to talk about right now well, it's what we are all talking about right now is AI. I think one of the mistakes we can make with AI is starting with how what can AI do. I would rather start with where is my team spending time on work that doesn't require their expertise? Meetings are a great example. We use Abicor to transcribe meetings and help draft follow-up communications. Before using it, someone had to take notes during the meeting, organize the notes afterwards, then draft a follow-up email to the client. Now my team can actually be present in the conversation. They're listening. They're asking better questions. They're watching the client's reaction instead of furiously typing. And afterwards, the technology helps us handle the administrative work that comes out of the conversation. That's where AI becomes human first. It isn't replacing the conversation. It's allowing us to be more present for it. Imagine your client receives a beautiful automated recap email and thinks, wow. They really get me. That's what technology should feel like. We started using Avicore, and it's been a game changer. Instead of spending an hour writing notes in our practice management system after a meeting, we send out a custom recap in minutes and push the meeting notes to our practice management system FinancialSense for the team to see, including the video. Clients, they feel heard. My team stays present instead of typing furiously during every call. It's a win for everyone. So when you're looking at the tools on this slide, don't focus on the logos. Think about the five categories. Where does your firm have strong technology support today? Where are you doing a lot of things manually? Where are you paying for overlapping tools? And what technology might actually be getting in the way of the experience you're trying to create? Go back to the tech stack inventory you've been building during this webinar. Put a check mark next to the category that you feel good about. Put a star next to the one you think needs attention because having great tools, it's only the beginning. The next question is whether any of them actually should talk to each other. And that brings us to integration. You can have amazing tools, but if they don't talk to each other, you're still doing double work. Integration isn't just about syncing data. It's about syncing your team, your culture, and the client promise. One firm I talked to had multiple cloud tools, but no integration. They were entering the same client data in three places. After setting up integrations, they saved five plus hours a week and cut response times by 25%. This is where we stop collecting technology and start designing an ecosystem. Whether it's a tool you currently use or let's say you find a tool you absolutely love, There are a few questions you need to ask yourself. First, what does this integrate with? If I add this tool, am I eliminating a manual step or am I creating another place for my team to log into and move information? Second, what time does it actually save, Not what the website says it should save. What does it save in your workflow? And third, what's the return? Are we reducing errors? Are we improving the client experience? Are we giving our team capacity back? Earlier, we started our inventory with five things. Now we're going to add a few more columns. Integrations, workflow impact, time saved, and ROI. We're building this road map in layers. Remember, we're not creating that inventory just to make a list of all the software we're paying for. We're using it to build our technology road map. For each tool, document what it integrates with. What other systems are connect is it connected to? Then document what those integrations actually do. Does information automatically move between systems? Does it trigger the next step in the workflow? Does it eliminate something your team used to do manually? And then look at the impact. How much time is this saving? What errors or duplicate work is it eliminating? And what is the human impact? Is it making things easier for your team? Is it improving the client experience? This is where your inventory starts to become much more than a list of software. You're actually documenting how information and work move through your firm. Because a great piece of software sitting by itself isn't necessarily a great technology strategy. For our firm, prior to using Anchor, we manually drafted engagement letters, we emailed them to the client for a digital signature followed by manual billing each month. Now that we're using Anchor, we're sending out our proposal, collecting payment information for automatic billing, and getting signatures for the engagement. And even better, clients are signing a lot faster than previously. Then once the client accepts the proposal, the project is automatically created in our practice management system, Financial Cents, and their new client is automatically set up in QuickBooks online and invoices push directly over with no manual work on our end. Notice what I'm describing here? I didn't just replace my engagement letter software, I eliminated handoffs. So before draft, email, signature, billing setup, create project, create QBO client, invoice. Wait for payment. Now what we're doing is proposal accepted, the systems take over. That's what I mean when I say a connected ecosystem. I'm not measuring the value of Anchor by whether it sends a prettier proposal, though that's a bonus. I'm measuring how many manual steps disappeared from the entire workflow. So, like, if I go back to my tech stack inventory, Anchor isn't going to just say proposals and billing. Under integrations, I'm document documenting that it comes that it connects with Financial Cents and QuickBooks Online. Under workflow impact, I'm documenting that an accepted proposal automatically creates a project, creates the client in QuickBooks online, and pushes the invoice into QuickBooks online. Under the time impact, I'm looking at the manual steps I've eliminated. And under the human impact, I'm documenting what that means for my team and my clients. Do is the experience much smoother? Is the onboarding experience better? Now I can actually see why that tool belongs in my ecosystem. And you may do this exercise and discover a tool where you can't answer these questions. It doesn't integrate with anything. You're not really sure how much time it's saving you. Your team doesn't love using it and you can't identify much of an impact on the client experience. That's information too. Maybe that tool doesn't belong in your future tech stack. At this point, our road map is starting to tell us quite a bit. We know what we're using. We know why we're using it. We know what connects. We know where we're eliminating emit. We know where we're eliminating manual work, and we're starting to understand the return. There's one more question we need to ask before we start automating everything we possibly can. Just because we can automate something, does it mean we should? As you've added integrations and time savings to your road map, I want to ask you one more question. Just because we can automate something, doesn't mean we should. We automate repetitive tasks that are predictable and require low judgment. We augment research, drafting, and decision support. We keep it human where it comes to judgment, strategy, relationships, and having those difficult conversations. Let's break down by the services we may offer in our firms. Let's think about monthly bookkeeping. We can automate bank feeds, recurring transactions, rules for predictable expenses, and even reminders when information is missing. There is very little value in having a human manually move the same predictable information every month. Then technology can help us identify unusual transactions, changes in margins, cash flow trends, or accounts that need a closer look. It can help us get to the interesting stuff faster, but it isn't necessarily deciding what those numbers mean for that particular client. Finally, we keep the conversation human. Why did the margins drop? Should we hire a new employee? Can we afford that equipment purchase? What should we do about cash flow? Those decisions require context, judgment, and a relationship with the client. So we're gonna automate the transactions, augment the analysis, keep the advice human. If you were to write anything down on this slide, that's it. Automate the transactions, augment the analysis, keep the advice human. No matter what tools we use, we need to ensure there's a return on integration. The ROI triangle shows us what matters most. Time saved, errors reduced, and relationship strengthened. If your tools don't do at least two of these, they're costing you. I realize strengthening relationships can be hard to measure, but I would also argue it's one of the most valuable returns. If technology gives us time back, what are we doing with that time? Maybe instead of spending an hour manually entering information, I'm spending that hour talking to a client about what's happening in their business. Maybe I'm reaching out proactively instead of waiting for them to call me. Maybe I now have the capacity to offer tax planning and advisory services that I simply didn't have room for before. And think about what that feels like from the client's perspective. They aren't necessarily thinking, wow, my my accountant has a great tech stack. No. They're thinking, my accountant calls me before there's a problem. They understand my business. They have time for me. That's what the relationship of ROI on technology. That right there. We're not using technology so we can spend less time with our clients. We're using it so we can spend less time on the administrative work surrounding our clients and more time serving them. That is called creating capacity. But there's another part of strengthening relationships that we can't overlook and that's trust. We can create an incredible client experience. We can respond faster, automate communication, offer more advisory services, and make it easier for clients to work with us. But none of that matters if they don't trust us with their information. And in our profession, we're asking clients to give us some of the most sensitive information they have. That's why I don't look at security as just a compliance requirement. I look at it as part of the client experience. Multifactor authentication might create one extra step when a client logs into their portal, but that extra step tells them we're protecting their information. An encrypted portal might not be as convenient as emailing a document back and forth, but it creates a safe place for us to collaborate. And employee security isn't something we just do to check that box. Our technology is only as secure as the people using it. Fortinet, a global cybersecurity leader found in 2024 I'm sorry. Found in its 2024 report that nearly 70% of organizations say their employees lack fundamental security awareness. 70%. What does that mean? We as firm runners need to do a better job of training our people to continue to build trust with our clients. Technology doesn't make your firm more human. You do. But the right systems give you the space and energy to do it well and to do it consistently. So let's bring this all together. You came here today thinking about one process in your firm that feels clunky. We mapped the workflow. We identified the time thief. We inventoried the technology supporting it. We looked for overlap and gaps. We asked what integrates. We decided what should be automated, what should be augmented, and what should stay human. And finally, we looked at the return, time saved, errors reduced, and relationships strengthened. That's your technology road map. You don't need to overhaul your entire firm Monday morning. Pick one workflow. Start there. Start small and build. For our final polling question, we would like would you like to get a personalized sales demo or consultation about what you learned in today's training? Yes, please. Or no, not at this time. I'll go ahead and give you a few moments. Great. If you are looking for more free training and resources, please visit the education center. There are some wonderful resources there to help you become a better firm runner and even learn more about what Intuit has to offer. And don't forget, support and community, the links are included in this slide where you can get peers like myself to answer tax questions. Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you're walking away with something tangible that you can take back to your firms and start working on before busy season comes around. Have an awesome day.