Bender CPA Experience: Leveling Up a Solo Practice with Minimal Spend

Meet Tatsiana Bender — a Texas-based solo practitioner with over 15 years of experience in tax preparation and advisory services and a four-year-old practice, Bender CPA. She manages about 100 clients and grows her business by automating every possible admin task involved in onboarding new customers so she can spend more time advising her clients.

Adding better value for less money

Tatsiana used SmartVault as a cloud backup storage facility for client files until the third-party provider more than doubled its prices. Solo practitioners already face plenty of challenges, and paying a thousand dollars per year for document storage alone was a costly and ineffective spend. 

‘I would definitely recommend TaxDome to all SmartVault users, especially solo practitioners, due to the price. And the features that TaxDome provides allow you to be really efficient. You can start using it as backup storage and save money because it’s seven hundred dollars less than SmartVault.’

Watch Tatsiana talk about managing her business with TaxDome in comparison with SmartVault:

Tatsiana was looking for an affordable and efficient document management solution and she landed on TaxDome Lite — an ideal option for CPAs who are flying solo. For three hundred dollars annually she got these extras on top of cloud storage: unlimited clients, e-signatures, a client portal and more.

‘What started out as simple price shopping for cloud storage became a fully automated information and documentation gathering step in my tax prep process. I think of the TaxDome workflow as a “self-check-out terminal” at a grocery store.’

Learn how Stephanie Papini CPA built an accounting business as a solopreneur after maternity leave.

Smooth transition to TaxDome

Although Tatsiana is a DIY person, she enlisted the help of the Customer Success Team. Switching from SmartVault to TaxDome was made so much easier with tips and best practices on how to build the processes in TaxDome provided by the Team. Tatsiana was impressed by how comfortable the set-up process was, including:

• The ease of scheduling the free quick 15-minute onboarding session or 45-minute white-glove set-up straight from the TaxDome account dashboard instead of making a lengthy phone call
• The ability to share the screen in 5 seconds instead of going through a 5-minute-long explanation 

Another way to move to TaxDome and set up your clients in one go is the TaxDome CSV import tool – a simple and safe way for migrating client data in half the time.

Watch Tatsiana sharing her experience with TaxDome:

In moving to TaxDome, Tatsiana got access not only to the backup storage which was her original intent but also the document management solutions included in TaxDome Lite: 

1. Unlimited cloud storage to keep documents secure and organized
2. Centralized document hub incorporated with the workflow
3. TaxDome Desktop App to upload files in bulk and print to TaxDome 
4. Virtual Desktop Drive to access client files directly from a PC without opening a browser

Learn how to upload documents quickly and easily to TaxDome with the self-paced TaxDome Academy course How to Streamline Exchanging Documents.

Automating the documentation gathering process

As a solopreneur, Tatsiana has to be highly efficient with her client management and the tax preparation process. That’s why, just two weeks into using TaxDome Lite, she upgraded to TaxDome Pro and got rid of Intuit Link, which she had used to manually manage all client interactions and document gathering.

‘I have upgraded to TaxDome Pro to increase efficiency for my firm. With TaxDome, I see an opportunity to save valuable time during tax season so that I can serve more clients.’

One of the TaxDome Pro features that became a complete game changer for Tatsiana’s practice was Conditional Organizers. 

‘I have built out the conditional organizer in such a way that my client interactions should only be advisory and value-adding in nature as opposed to information and document gathering. I don’t have to come back to software to send a particular organizer to a particular client. If they have a rental income, the organizer populates the questions related to it. If they have a business, the organizer populates only the questions about their business income.’

At the time of publication, Tatsiana is tweaking the TaxDome automations to make the most out of them for the next tax season.