Does tax planner software for CPAs really work? | Corvee (2024)

Alisha Lewman, the “Real Estate CPA,” is a certified public accountant committed to working with real estate agents, brokers, investors, management companies and landlords across the United States. She focuses on tax planning and CFO services. She typically helps real estate professionals apply tax and business strategies to save her clients money through using advanced tax planning. Here is how her firm got to where it is today.

CPA Does Tax Planning Manually

Ms. Lewman started out her firm on her own at the end of 2017 with zero income and a brand-new CPA license. She decided to specialize in tax planning for real estate agents after going through one of Corvee’s growth and development programs. At this point in her career, she was doing tax plans by manually calculating the numbers from the data her clients gave her, then using a few basic strategies she had learned to find some savings.

Ms. Lewman would spend substantial time typing her findings and numbers into a PowerPoint before delivering it to the client as a finalized tax plan. The process took several weeks from the sales call to the onboarding, and finally to the deliverable.

This manual way of tax planning was never multi-entity or multi-year, rather it simply focused on 2-4 strategies that often specifically impacted those dealing in real estate. Her clients were typically making between $50,000 and $150,000 a year, and Ms. Lewman would recommend switching to an S Corporation if they were already doing a 1099. The problem became if the client already had an S Corporation set up, she’d have to tell the client there wasn’t much she could do for them.

That began to change once Ms. Lewman started using Corvee Tax Planning software, because it reviews more than 60 tax savings strategies out of the box. “Before the software, making an S Corporation was my main strategy, now I know there are many more strategies for existing S Corporations,” she said.

CPA Onboards Tax Planner Software

As Ms. Lewman transitioned from tedious manual tax planning to leveraging technology and letting tax planner software do the calculations for her, including creating the deliverable, she found her whole tax planning process became more streamlined. The software found more tax planning strategies that her real estate agents could use, and nearly every tax plan created in Corvee doubled the amount of estimated savings compared to her initial manual estimates.

Besides the additional value this gives her clients, Ms. Lewman is also able to serve more clients because of the increased capacity she can handle now. Creating a tax plan in Corvee Tax Planning takes her about 20 minutes, as opposed to the lengthy time it took her when she was manually calculating and putting together the deliverable.

“I had to always combine all the data, double check the numbers, update everything in my Powerpoint, so it was a time consuming process. Now I just input data into the software and it calculates and creates the final deliverable in an attractive, professional PDF in minutes,” she explained.

What is she doing with all the extra time she is saving? Increasing her capacity to serve more tax plans to new clients, taking more sales calls and growing her firm. Ms. Lewman now has four full-time team members and is looking to hire a senior tax manager who will also work with the tax planner software.

“Clients are very grateful,” said Ms. Lewman. “We did a tax plan for a client a year ago, manually, and found $13,000 in estimated savings. We just reran this client through the software and came to realize we could save them an estimated $27,000. I’m telling you, it’s almost always double what I initially calculate manually.”

She went on to say, “My own tax knowledge has grown just by using the software and seeing different strategies come up, then reading more about them. By using Corvee Tax Planning software, I learned how much I didn’t know before. There’s so much more to tax planning than what I knew, and so many more tax strategies I never knew about.”

Client Collaboration a Bonus Surprise in Tax Planning Software

While Ms. Lewman’s favorite feature of Corvee is the ability of all the tax planning calculations being done for her automatically, including multi-entity and multi-year, she did experience benefits from also using the Corvee Client Collaboration features inside of the software.

“My entire client onboarding process is more efficient now because I can easily send engagement letters through Corvee. I use requests lists and automatic reminders to improve my firm’s efficiency,” Ms. Lewman explained. “Our onboarding process has improved—I knew that onboarding was less than ideal before, especially getting from the sale to the first kick-off call. Sometimes I’d forget to send an engagement letter or realize the client never signed it. Now, I’m able to send the engagement letter right away and collect payment before I start anything, and this has been huge to automate this early part of our process.”

What’s her advice for any CPA thinking about adding a tax planner software to their firm?

“You can’t afford not to have Corvee Tax Planning. You need it. I wouldn’t want to do tax planning any other way now that I have this software.”

To see how quickly Corvee Tax Planning can calculate additional tax savings for your clients and create custom-branded PDF proposals and plans, schedule a demo with us today.