ProConnect™ Tax Customer Profile: Jeff Wilson II

Meet Jeff Wilson II, CEO of The W2 Group in Clinton, Md. Jeff has four full-time employees and 14 part-time/contract employees and processes 100 to 150 returns each year. A QuickBooks ProAdvisor®, Jeff is certified in QuickBooks® Online (QBO) and Advanced QuickBooks Desktop. He specializes in outsourced accounting services for federal contractors and Not-For-Profit Associations, offering tax services, financial planning, and forensic accounting.

The CPA Practice Advisor named Jeff as a 40 under 40 CPA. He was also a 40 Under 40 Black CPA centennial recipient. He is the recipient of the 2023 Outstanding Young CPA Award and Forbes Magazine  America’s Top 200 CPA.

Jeff’s Story

I don’t think I have the typical ProAdvisor story. In college, I always read 10Ks and 10Qs, and I was really more into accounting because I was trying to day trade and invest. I’m an economics junkie, and I like being able to see the big picture, globally, and being able to relate that to what’s going on at the general ledger level. I worked as an auditor for KPMG for a little over four years doing federal audits, but I didn’t feel like I was doing anything for the greater good. I wanted a change, so I went to the National Credit Union Administration, where I got experience working at the CFO level doing some tax work. That’s when I decided to start my own practice.

We were pretty much all tax at the beginning, and now tax is about 30 percent of what we do from a revenue basis standpoint. Becoming ProAdvisors is what really drove our business and our tax practice. We keep focused on federal contractors because we know that industry very well. We’ve been really successful with it.

We’ve been using QuickBooks® from the beginning. Intuit® is the top accounting system in the world. It’s just the best end-user product out there. That’s point blank, flat. To me, you’re crazy to work with anything other than Intuit and QuickBooks. So, with that settled, it just made sense to become a ProAdvisor, in order to learn more about the software. In the beginning, we used Intuit ProConnect™ ProSeries® for the tax side work, but as soon as ProConnect Tax came out, we knew that was the direction we wanted to head. Once our online strategy took hold and we had the QBO users in place, we switched to ProConnect Tax. That really was the defining moment for us.

Basically, if you’re a QBO expert, I think you’re crazy if you’re not doing taxes as well. ProConnect Tax has made it that much easier. It lets us push client data directly from QBO and makes it simple to communicate with clients and share documents in a safe, secure and professional way. As soon as Intuit connected ProConnect Tax with QBO, our margin increased.

The other side is that ProConnect Tax is truly cloud-based, and that means I can be anywhere. I’m no longer tied to the desk. With ProConnect Tax, we can really say that we’re a 100 percent cloud-based accounting firm. That saves us tons of time on travel. In the D.C. area, that’s huge because the traffic is crazy. It also helps strategically with staff. Since the software is cloud-based, I can get the best staff, no matter where they’re based, and we we can pretty much target clients from anywhere in the United States. I think it’s going to open up a very big market for us. Huge, in fact.

ProConnect Tax cuts down heavily on our input and review time. If you serve QBO clients, there’s pretty much no excuse not to use ProConnect Tax. Your margin goes up with ProConnect Tax. No question. Done.

Editor’s note: Check out other ProConnect Tax customer profiles on the Tax Pro Center.