ProConnect™ Tax spotlight: Liz Hanley, EA

Meet a truly out-of-the-box tax and advisory pro, Elizabeth Hanley, EA. She is managing partner of Liz Is All Biz Inc., a 15-person all-female firm with locations in San Francisco and New York City. The firm offers tax, accounting, and advisory services to approximately 800 clients. I sat down with Liz, in part to found out more about her advisory practice for a white paper, “Transform your firm’s tax workflow: 5+ proven strategies to eliminate low-value tasks,” and also to find out more about her tech stack, including Intuit® ProConnect™ Tax. The other parts of her tech stack includes QuickBooks® Online, Karbon, Dropbox, Syft

Scott Cytron: How do you structure your team in order to create an optimal workflow? 

Liz Hanley: So many bookkeepers came to me and were used to doing one client, soup to nuts. They were doing the accounts payable, the reporting, and the analysis. For us, we were able to segment out the work by skill set so that we don’t have any of our higher skilled workers doing any low-value work.

The key to eliminating low-value work is making it work across hundreds of clients. You have to make sure you don’t drop any balls—and that everybody is talking to each other and implementing the systems for true coordination. That was the thing that took us the most time: How do you make all those pieces work together and how do you get all that integrated?

SC:  Are you outsourcing any non-core tasks, such as tax prep?

LH: Yes, part of our outsource team is in Ukraine—about 10 to 13 people depending on the time of the year. We’ve been working with them for about 8 years, starting out with a smaller group, but grew the team as our business grew.

SC: Have you had some non-traditional hires in your firm?

LH:  Yes! One of my best hires was a film editor, which you wouldn’t think would work in a tax and accounting firm, but if you think about what film editors do, they have to work with technology. They have to be very precise and be very attentive to detail. This was one of my best hires.

SC: How are you automating low-value tasks at your firm with technology? 

LH: Building out our review process has been important. Karbon has been able to help make everything highly systemized. Now, senior members can review work from outsourced staff, knowing exactly what they’re looking for so they can discover problems quickly. We’ve also used Syft reporting, which has a tech stack that can discover anomalies.

SC: Do you have processes in place to standardize your firm’s workflow?

LH: We have this really stratified way that we work and it’s all based on automatic notifications. If one person is done with their work, it shows up in the next person’s queue. In other words, when Person A finishes something, it then moves to Person B, who does the next thing. Now it’s all automated. With as many clients as we have, having a process like this is absolutely necessary.

SC: Part of being an advisory firm is consistent communications to your clients. How are you doing this?

LH: We do internal training on this to help the team talk to clients. Because we’re meeting with clients quarterly, we are really trying to standardize, streamline, and professionalize how we’re communicating to clients.

When you’re doing 800 reviews, for example, those emails can get kind of short. So being able to have all of the information—where one of my team members isn’t having to type it out, or copy and paste it—is going to help us deliver our services.

SC: How does ProConnect Tax help you be successful as a firm?
LH: It’s all in one place. ProConnect Tax reduces administrative time by having everything together so you can’t lose anything. That’s why we use ProConnect. For example, if you are tagged in to deal with a client you’ve never seen before, you would have all the context right there: everyone’s notes, all the documents, and all the materials from the client. If you want to see the emails, they’re all in Karbon. Everything is completely centralized. If you have as many clients as we do, you’re just never going to remember all of those things.