The second wall: When too much software slows you down

Let’s pretend for a moment.

You’re the owner of a solid, established firm that sees a path to a brighter, more efficient future for you and your clients. You decide that by automating the manual work, you could eliminate the tasks taking up the most time. Maybe you went digital with documents, perhaps picking up a document management tool, and found a really nifty signature collector. It worked. The manual work got done, clients stopped calling to ask “Did you get my W-2?,” and you could see the road ahead—with optimism.

But then, suddenly, in the middle of the busiest week you’ve ever experienced with your new tech stack, you found it: the second wall, and it’s huge.

When a firm upgrades its tech stack and switches tax software, it’s like a major life event that comes with anticipation, pessimism, and even optimism because of the fear of the unknown. Yet, the result can also be life-changing. Here’s how.

The busywork found a secret entrance

Let’s look at this hypothetical firm from another angle. You’ve gone from 400 clients to 900 in under three years. You added bookkeeping. Then advisory. Then a part-time preparer, then two more. Every tool you brought on along the way, on its own, did exactly what it promised. 

You found the second wall in a hidden place: in the seams between your tools, with a client’s books live in one system, while their return was prepared in another. Getting the numbers from one to the other meant someone exported a file, imported it somewhere else, and double-checked that nothing got lost or duplicated. You watched this multiply across your blossoming client list, and the manual work weaseled its way back into your life.

The first wave of tools removed busywork within a task, but the second wall, well, it’s about what happens between the tools.

What a genuinely connected workflow looks like

We have good news, and, ironically, fewer tools; tools that actually share the same data, so nobody on your team, not even you, has to carry it between them by hand.

When a firm’s entire workflow, from onboarding individual and business clients to offering advisory, is in one connected platform—Intuit® Accountant Suite integrating directly into Intuit ProConnect™ Tax—the numbers that live in the books show up in the return without the export-and-import step. ProConnect’s SmartReturn takes it a step further on the data entry side, pulling available client documents into the return automatically so a preparer is reviewing a return instead of retyping one.

And, yes, we mentioned advisory. Intuit Tax Advisor, built into ProConnect, pulls from that same connected tax return data to surface planning opportunities that would otherwise take a separate research pass to find, as well as separate software in our hypothetical firm’s case, which matters most for firms trying to make advisory a seriously valuable revenue source.

The second wall is about losing time to cracks in systems, and ProConnect is here to blast through it. 

Where to start? How am I supposed to switch now?

We know. From talking with other pros, here’s what we garnered are the best first steps:

1. Where is your second wall? Walk through one client’s full lifecycle and flag every spot where someone manually moves a number from one system to another. That list is your actual priority order.
2. Commence the research! “Integrates with” means different things depending on who’s saying it. Take the software for a test drive. You can do this with ProConnect and we expect no commitment from you—not even a credit card.
3. Don’t be afraid to picture the future again. The point of blasting down the second wall is freeing up the hours that would’ve gone to reconciliation so they can go toward the planning conversations clients want and need from you.

So, give it a go! And if you want an even easier first step, see what we did with ProConnect and why we care so much about telling you.