Resources for CPA & EA firms: notes from the desk.
Short, practical guides on outsourcing expat and domestic tax returns, how a co-source season runs, and which engagement model fits your firm. Written for the partner, not the prospect.
Why firms outsource expat tax returns
Capacity, risk, and margin — the case for handing FBAR and Form 1116 work to an outside desk of enrolled agents without losing the client.
A season with the TaxSQR desk
Intake to e-file: how a firm actually works with our enrolled agents through filing season, on one shared audit log.
White-label, overflow, or co-source?
Three ways to hand work to the desk — and how to pick the one that fits your firm this season.
The capacity wall: why you can't hire your way out of October
Hard returns pile up by design, seasonal hires leave in May, and partner review time doesn't scale. Why October is a structural problem — and what actually fixes it.
The real cost of seasonal help
Recruiting lands in your busiest month, the training curve is the wrong shape, the hire leaves in May — and adding a preparer never adds a reviewer.
Fire the client, eat the hours, or find a third option
The return that loses you money usually belongs to one of your best clients. Why the realization report gives bad advice, and what the summer conversation misses.
The K-1 return: why one late schedule holds ten hours of work hostage
A 1040 that has been 90 percent ready since March, a Schedule K-1 that arrives in September, and the basis and at-risk records nobody maintained.
Multi-state returns: the allocation work that eats a preparer's day
One W-2, three states, and a year of withholding sent to the wrong one. Why remote work turned a rare fact pattern into a routine one your fee never covered.
Behind every late entity return is a bookkeeping problem
The 1120-S in your extension pile is not a hard return. It is late because the books were never closed — and that one fact reprices the work and blocks the owners' 1040s.
Foreign-income returns: the deep end we swim in every day
Eight decisions sit in front of the arithmetic — residency, what the money is, Form 2555 or Form 1116, FBAR and 8938, PFICs, foreign pensions, and the years already missed.
Outsourcing without the black box: what to demand from any prep desk
A costume and a real preparer can look identical from the outside. Five questions that tell you which one you're about to hand a client's return to.
Two sets of enrolled-agent eyes: how the review layer works
What the reviewer sees before the draft return, what a send-back is required to say, and why the second enrolled agent's lack of memory is the qualification.
What sending us five returns actually involves
The consent the platform will not let anyone skip, when the clock actually starts, the six stages a case moves through, and who signs at the end.
Which returns should leave the building
A quarter of an extension pile usually carries about half its remaining hours. Finding that quarter is the decision, and it is not the same as finding your worst clients.
What comes back, and how it gets into your software
A structured worksheet rather than a Drake import file — and the reason that is an honest answer instead of a disappointing one.
The returns that aren't waiting on you
Outsourcing does not make a client answer their email. What it can do is chase on a schedule, stop the moment they respond, and tell you weekly who has gone quiet.
The deadline after the deadline
For clients abroad, 15 October is not necessarily the end. The window to ask for December closes the same day the return is due, and it does not carry the FBAR.
Write it down before you forget October
The information that fixes next October is being generated this week and mostly not captured. By January all anyone remembers is which returns were large.
What the week after the deadline is actually for
The returns that missed are still on a monthly clock with a second cliff in December, and the three weeks after 15 October are the only part of the year a firm can change anything.
Not a startup experiment: the practice behind the platform
The questions a careful firm owner should ask about any prep desk before sending it a client, answered about us, including the ones where the honest answer is modest.
How a Japanese tax document becomes a line on a US return
The return itself is rarely the hard part for a client living in Japan. The hard part is a stack of documents in a language nobody in the office reads.