Use case: a solo EA, 300 clients, one inbox
What the first week with Taxably looks like for a one-person practice where every client sends documents a different way and February is triage.
This is an illustrative walkthrough of the workflow Taxably is designed around, with invented names and a made-up folder. It is not a customer story; real reviews will live on the reviews page when they exist.
Updated : An earlier version of this post said each document was read on Taxably's side and deleted afterwards. A document's pages go from the firm's workstation straight to the reading provider instead, and our servers are not on that path.
Updated : The September 23 correction described the reading provider's terms as not letting it keep the pages. That is not established. The provider is not permitted to train on the pages, and under its standard terms it can keep content it flags for abuse monitoring for up to 90 days unless an applicable agreement applies. The sentence now says only that the provider is not permitted to train on them. The walkthrough also had Connect building sheets as soon as a folder was connected, and a sheet rebuilding on its own soon after a new document arrived. Connecting a folder lists its clients; sheets are built when the firm presses Build prep, and rebuilt without a press only on Auto-pilot. It also described a NEEDED card as appearing for anything a section expects; the sheet lists the documents the client's own paperwork points to.
The short version
- Nothing about how clients send documents changes; Connect watches the folders that already exist.
- Each client's pile becomes one bookmarked PDF with a NEEDED list per section.
- The chase email writes itself from the checklist, in the firm's own voice.
Picture a solo EA, call her Dana, with about 300 individual clients. Her documents arrive four ways: a TaxDome portal the organized third of her clients actually use, email attachments, phone photos forwarded from texts, and a scanner in the corner for the envelopes. Everything eventually lands in one folder tree on her workstation, one folder per client. That folder tree is the whole filing system, and in February it is also the backlog.
Her bottleneck has never been preparing returns. It is knowing what is in each folder and what is not. Before she can open her tax software for a client, she opens fifteen files with names like IMG_4club.jpg and scan0042.pdf, figures out what they are, and keeps a legal pad of what is still missing. Twenty minutes per client, three hundred times.
Day one: point Connect at the tree
Setup is the installer, linking it to her account, and one decision: which folders to watch. Dana picks the root of her client tree, and Connect lists her clients without opening a document. She ticks the clients she is starting with in Build prep and confirms. Each document's pages go from her workstation straight to the reading provider, which is not permitted to train on them; what our servers keep is placeholders and form types, and the map back to a real name stays on her machine.
When the build finishes, each of those client folders holds a new PDF: cover page, table of contents, the client's documents filed into return-ordered sections, and a NEEDED card for each document the client's own paperwork points to that has not arrived. The brokerage statement that came in twice shows up once, with the duplicate flagged.
February: the checklist becomes the chase
The week's rhythm changes shape. Each morning Dana skims covers instead of folders: document count, open items, done. A client whose prep sheet shows two NEEDED cards gets one email listing exactly those two items, written by Dana, in Dana's voice, because no portal nags her clients on her behalf.
When the missing W-2 lands three days later, photographed at a kitchen table, Connect reads it as it arrives. Dana presses Build prep for that client (on Auto-pilot the sheet would be rebuilt without asking), and the NEEDED card flips to a received card with the Box 1 value on its face. Nothing was moved, tagged, or renamed, and no client portal was involved.
What did not change
Dana's clients never learned a new tool. Her TaxDome portal kept doing its job for the third who like it. Her tax software stayed exactly as it was; the prep sheet just sits on the second monitor while she works. And her legal pad retired, which was the point.
See the prep sheet for yourself
How it works shows what a real prep sheet holds, built from a sample client folder.
See how it works