The stats
- 10 to 20x faster on advisory research with Juno Advisor
- K-1 capacity bottleneck cleared without adding headcount, even with real estate program clients carrying heavy K-1 volume
- 10 to 12 hours of complex business-acquisition scenario work that David estimates would otherwise have taken months
- Advisers who didn't sign up to be tax preparers now participate meaningfully in the tax process
Tech stack
- Juno
- ProConnect
"Our advisers now don't have to become little mini CPAs."
David Blain, Founder and CEO, BlueSky Wealth Advisors
The situation: a wealth firm whose advisers were drowning in tax work they never signed up for
BlueSky Wealth Advisors was built from the start as an integrated tax and wealth advisory practice. David Blain, who graduated from West Point and spent 10 years in the military before moving into wealth management, bought a tax and accounting firm early on so that tax prep, tax planning, investment planning, and estate planning could all live under one roof.
"I had this vision to provide a service in investments and tax where people could get high-quality advice for a reasonable fee with personal attention."
The trouble was that the model only works if the firm can keep pace with the tax side. By David's own account, BlueSky's tax work was concentrated on a few senior CPAs, including David himself and his partner Christie, while newer advisers who hadn't signed up to be CPAs were getting pulled into tax prep anyway. K-1s, especially from BlueSky's real estate program clients, were a particular pressure point.
"K-1s are the bane of our existence."
Two compounding problems started showing up at once. K-1 volume was about to push the firm into hiring additional tax staff it didn't want to hire. And the advisers who were already there were getting frustrated enough that David was openly worried about losing them.
What they did: adopted Juno early and pushed tax work down to the team
BlueSky was an early Juno customer. David has been candid that the product was very different in its first months than it is now, but the firm's bet was that having a tool to handle the grunt work would matter more than waiting for a polished release.
The implementation shifted who did what. Instead of tax prep falling on David, Christie, and the handful of CPAs at the firm, the team's advisers and client service staff started running source documents through Juno themselves.
"Now we're saying, look, can you just run the software? You just do this."
David moved most of his own tax time into Juno's Advisor module, using it to run scenario analysis on complex client situations. In one stretch, he ran 10 to 12 hours of business-acquisition scenario work through Juno Advisor.
"I was running hypothetical scenarios through Juno Advisor. Pretend company A owns company B with shareholders A, B, and C. I asked Juno what would be the optimal way to do this, and just dug really deep. It was like sitting down with some tax guru and having a conversation. It was amazing."
His estimate of how long that scenario analysis would have taken him without Juno: months.
What changed: K-1 capacity unlocked, hiring decision canceled, research time cut 10 to 20x
"It's just transformed."
The capacity question that had been driving a hiring decision resolved itself.
"We've gone from trying to figure out how we're going to hire people to do this, to realizing we can do this with Juno and the people we have."
That single shift carried two outcomes. The firm absorbed its busy-season K-1 volume without expanding headcount. And the advisers David had been worried about losing didn't have to become tax preparers to stay.
"Our advisers now don't have to become little mini CPAs. They participate meaningfully in the tax process."
David's own work changed too. With his time freed up from compliance and from manually running K-1s, he could spend it on advisory research that would have been impractical before. He's been clear about the magnitude:
"Juno cuts my research down by 10 to 20x."
Why it matters: integrated tax and wealth advisory becomes operationally viable
For firm owners considering the integrated tax-and-wealth model that BlueSky has been running, the operational hurdle has always been the same: the tax side scales linearly with headcount, and the talent to handle it is hard to keep. The combined practice promises a better client experience, but the back office has to carry it.
What David's experience suggests is that the math changes when the prep itself stops requiring the firm's most senior people. When Juno handles extraction and validation, advisers who didn't sign up to be tax preparers can participate substantively in the tax process. The senior preparers get their time back for the research and planning work that compounds.
David has been doing this 26 years. His take is straightforward: the prep work was always going to be a low-margin part of an advisory firm's business. The piece that needed to stay human was the planning and the judgment. The shift his firm made was making that division of labor real.
Sustainability: a firm that grew capacity without growing headcount
The BlueSky shift is recent enough that the longer-term picture is still developing. What's already visible: a hiring decision the firm was preparing to make is no longer on the table, advisers who were considering leaving stayed, and David is spending his hours on work he wanted to be doing all along.
The firm continues to use Juno for both prep and advisory research. David's stated interest going forward is the K-1 parsing improvements rolling out, which his real estate program clients will be the first inside the firm to test.
"I can't wait to run all the returns through Juno's K-1 parsing."
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Source: Quotes are from David Blain's appearance on the Modern Tax Pros podcast, hosted by Juno founder Dave Haase. Quotes lightly cleaned for readability while preserving David's exact framing and intent.
