The stats
- Retiree return prep cut from 90 minutes to 20 by moving the work from CPA to admin
- $70K vs $140K cost arbitrage on commodity returns: the same work, the right person, the right rate
- 20-30% efficiency gain when acquired firms move from manual data entry onto Juno + ProConnect
- CPA-firm acquisitions integrate faster with Juno as the operating stack across the rolled-up firms
Tech stack
- Juno
- ProConnect
- TaxDome
"The CPA is spending twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half. And that arbitrage between $70,000 a year versus $140,000 is a very nice savings."
Joel Yaeger, Founder, CMPD Wealth Advisory Tax
The situation: a wealth-advisory firm with growing tax volume and a 60% scanning hit rate
CMPD Wealth Advisory Tax is an integrated practice. Tax preparation and wealth advisory under one roof, with one deliverable to the client. Joel Yaeger, who built the firm and previously worked at Baker Tilly, has been clear about why they bundled the two services:
"We want more accounting clients to do wealth management. There are higher margins in wealth management at the end of the day."
The strategic move was M&A. Joel began acquiring CPA practices to scale revenue and roll those clients into the integrated tax-and-wealth-advisory model. Each acquisition came with a tech stack he had to integrate, and most were manual on the prep side. The scanning-based tools they inherited were hitting around 50-60% accuracy on documents:
"What used to be scanning was a 50-60% hit rate, and definitely not every doc."
That's a problem at scale. When you're integrating an acquired firm into a growing wealth-advisory practice, you can't pay senior CPAs to retype 1099-Rs and W-2s into a tax program. Or rather, you can, but the unit economics of the rollup stop working.
What they did: standardized on Juno + ProConnect across acquired firms
Joel's operating playbook for new acquisitions is straightforward. Standardize the tax stack on Juno + ProConnect. Push the lowest-judgment work down to admin or junior preparers. Free senior CPAs to do review and tax planning.
The shift on retiree returns is the clearest example. A 1099-R, a Social Security statement, maybe a small 1099-INT. That return used to take a senior CPA 1.5 hours of hand-entering data. Under the new workflow, an admin runs the source documents through Juno, validates the extraction, pushes to ProConnect. A senior CPA picks it up for review.
"The CPA is spending twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half. And that arbitrage between $70,000 a year versus $140,000 is a very nice savings."
The cost framing is more useful than a pure time-savings claim. The same return, done by the right person at the right rate, is doing work that used to be billed at twice the cost.
What changed: efficiency gains, junior staff capabilities expanded, the M&A math improved
For acquired firms moving onto Juno + ProConnect, Joel sees consistent efficiency gains:
"We could consider that a 20-30% efficiency gain. We're seeing it live on one of the firms we just acquired. They hand-entered everything using UltraTax. Switching them into ProConnect and Juno is going to be a big gain on those returns where you have multiple docs."
Junior staff at CMPD are also picking up returns faster than they would have without Juno. They're starting from a forms view rather than a data-interview view, which is how reviewers actually think about returns:
"It's making the learning curve shorter for our team."
And there's a second-order effect that matters for an M&A-fueled firm. Prospects can see the difference. Joel mentioned showing acquisition targets and prospects his firm's Juno + ProConnect workflow:
"We show some of our prospects our process with Juno and ProConnect. Some people might say, don't show them. Then they'll know the difference between the value and the reality sometimes. But the clients have been blown away."
Why it matters: the unit economics of CPA-firm rollups change when prep gets automated
For firm owners thinking about scale, whether through hiring or acquisition, the operational question is the same: who pays for the prep work, and how much does it cost? When that work moves down a level from senior CPA to admin, with the right tool doing the extraction, the math on growth gets a lot more friendly.
Joel's view, looking at the next phase of the rollup:
"If Juno evolves our ability to acquire more for volume to scale, that volume and revenue is probably why I picked this. The removal of a lot of data entry is huge in an efficient, interconnected way between tax software and Juno."
The deliverable to the client is also changing. Tax prep is becoming the commodity work. Tax planning is where senior CPAs spend their hours and where the firm captures margin. Juno fits both:
"Juno is the very first check our staff do when running a tax plan."
Sustainability: tax season is one thing, tax planning is the other
Joel sees tax season as compliance work that should be turned and burned as fast as possible. The real margin lives in the planning work that comes after.
"Tax season is how do I turn and burn as many tax returns as possible. And then what happens post-4/15 is when it's tax planning season. Junior team members are going to learn a lot fast reviewing forms instead of putting data entry in."
The firm continues to run Juno + ProConnect as the operating stack across its acquired practices, and the integration playbook is getting tighter with each rollup.
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