The summary
- Manual data entry on business returns eliminated. The QuickBooks-to-CCH Axcess handoff now runs through Juno without Jason "having to fiddle with anything."
- Full audit trail preserved across years. Every adjustment, journal entry, and source document tied back to its origin, so the next-year preparer doesn't open a black box.
- Five-minute export to CCH Axcess. The integration Jason expected to be complicated turned out to be a five-minute setup.
- One integrated stack instead of "SaaS soup". QBO → Juno → CCH Axcess runs as one workflow, not 20+ disconnected tools.
Tech stack
- Juno
- CCH Axcess
- TaxDome
- QuickBooks Online
"When it comes to the inputting of items now, especially from QuickBooks, this is getting done without really me having to fiddle with anything. Before, manual data entry, I'm just not a fan."
Jason Smith, CEO, Fix My Books
The situation: a corporate-returns practice that needed automation without losing the audit trail
Fix My Books doesn't look like a typical bookkeeping-to-tax firm. Jason Smith started it in Toronto in 2020, a week before COVID. The firm began with bookkeeping only, expanded into personal returns, then Canadian corporate returns. Jason got his EA so he could handle US filings for the Canadian clients who held US citizenship. The practice eventually relocated to Illinois.
Today the firm runs almost entirely on corporate returns, with cross-border tax planning and strategy as the value-add layer. Jason's framing on the firm's evolution:
"It's grown a lot since we just started. We were originally just doing bookkeeping, and now it's pretty much taxes, really complicated taxes as well. We tried to focus on value adds for clients instead of trying to churn things like 1040s. So we moved towards doing a lot more cross-border work, as well as tax planning, tax strategy, and that kind of thing."
The operating challenge for that kind of practice isn't volume. It's the reconciliation work that sits behind every business return: trial balance, P&L, balance sheet, journal entries, adjustments, and the audit trail that has to survive being picked up by a different preparer next year.
That audit-trail problem is the one Jason cared about. The QuickBooks-to-tax-software connectors most other firms use don't solve it:
"When you use those systems, you change something, you recategorize something there, you don't know who did that, or why they did that. You don't keep a journal note on it, a year later, you come back to it, and it's like, why did we put that there?"
That's the failure mode Jason wanted out of. The data being in the right field on the return isn't enough. You need to know who put it there, why, and what the adjustment was, in a way that still makes sense to a future preparer.
What they did: standardized on QBO → Juno → CCH Axcess as one workflow
Jason found Juno over a year ago, on what he calls "a really obscure Reddit post about potential tax prep software coming up," and decided to try it.
"I thought, okay, yeah, let me just have a go. Very Australian attitude of mine, just have a go. I saw it, I thought it was fantastic as a concept, and it looked great. I signed up, and yeah, I've been using it ever since."
The operating stack that emerged at Fix My Books is integration-first by design. Each tool does its part and hands off cleanly to the next:
"One of the reasons we actually liked Juno was its ability to want to integrate with other things. Our flow would be QBO, Juno, CCH, Juno, push from CCH to TaxDome. It just ended up working really well as a cycle and a flow, instead of having to move between these different softwares."
The thing Jason was reacting against, and the thing this workflow was designed to avoid, is what he calls "SaaS soup":
"You see a lot of tax softwares in the tax space, they want to just do one thing, and then they don't want to integrate with anything else. It's really irritating, because you end up with this 20, 30 software tech stack, and everyone has this bill at the end of the month."
The reason the integration worked, in Jason's framing, is that Juno was willing to build outward toward the tools he was already using rather than asking him to centralize on one vendor.
What changed: data entry gone, audit trail preserved, adjustments visible
The clearest change inside the firm is that the QuickBooks-to-CCH Axcess data flow on business returns is now automated. Juno pulls the P&L and balance sheet from QBO, reclassifies to the tax-return categories, generates journal entries for the adjustments, builds the workpaper, and pushes the data into CCH Axcess.
For Jason specifically, the part that mattered most isn't the speed. It's the documentation that comes with it:
"We generally try to have documentation when we go through and do this sort of stuff, so that's why we gravitated towards Juno. Why I really liked it was there was some sort of trail that we could follow all the way through. It's just less documentation we actually have to manually do on our end, so anything manual that I can get rid of, I would love it."
The auto-generated journal entries are the operating piece. Instead of Jason or his bookkeeper having to remember what was adjusted and where, Juno surfaces the entries it's recommending and lets him accept or modify each one:
"I like that, because it's not going to affect the books per se, it's going to just give you a list of JEs, the AJEs, that you need to then give to the bookkeeper. They can make the change. I also like that you've got that section where you can add everything into the binder. So later on, you're not losing track of what you've done."
On the export side, Jason had braced for complexity. He uses CCH Axcess, and integrations with the bigger tax-software packages have historically been the painful part of any tool:
"I thought this would be more complicated than it was looking. Grant walked me through it. It's super simple. It takes five minutes."
The Reviewer module is the third piece Jason uses heavily, as a second-pair-of-eyes layer on top of the prep work:
"We actually use Juno Reviewer quite a bit. Nothing's ever perfect with these things, human beings are not perfect either, but we like this because it flags a lot of things that we may have missed. Just to have a second pair of eyes at it. A tax return will never be perfect, but you can get it close to perfect."
Why it matters: business returns are a reconciliation problem
The data on a business return is already in QuickBooks. The work is that QuickBooks categories don't map cleanly to tax-return categories, the chart of accounts is built for management reporting not tax reporting, and the adjustments needed to make book-to-tax work (depreciation, meals disallowance, opening-balance-equity cleanups, accrued items) have to be documented in a way that survives next year's preparer reopening the file.
What Jason's experience shows is that for a business-returns-heavy practice, the bottleneck is the reconciliation workflow: surfacing the adjustments, generating the journal entries, building the workpaper, and pushing the data into CCH Axcess (or Drake, ProConnect, Lacerte, etc.) with a trail that holds up next year.
That's the part Fix My Books got from Juno that the QBO-to-tax-software native connectors don't deliver.
Sustainability: a practice that recommends only what it uses
Jason has been an unusually active feedback voice with the Juno team, and several of the firm's requests have made it into the product. On what it's like to work with the team:
"I'm just some random guy. I just own my own tax practice. The only reason I'm here is because I reach out to you guys and say, hey, can you upgrade this, to the Juno team, and then you guys just do it. If you do actually make a comment, they will try to implement and change something."
The QuickBooks class-based pull for rental properties is one example. It came from a request Jason made.
His framing on the firm's overall stance toward the tools it uses is direct:
"We recommend a lot of software, but we only recommend things we'd actually use. We don't like stuff that makes our lives difficult, and we wouldn't want to advocate for it otherwise. Just keep doing what you're doing."
Fix My Books continues to run Juno + CCH Axcess + TaxDome + QBO as the operating stack across its bookkeeping, business returns, and cross-border advisory work.
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This case study draws from Jason Smith's appearance on a Juno business returns launch webinar, hosted by Juno founder Dave Haase. Quotes were lightly cleaned for readability while preserving Jason's framing and intent.
