The stats
- 40-hour weeks held through tax season, no weekends
- Extension-season Juno onboarding so the team could learn without pressure
- Preparers upskilled from data entry to review as Juno absorbed the extraction step
- One-workflow-at-a-time rollout to protect team focus and momentum
Tech stack
- Juno
- ProConnect
- Financial Cents
"Culture is the point. Technology is just how we protect it." – Katie Helle, Scaled Accounting Solutions
The situation: 15 years in public accounting, one hard question
Katie spent 15 years in public accounting before launching her own firm. She loved the work. She did not love what the profession had convinced her was normal, the long hours, endless busy seasons, missed family dinners.
When she started Scaled Accounting Solutions, she made herself one promise. The firm had to work around her life and her family, not the other way around. Every process, every technology investment, every hire has been filtered through the same question: does this help me build the firm I actually want?
That framing changed how she evaluated tech. Katie is an early adopter and a self-described tech nerd, but she's cautious about stacking too much change on a team at once.
"Technology doesn't create capacity. Great systems create capacity. Technology simply makes those systems better." – Katie Helle, Scaled Accounting Solutions
What she did: onboarded Juno during extension season, one workflow, one owner
When Katie learned about Juno, she saw the fit right away, not because she thought it would solve everything, but because she believed it could take repetitive extraction work off her team.
She refused to onboard during tax season.
"Please, do not implement major software change in January. January is when we are trying to survive, not learn. Extension season is completely different. This is when I onboarded Juno and a lot of my other softwares. My team had room to breathe." – Katie Helle, Scaled Accounting Solutions
She picked one workflow to start: individual tax preparation during extension season. She defined success upfront (moving repetitive data entry off the preparers so they could start ahead and spend more time reviewing and advising). She became the first learner herself. She attended the trainings, she made the mistakes, she helped the rest of the team learn the software.
Only after the workflow felt familiar did the firm expand its use of Juno. Everything intentional. Nothing rushed.
What changed: admin drives extraction, preparers start further ahead
Scaled Accounting Solutions is a small firm. Katie plus a part-time preparer, a part-time admin, and a full-time bookkeeper. The workflow shift shows what admin-driven prep can do at that size.
Clients upload their documents and complete a digital organizer through the firm's portal. Katie's admin pulls the documents into Juno and runs the extraction. Katie's preparer then picks up a return that's already populated in ProConnect, and her job shifts from typing to reviewing.
"Instead of my preparers entering the information from every tax document, our admin actually uploads the documents into Juno. Juno then extracts the data from those documents. Our preparers now start further ahead. Instead of manually keying in every document into the tax software, they can now begin with reviewing the extracted information." – Katie Helle, Scaled Accounting Solutions
Juno slotted into a workflow that was already working. The firm kept its existing binder and review process because that's what the team already knew. Juno absorbed the extraction and validation. Everything else stayed familiar.
The unexpected upside: the shift upskilled Katie's preparer.
"This has been really an upskill for my preparer as she's using Juno to input the documents and review everything to make sure the data is there that needs to be there. So at the same time, you're upskilling your team." – Katie Helle, Scaled Accounting Solutions
Why it matters: the 40-hour tax season holds
Katie's firm has a hard operating rule. Nobody works more than 40 hours a week. Nobody works weekends. That includes tax season.
"Our firm, including myself, does not work more than 40 hours a week. We do not work weekends, even during tax season. That is not accidental. It's something we designed with the systems that protect us." – Katie Helle, Scaled Accounting Solutions
Katie takes her daughter on a spring break vacation every year, during tax season, without disrupting the firm. That's the tell of the design working. The 40-hour cap isn't a promise on a website. It's what the operating model produces.
The measurement that matters: how she knows Juno is working
Katie doesn't measure Juno by hours saved. She measures three things.
Manual touches. How many times does someone re-enter information that already exists somewhere else? Fewer touches means less inefficiency, fewer errors, and preparers reviewing instead of retyping.
Speed to reviewer-ready. Not total prep time, but how long it takes a return to arrive at the reviewer clean. That's the friction metric.
Room. For better client conversations, planning work, thoughtful review, and space to breathe. Katie's framing: capacity isn't measured in returns per week; it's measured in how intentionally the firm can serve the clients it's chosen.
Sustainability: a calmer firm, on purpose
Scaled Accounting Solutions grew fast in year one and Katie still felt the tax-season pressure her old firm had trained her to expect. That was the moment she realized technology alone wasn't going to fix the pace. Great systems had to come first.
Juno has been the last piece to make the systems produce the outcome she designed for. Her team spends more time reviewing and advising, less time keying documents. Her preparer is upskilling in the process. Her firm looks, to her clients, like a firm that has its act together, because it does.
Want to see what Juno does on your firm's returns?
Start 5 free preparations of AI tax preparation software built by a CPA, trusted by 1,000s of tax pros.
7-day trial. No credit card required.
This case study draws from Katie Helle's appearance on a Juno-hosted webinar (August 2026) with Dave Haase, founder of Juno. Quotes were lightly cleaned for readability while preserving Katie's framing and intent.
