Juno was built inside this firm. When COVID broke Dave's hiring model in 2020, he spent two years trying to backfill junior staff before giving up and starting to build the tool he wished existed. Golden State Accounting was the operating environment used to test, refine, and prove it. Every feature in Juno you'll see in this case study came from a real workflow problem inside this firm. The transformation below is the proof, told by the three people who lived it: Dave (owner and Juno founder), Mili Borzini (operations lead), and Bonnie Fenton (CPA, preparer/reviewer).
The stats
- Tax return prep time cut 50% firm-wide after adopting Juno
- Profit margins doubled (from ~15-20% to higher), without changing the client mix
- Headcount restructured from 12 full-time employees to 2 full-time plus 6 part-time, intentionally favoring senior staff with flexible hours
- Admin staff now do return data entry that used to require senior preparers, freeing reviewers for judgment work
Tech stack
- Juno
- ProConnect
- Karbon
"Juno pretty much does all my work for me, which is great."
Mili Borzini, Operations Lead, Golden State Accounting
The situation: a small CPA firm broken by COVID and the junior-staff hiring crisis
Before Juno existed, this is what Golden State Accounting looked like.
Dave Haase bought the firm from his mother in 2015. By 2019-2020, the Bay Area practice had peaked at 12 full-time employees doing the standard mix of CPA work: individual returns, S-corps, some bookkeeping.
Then COVID broke it.
"COVID kind of changed everything, and it's actually a big part of why I started Juno. It started in 2020 with the chaos of, you know, we had a lot of people leave the state of California, and then when things started to reopen, we just had a huge amount of turnover in one year. People kind of went back to in-person jobs, or they just didn't want to work virtually."
Dave Haase, Founder of Juno
Dave spent the next two years trying to backfill the roles. He couldn't find good junior staff. He didn't have a real training operation. Every replacement hire was another six months of ramp time he didn't have. He started to wonder if the math on hiring junior preparers worked at all anymore:
"You're fresh out of school, I'm gonna pay you 55 grand or 60 grand, and you're gonna work 60 hours a week, 4 months a year. You can never make a mistake, and half the time, you're gonna be chasing clients for documents, or typing in numbers off of PDFs. It's not surprising that we're struggling to get people to come into this profession."
Dave Haase, Founder of Juno
In 2023, instead of running yet another hiring cycle, Dave started building Juno inside the firm.
What they did: rebuilt the firm around senior staff, flexible hours, and the tool they were building
The Golden State transformation wasn't a single decision. It was a sequence of changes that compounded over a few years. The headline pieces:
Switched off hourly billing. The old model was reactive: bill for time, hire to add capacity, hope nothing breaks. The new model is value-based pricing for clients and variable hours for staff. When Juno cut prep time by 50%, the firm kept the savings instead of dropping prices.
Restructured headcount. From 12 full-time to 2 full-time plus 6 part-time. Counterintuitively, the firm now has a more senior team, with a higher admin-to-preparer ratio. The flexible-hours model lets Dave keep the people he wants long-term:
"What I like best about that is I get to keep really good people. If I can give them flexibility, I feel like it's harder for someone to take them away from me."
Dave Haase, Founder of Juno
Adopted Juno across the workflow. Documents flow from the client portal into Juno, which extracts and validates the data, generates the work paper, and pushes the return into ProConnect. The shift wasn't just about speed. It was about who in the firm could do which work.
Fired the bad-fit clients. Over four years, Golden State has methodically removed clients who refused to use the firm's processes. At one point, that meant firing about a third of the client base in a single year. The firm now adds 15-20 names a year to a running "bad fit" list and works through them after busy season.
"There were people that just straight up were like, I'm not gonna use any of your processes. I'll do whatever I want. I'm gonna ignore 40 emails and then submit my stuff 5 days before the deadline."
Dave Haase, Founder of Juno
What changed: admin staff doing data entry, preparers doing review, reviewers handling exceptions
The role changes are the operational story. Mili Borzini joined the firm a year and a half ago on the administration side. Today she runs the front end of every return:
"My job in the beginning is to make sure we have all of the documents from the clients. I go through our link portal system, save all of our documents into our Google Drive portal, and then all I have to do is just go to Juno and upload everything. Juno pretty much does all my work for me. It uploads everything, it validates everything, and then you just send it off into our tax software system, which we use ProConnect."
Mili Borzini, Operations Lead, Golden State Accounting
A return takes Mili 15 minutes to an hour, depending on document load. Crucially, she's doing work that used to require a senior preparer, and she doesn't have a tax background. The tool fills in the field-mapping knowledge:
"I'm not a tax preparer, so I don't really know much about the prep side, but it makes it so easy for just the administration staff. It tells you where to look in the document to be able to validate everything."
Mili Borzini, Operations Lead, Golden State Accounting
For Bonnie Fenton, a CPA who's been at the firm since 2019, the shift moved her from data entry into the judgment work that should have been her job all along:
"You're actually eliminating two points of entry: one being the work paper, and one being the tax return. Just getting the high-volume, low-reward data entry parts out of that, you're saving time in two places. It keeps your brain fresher. You're not having to go back and forth between all these documents."
Bonnie Fenton, CPA, Golden State Accounting
The benefit Bonnie didn't expect: extension season got dramatically easier.
"Being able to throw everything into Juno, pump it into the tax return, compare it to last year, and pump out extension estimates in the heat of the season was so much easier and so much faster. It really allowed us to look at things that we might have missed."
Bonnie Fenton, CPA, Golden State Accounting
Dave's own time changed too. As the reviewer of last resort, he used to be the bottleneck on every return. Now his reviews are short, his preparers do the first pass through Juno's source-to-return checks, and he runs a tech company on the side:
"We reduced our time on tax returns this year by, like, 50%, which is just huge. And it made my life a lot better, especially trying to run a tech company at the same time."
Dave Haase, Founder of Juno
Why it matters: a firm owner doesn't need to choose between scale and a real life
For most CPA firms, the operational model still assumes a Junior Preparer Industrial Complex: hire fresh grads, train them through 60-hour weeks, hope they stay, replace them when they don't. That's the model COVID broke for Golden State. It's also the model that's getting harder to staff every year.
Dave's lesson, after rebuilding his own firm: the answer isn't more junior preparers working harder. It's senior people doing higher-judgment work, supported by tools that handle what used to be entry-level data entry. The firm gets smaller, more flexible, more profitable, and easier to staff.
The piece Dave's most clear on: this only works if the foundations are clean.
"You've got to have key elements in place before you start to really automate. Where is your data? Is it consistently saved in the same places? Are you collecting information from clients in a consistent way? That is really important. And your processes need to be documented and consistent across your staff."
Dave Haase, Founder of Juno
Sustainability: continuous improvement, not a one-time fix
Golden State treats process improvement as an annual cycle, not a project. After every busy season, the team goes back through the bad-fit client list, the work paper templates, the practice management workflows, and the integration points between tools. Bonnie drives a lot of the work paper improvements. Mili manages the upstream client side. Dave admits he's not great at running the firm, and credits the people on his team for doing the work he doesn't:
"I'm not a super process-oriented person, but I have the benefit of working with a lot of folks that have put in some great processes."
Dave Haase, Founder of Juno
The team is now experimenting with Juno's Reviewer module (the source-to-return checks and "gotcha" logic). The next round of improvements is already in motion.
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This case study draws from a webinar with the Golden State Accounting team: Dave Haase (owner, also founder of Juno), Mili Borzini (operations lead), and Bonnie Fenton (CPA, preparer/reviewer). Quotes were lightly cleaned for readability while preserving each speaker's framing.
