From a $55-per-return 1040 mill to a systems-first modern firm in three years

The starting point

In early 2023, Jeremy took over R Tax Services in Evansville, Indiana, a 40-year family tax practice his father built. The day-one snapshot:

• Around 2,500 returns per year.
• Average fee around $55 per return.
• Tooling: Drake for prep, Square for payments. No client portal. No workflow tool.
• Service model: in-person appointments, walk-ins, the local-tax-shop pattern.
• Pricing: discount-driven. Long-time clients paid less than new ones; almost nobody paid the same thing.

It was a high-volume operation that worked because the previous owner held it together personally for forty years. It was not a system that transferred cleanly.

Year one: stop the bleeding

The first move was pricing discipline. Discounts off, standardized fee structure on. This sounds simple. In a practice where half the client base has been paying a friend price for fifteen years, it is not.

The second move was client-selection policy. Not every long-time client was a fit for where the firm was going. Some self-selected out when the friend price ended; some were eased out with referrals. The team-protection logic mattered as much as the financial logic: a 2,500-return-at-$55 model is built on the staff working through volume that no system can rescue.

By the end of year one, the firm was smaller, less chaotic, and breakable in fewer places. That made the rest of the rebuild possible.

Year two: replace the stack

The technology transition came once the client base was stable enough to absorb change.

Before	After	Why
Drake	ProConnect	Better integration story with the rest of the new stack and a more modern UX for hire-able preparers.
Square	TaxDome billing	Engagement-aware invoicing tied to the workflow. Square had no concept of an engagement.
(none)	TaxDome client portal	Single place for documents, signatures, and client-facing communication.
(none)	ClickUp	Single source of truth for the work. Pipelines per engagement type, owner per stage, visible handoffs.

The integration points are where most builds succeed or fail. The three that mattered:

1. Intake to engagement record — a new client lands in TaxDome and a corresponding ClickUp engagement is created in the right pipeline without retyping anything.
2. E-file acceptance triggers billing — when ProConnect records an accepted return, the matching ClickUp engagement advances to the billing stage and TaxDome auto-issues the invoice from the engagement template.
3. Document upload advances the stage — when a client completes the document checklist in the portal, the ClickUp task auto-moves from “document collection” to “preparation” so it surfaces on a preparer’s dashboard.

The combination converts most of the firm’s day-to-day from “remember to do X” into “respond to a thing on a list.”

Year two also: drop the in-person model

Roughly in parallel with the stack swap, the service-delivery model shifted from in-person appointments to virtual and drop-off. This was less of a technology decision than a capacity one: in-person consumes preparer hours at a bad ratio, and the kind of client who insists on it is often not the kind of client a tiered-pricing firm wants more of.

The drop-off and virtual model also makes the new tooling work harder. A client who never sets foot in the office is much more likely to use the portal as designed; a client who walks in and hands over a folder is much more likely to bypass it.

Year three (2025): tier the offer, raise the floor

By year three, the system was stable enough to support a real strategic move:

• Base price raised to $225. Up from the inherited $55 baseline. The math on a smaller client base at higher fees is straightforward; the discipline of holding the line on the new floor is the hard part.
• Tiered service options. Returns are no longer one product. The lower tiers are clean compliance-only returns; the higher tiers bundle planning conversations and advisory work that the old practice had been giving away inside the $55 fee.
• Smaller client base, better profitability. Not the same firm at higher prices. A deliberately smaller firm with a different client mix. The high-volume $55 work that built the practice is no longer the work the practice does.

What the system looks like now

Three sources of truth, each owning its own domain:

• TaxDome for client info, contracts, document collection, invoicing, and the official engagement status.
• ClickUp for pipelines, tasks, owners, deadlines, and the working state of every active engagement.
• ProConnect for filings — the canonical record for what was actually accepted by the IRS.

The owner’s Monday-morning view has three slices: capacity per stage, aging engagements, and any anomalies surfaced by the weekly TaxDome-to-ProConnect reconciliation. Most weeks the action list is short.

What this is and isn’t

This is a real story about a real firm: R Tax Services, run by Jeremy Roman, the same person who runs Roman Services. The numbers in this case study are public; Jeremy walked through them on Between 2 Firms, episode 10. The system described above is the same architecture we install at Roman Services engagements with appropriate adjustments for firm size and existing tooling.

This is not a guarantee that any other firm will see the same trajectory. The numbers above are what happened at one firm with one inherited situation. The transferable part is the architecture and sequencing, not the specific outcomes.

It is also not a claim that this is finished. The system at R Tax keeps evolving. AI-assisted internal tooling is the next chapter, on a 7216-aware path that we’ll write up separately as it stabilizes.

What to take from this

Three things, if you’re a firm owner reading.

1. Sequence matters more than tools. The pricing reset and client-selection policy in year one made the year-two stack swap possible. Trying to swap the stack first usually fails.
2. Integration points carry the weight. Picking the right tools matters less than building the three or four integrations that turn human discipline into automatic behavior. Intake → engagement, e-file → invoice, upload → stage are the durable wins.
3. A smaller, better firm is usually available. Most owners who feel buried in volume can earn more on fewer clients with a tiered offer. The hard part is holding the line during the transition.

Listen to the full backstory

Jeremy went through the year-by-year detail of this on Between 2 Firms, episode 10 with host Nick. The episode runs about 90 minutes and covers the parts this case study compresses: the day-one inventory, the pricing reset, the staff protection logic, and the 2025 reset to $225 base with tiered advisory.

If you want a system shaped like this for your own firm, a fit call is the fastest way to figure out whether it’s a thing you can build internally or a thing where bringing us in shortens the timeline.