Firm360 announces tax prep automation capacities

Accounting practice management solutions provider Firm360, in partnership with tax prep software company Juno, announced Firm360 AutoPrep, for firms doing tax prep on major tax software.

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AutoPrep takes the client tax documents firms already collected in Firm360 and turns them into entered, verified data in their tax software, with no manual typing. Firms select documents in their Firm360 document section, individually or in bulk, and send them to Juno in one action. Juno extracts data across more than 100 document types, including W-2s, 1099s, K-1s, Schedules C and E, balance sheets and P&Ls. It then builds a review-ready workpaper, flags source-to-return mismatches and pushes verified data into Drake, Lacerte, ProConnect, CCH Axcess, UltraTax and other major tax software. When a prior-year return is on file, Juno also builds a document checklist so teams know what's still outstanding before a return goes out.

"Every firm has to get three things right to thrive: client experience, work management, and firm health. Tax prep runs through all of them," said Firm360 CEO Patrick O'Neill in a statement. "AutoPrep gives firms hundreds of staff hours back each season, and their preparers start at review, where their judgment actually matters."

In a later email, he said the Firm360 announcement was made with the idea that firms should not have to stitch together separate systems to run a practice, do the tax work and handle the accounting, as the handoffs between these systems are where a lot of firms see lost time and accumulate errors. 

"Tax prep is one of the clearest examples," he wrote. "It touches the client experience through how fast a return comes back. It touches the team through all the tracking and manual keying. And it touches the firm's margins, because every hour spent typing in a W-2 is an hour not going toward higher-value work,"

To O'Neill, moving deeper into the tax prep space isn't really a departure from the company's traditional practice management focus. Cohesion, he said, has always been the strategy, as the intention has always been to bring practice management, tax and accounting into one platform as a complete experience. He intends to further develop AutoPrep with more features and capacities in the future. 

"As for what's next, I can tell you AutoPrep itself isn't finished growing," he added. "Juno is the engine powering the data extraction and verification you'll see at launch, and we intentionally partnered with them because we share a lot of DNA with them — they were also founded by a CPA, and they also obsess over creating the best possible customer experience. Beyond the Juno integration, we're already building additional features into AutoPrep, so this isn't 'we added tax prep once, and we're done,' it's a capability we intend to keep building on."  

AutoPrep is coming soon and requires a Firm360 Premium plan and an active Juno account. Firm360 firms can join the waitlist for early access at juno.tax/integrations/firm360.


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Technology Practice management Tax prep software
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