David Alvarez
fractional CFO · Chicago, Illinois
Press play — energetic intro, then the conversation
J This is Jennifer from the UpTax Podcast Room, and today I've got David Alvarez with me. David Alvarez, so great to have you on. D Thanks for having me on the show, Jennifer. J So set the scene for us. You're running a firm out of Chicago, doing fractional CFO work plus accounting. That's a lot of moving pieces. D It really is. We're twelve people total, and we manage about sixty business clients. Some of it's monthly close, some is advisory, and then obviously there's the tax side that eats us alive every spring. J Eats you alive is the phrase I hear a lot this time of year. What did busy season actually look like for you before you changed anything? D Brutal, honestly. We'd bring on two or three seasonal staff every January, train them fast, work them sixty-hour weeks through April, and then let them go. It was expensive and exhausting for everyone, including me. J And training people just to lose them a few months later — that's got to sting. D It does. You're investing real time into someone who's gone by May. Plus the quality was inconsistent because they're new, they're rushed, and mistakes slip through when everyone's underwater. J So what was the actual turning point for you? When did you start rethinking the model? D Two years ago I sat down and did real math. I asked myself, is it cheaper to build an offshore team from scratch, or is there a smarter way to get capacity without hiring at all? J That's the question every firm owner is quietly asking right now. What did you find? D Building offshore sounds cheap on paper. Lower hourly rates, sure. But then you've got recruiting, management overhead, time zone coordination, quality control layers you have to build yourself. It's not just labor cost, it's a whole operational system you're standing up. J Right, people forget the hidden cost of managing a team you can't just walk over and talk to. D Exactly. And I didn't want to become a call center manager. I wanted to stay a CFO advisor to my clients, not spend my nights on video calls with a team eight time zones away. J So where'd you land instead? D We split the work differently. Now the first draft of a return gets built with AI. It pulls the source docs, organizes everything, and produces a clean starting point way faster than a junior staffer typing it in by hand. J So the AI is doing that first heavy lift. D Right, the grunt work. Then instead of hiring my own offshore team to review it, we use an offshore review layer that's already built and already trained on this exact workflow. They check the draft, flag anything odd, and hand it back to us. J So you get the cost benefit of offshore review without the burden of building and managing that team yourself. D That's the whole thing. I'm not recruiting in another country, I'm not training people I'll never meet, I'm not worrying about who quits in March. I just plug into a review process that already exists. J And your team here in Chicago, what's their role now? D They do the final review before anything goes to the client. They're catching the nuanced stuff, the judgment calls, the conversations with clients about their specific situation. The tool we use handles the repetitive part, the offshore layer handles the second set of eyes, and my staff handles the relationship and the final sign-off. J That's a really clean division of labor. So walk me through the actual number — thirty percent fewer seasonal staff, is that right? D Yeah, we used to bring on three seasonal preparers. Last season we brought on two, and honestly, we could've done it with less stress even than that. We just wanted a buffer for year one of the new process. J So real dollars saved, but also real sanity saved, it sounds like. D Sanity is underrated in this business. My senior staff weren't drowning in data entry. They were doing the thinking work, the stuff that actually needs a CPA's brain. J I want to go back to something you said — this is different from just shipping the work to Bangalore. A lot of firms have tried straight offshoring and had mixed results. What makes your setup different? D The difference is the AI draft comes first. When you just offshore raw data entry, you're paying someone to manually build the return from scratch, and quality really depends on who you got that day. When AI drafts it first, the offshore reviewer isn't building anything, they're checking something that's already structured and mostly accurate. J So the review layer becomes a quality gate instead of a production line. D Exactly, it's a completely different job. They're comparing the draft against source documents, looking for anomalies, not typing in numbers under deadline pressure. That's a much higher quality check for a lot less management on my end. J Did your clients notice any change in turnaround or quality? D Turnaround got faster, honestly. We're not waiting on a junior staffer to slowly build a return anymore. And clients started getting drafts back for review sooner in the process, which they loved. Nobody wants a surprise the week before the deadline. J You mentioned you still make the final call on everything though. D Always. Nothing goes out the door without our firm reviewing and being comfortable with it. The AI drafts, the offshore layer checks, but we're the ones putting our name on it. That part hasn't changed and never will. J That responsibility piece matters. If someone listening is sitting where you were two years ago, staring at the offshore-versus-hire decision, what would you tell them? D Do the real math, not just the hourly rate math. Add up recruiting, training, management time, turnover. Then ask if there's a way to get capacity without owning all of that. For us, that answer was combining AI drafting with an existing offshore review process instead of building our own from zero. J That's such a practical way to think about it. David, this has been such a great, honest look at how a real firm actually restructured busy season. Thank you for sharing all of this. D Thanks for having me, Jennifer. Happy to talk shop about this stuff anytime. J If you're listening and thinking about your own busy season nightmare, go check out uptax.ai and book a demo. See you next time on the UpTax Podcast Room.
