Emily Thompson
firm founder · Miami, Florida
Press play — energetic intro, then the conversation
J This is Jennifer from the UpTax Podcast Room, and today I've got Emily Thompson with me. Emily Thompson, so great to have you on. E Thanks for having me on the show, Jennifer. I'm excited to just talk shop for a bit, honestly. J Same here. So give everyone the quick rundown — what does your firm look like day to day? E Sure, so I run a bookkeeping and tax firm out of Miami. We're mid-size, small-business focused, and right now we manage right around two hundred clients. J Two hundred! That's not a small operation. E It's not, and it doesn't feel small in February, I'll tell you that much. J Okay let's go there — walk me through what busy season actually feels like for you. E Honestly it used to be chaos. You've got clients sending documents at the last minute, staff pulling late nights, and everyone is just drowning in returns that all need to be drafted, reviewed, checked again. J And I imagine at that volume you can't just wing it with a couple of preparers. E No way. We got to a point where we were seriously asking ourselves — do we hire an accountant, maybe two, just to survive the season? Or do we hire a bookkeeper to take some prep work off our plate? J That's the classic fork in the road for a growing firm. E Right, and neither option felt great. Hiring is expensive, training takes months, and then you're paying full salaries for maybe three intense months of the year. J So what was the other option you were weighing? E We actually got pretty far down the road of building an offshore team. Looked at contracts, looked at recruiters, the whole thing. J And what made you pump the brakes on that? E The real question became, honestly, what's more cost-effective — building our own offshore team from scratch, or just using something like UpTax.ai that already has that infrastructure built in. J That is exactly the question we hear from firm owners constantly. So which way did you go? E We went with UpTax, and I'm just going to say it plainly — it's been a genuine game-changer for us. J I love hearing that. Tell me what actually changed once you brought it in. E So the AI tax preparation engine drafts the returns for us first. It's pulling in the client data, organizing it, flagging inconsistencies, and building out a draft return that's honestly shockingly clean. J And that's not the final step though, right? Walk me through what happens after the draft. E Right, it's not just the AI and done. There's an offshore review layer built into UpTax, so trained reviewers go through the draft before it even gets to us. By the time my team sees it, most of the heavy lifting is already handled. J So your CPAs are reviewing and finalizing, not starting from a blank page. E Exactly. We're the ones making the final call and getting it ready to file, but we're not sitting there for hours building a return from scratch anymore. J That's the part people don't always picture — it's preparation plus a review layer, not some black box spitting out final returns. E Right, and that distinction matters a lot to me as a firm owner. I still feel like we're in control. We're just not buried. J So let's talk numbers a little. What did this actually free up for you? E We calculated it out and it's over two hundred billable hours a year that we got back, just from not manually drafting every single return. J Two hundred hours is basically another part-time staff member's worth of capacity. E That's exactly how I think about it. It gave us capacity without hiring another accountant or bookkeeper. We didn't have to recruit, train, or carry a new salary through the slow months. J And versus the offshore team you were building out — how did the cost actually compare? E Not close, honestly. Building our own offshore team meant management overhead, recruiting costs, quality control issues we'd have to solve ourselves. UpTax already had all of that solved, and it was a fraction of the cost. J That's really the core of how UpTax supports CPA firms — you get the offshore capacity without building the offshore operation yourself. E Exactly, and that's the phrase I keep using with other firm owners — it's tax preparation outsourcing, but done the smart way, with AI doing the first pass and real reviewers checking the work. J Has it changed how you think about growing the firm from here? E Completely. We're not scared of adding another fifty or a hundred clients next year, because I know we can automate our tax practice around this instead of just throwing more bodies at the problem. J That's the dream honestly — being able to automate a CPA practice without losing the personal touch with clients. E That's exactly it. My team still talks to clients, still gives advice, still does the relationship work. UpTax just took the grind out of the actual return prep. J If another firm owner is sitting where you were, staring down busy season and wondering whether to hire or go offshore, what would you tell them? E I'd say try the AI tax route first. Seriously, look into UpTax before you sign any recruiting contracts. It changed our whole busy season, and I don't think we're going back. J I love that. Emily Thompson, this has been such a great conversation, thank you so much for sharing all of this. E Thanks again for having me, Jennifer, this was fun. J And to everyone listening, if you're a CPA or EA firm feeling that same busy-season crunch, go check out UpTax.ai and book a demo. See what AI tax preparation can actually do for your practice.
