Mark Reynolds
Enrolled Agent · Denver, Colorado
Press play — energetic intro, then the conversation
J This is Jennifer from the UpTax Podcast Room, and today I've got Mark Reynolds with me. Mark Reynolds, so great to have you on. M Thanks for having me on the show, Jennifer. I've been looking forward to this one. J So let's start with the basics. Tell everyone about your practice out there in Denver. M Sure. I'm an Enrolled Agent, been running my own shop for about nine years now. We handle roughly 300 returns a season, a mix of individual, small business, some real estate investors. Pretty typical firm, honestly. M But typical doesn't mean easy. Busy season used to just about break me. J Okay, tell me about that pain. What did January through April actually look like before? M Chaos, honestly. I had one part-time preparer helping me, and we were just drowning in data entry. Every return starts with somebody manually keying in W-2s, 1099s, K-1s. That's hours and hours before you even get to the actual tax thinking. M I was working sixteen-hour days for like ten weeks straight. My wife started calling it 'the season I disappear.' J I feel that. So the obvious next step for a lot of firms is to hire an accountant, or hire a bookkeeper, or build out an offshore team to help with the volume. Did you look at that route? M I did, seriously looked at it. I actually got quotes from a couple offshore staffing agencies out of India and the Philippines. J And what did that look like cost-wise? M It wasn't cheap once you added it all up. You're talking recruiting fees, management overhead, training time, plus you still need someone stateside supervising the work. And honestly, the ramp-up time was brutal. Months before someone's actually productive on US tax forms. J Right, and that's before you even factor in turnover, which is a real thing with offshore staffing. M Exactly. I'd have been managing a whole HR problem on top of my actual tax practice. That's when a colleague mentioned UpTax to me. J Okay so walk me through it. What is UpTax actually doing for your practice day to day? M So the way it works is their AI tax preparation engine takes in the client documents, and it drafts the actual return. Income, deductions, all the forms populated. Then there's an offshore review layer that checks the draft before it ever lands on my desk. M So by the time I open a file, it's not a blank canvas anymore, it's basically a completed draft that's already been looked at once. J So you're not filing through UpTax, to be clear, you're still the one reviewing and getting the return out the door. M Right, that's an important distinction. UpTax preps it, their review team checks it, and then I do my final professional review as the Enrolled Agent. I'm still the one making the call and putting my name on it. It just means I'm reviewing instead of building from scratch. J That's such a huge shift in where your time goes. So what did that actually do to your capacity this season? M I mean, this is the part that still kind of blows my mind. I went from 300 returns with me basically drowning, to handling well over 800 this year. Same me, same one part-time preparer. No new hires. J Wait, almost 3x the volume without adding headcount? M Almost 3x, yeah. I didn't have to hire an accountant, I didn't have to hire a bookkeeper, I didn't have to build an offshore team from scratch. It's genuinely a game-changer for a practice my size. J I love hearing that because that's exactly how we think about this, this is how UpTax supports CPA firms and EA practices, giving you leverage without the staffing headache. M That's exactly it. And on cost, it wasn't even close compared to what I priced out for offshore staffing. I'm paying based on usage, no recruiting fees, no management layer, no ramp-up time. It made the offshore build-out option look really inefficient in comparison. J So for firms listening who are on the fence between tax preparation outsourcing the traditional way, meaning building your own offshore team, versus a platform like UpTax, what would you tell them? M I'd say do the math honestly. Add up recruiting, training, management time, turnover risk. Then compare that to a system where the AI tax drafting and review is already built in and ready to scale up or down with your season. M For me it wasn't close. UpTax basically let me automate a CPA practice's worth of grunt work without touching my org chart. J That phrase, automate your tax practice, that's really the heart of it, isn't it. It's not about replacing your judgment, it's about removing the repetitive drag. M Completely. My value as an EA was never in typing numbers into boxes. It's in the advisory conversations, the planning, catching things a computer might miss on a judgment call. UpTax freed me up to actually do that work instead of drowning in data entry. J Did your clients notice a difference, by the way? M Honestly yeah, turnaround times got faster, and I had more bandwidth to actually talk to people instead of just rushing them through. A couple of my long-time clients said this was the calmest tax season they've seen from me in years. J That's such a great outcome, better capacity and better client experience at the same time. M Right, and no burnout on my end either, which honestly might be the biggest win personally. J I bet your wife appreciated that too. M She definitely noticed I wasn't disappearing for ten weeks straight this time. J Mark, this has been such a great real-world look at what AI tax preparation can actually do for a working practice. Any final word for firms thinking about making this move? M Just try it before you commit to hiring or building an offshore team. See what the capacity gain actually looks like first. It changed how I run my whole practice. J Couldn't have said it better myself. Mark Reynolds, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this. M Thanks again for having me, Jennifer, this was fun. J And to everyone listening, if you're ready to automate your tax practice this season, go check out UpTax and book a demo at uptax dot ai. We'll see you next time on the UpTax Podcast Room.
