CPA Reactions | Outside Tax Group

Justin Tucker and Zak Long | partners in Baker Tilly's Mergers & Acquisitions group. Baker Tilly is the 9th largest CPA firm in the country.  He is going to describe his day to day job and it never includes tax preparation, tax planning, tax adjustments or problems he has with his tax clients. That is what Once was built for, it just does it in a way that allows the efficiencies we found there to be shared with other groups. These videos compare what he gets from solutions to address his problems (outsourcing to India) compares to what we do as a by-product of our tax workflow. Description of M&A Process

Justin asks how Once Accounting can address messy intercompany transactions. That is a big part of what he does but it is not a big part of tax preparation. We consolidate so we can plan easier for clients with multiple entities and that messy intercompany activity doesn't get eliminated if they file separate tax returns. Most small businesses file separate tax returns because of this need, consolidating data for a return is harder than preparing two. We consolidate entities but for efficiency's sake mainly, not as much as M&A advisors do. There is software to help big companies, but nothing for the guy with 5 QuickBooks online companies. Justin talks about how what we can do because we want tax alerts would have saved his butt on a project and as he tries to process what else he could do, he says "cool" ... about accounting software. Click here for cool. 

We demonstrated our ability to consolidate across Sage Accounting, Xero, and QuickBooks by simply dragging and dropping them and Justin notes he deals with it all the time, but it is the part that is after the acquisition that is the challenge. That is when the acquiring company has to integrate one software into another, he compares what he just watched us do to what the company he refers clients to does. Of particular note here, consolidated reporting is the first solution OneStream lists on their site. Just a couple of notes about OneStream, they started in 2016, we started in 2020, the tech team has not been together for two years yet. The idea I could do something with the data barely even existed in 2016, let alone the platform. I started working on the problem in Excel for the 2016 tax returns, in 2017 but I was two years away from getting it to work in Excel. They have over 1,000 employees, we have 8. They are backed by venture capital and last November they hired Morgan Stanley to help them go public with a $10 billion dollar valuation. We built a tax prep platform and to make it so tax professionals can plan easier for clients with multiple entities, we made it easy to combine information because if I want to see it combined, i may have to file it separately, so we made it so it is easy to move entities in and out of the group. Because we attacked the tax return issue at the accounting data level, our efficiencies in tax preparation made consolidations possible by dragging and dropping them together. At this point, Justin knows we also give him the ability to drill down and see the underlying transactions, he is just trying to process all the things he has never seen before. Here is a discussion about consolidations and the comparison he sees to OneStream. 

We ended with next steps, how they could start using this soon and then at the end of the conversation, perhaps immediately. That is the best news of all, but we connected with them to help consolidate 39 entities but he passed on the project because it was too rushed, they wanted due diligence completed in 3 weeks. What he said about us next was really nice, and of course Zak then chimed in with an immediate opportunity that we can hopefully get Will started setting up their database this week from New York. Here is that conversation.