Accounting-Firms Self-Service Portal & Returns Tracker

JDA TSG runs managed operations teams for other companies, and its tax practice works in partnership with the Intuit Select Pro Staffing program. That operation serves accounting firms that take on more clients than they can prepare returns for before the filing deadline. JDA never stores the sensitive documents and never files: the firm grants access to its own software, JDA prepares the return there, and the firm reviews and files it. That model is why every firm needs a space of its own, where it can see its returns and nothing belonging to anyone else. Last season that meant roughly 50 firms.

The operation ran on Monday.com, one board per firm. It held the work but not the reporting. There was no way for the account manager to see, or be told, that a return had passed the five day target or was about to. Base Flows rebuilt it with Airtable as the backend and a Softr portal for the firms, so each one submits work, follows the status of every return, and picks up deliverables without asking anyone for an update. Firms went from about five check-in emails per return to one.

The five day SLA is the center of the system. A return starts the clock when a preparer begins work, and the clock stops on its own whenever the return is blocked, which is usually a missing document. The firm gets the request as a comment, answers it in the portal, and the timer picks up where it left off. Nothing is counted against JDA while it is waiting on the firm, and account managers see what is close to the limit before it goes over instead of after.

Assignment stays with the account manager, and the system gives them what they were missing: a dashboard with every preparer's current load, so a return goes to someone qualified who is not already buried. Pricing is modeled underneath it. Firms sign up for a package, each package covers a set of forms, anything outside it is charged per form, and the whole scheme is versioned by tax season, with HubSpot holding one deal per firm per season. A return still open when a season closes moves to the next season's pricing on its own.

The rest runs without anyone watching it. Completed returns are grouped and billed on a cycle with the detail of what was done, and payment status flows back so the team sees what is outstanding. Daily digests and an end of day report summarize everything that moved on the platform, and every new firm triggers its onboarding tasks in Asana, with progress visible on an Airtable dashboard. The MVP was live for January 1, the day the regular filing season opens, and it is all native: no custom components and no server to keep running.