As a specialty tax consulting firm, Boise-based Strike Tax Advisory deciphers complex tax law and judicial precedent to identify and substantiate credits and incentives for their clients, including the R&D tax credit. Technology and taxes both thrive on processes, but automating in a traditional industry can be challenging.
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Sending documents back and forth to clients, requesting clarification on missing information, and omitting an all-important signature is labor-intensive for tax specialists. By reducing the time spent collecting and sorting through paperwork, this R&D tax advisory knew that it could serve additional clients more efficiently. And since inaccuracy brings the eagle-eye of the IRS down on you, obtaining accurate financial details quickly the first time was a core mission of the company.
Like most industries, accountancy has its own language. However, tax law, and specifically R&D tax law, has a very specific, difficult language that made it hard to translate into terms that designers and developers could understand. Product owners that were comfortable talking about business ideas and processes needed to understand the individual steps that consultants perform with their clients had to take to complete a credit study on time.
It wasn’t just the language that made the project hard to build out. Automating manual processes meant outlining every single decision point. An R&D study requires documents to be submitted in a certain order. If the client couldn’t produce the documents in a timely manner, it could take weeks between document submissions. The starting, stopping and waiting for documents caused long delays.
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Through discovery sessions with the Ventive team, Strike knew that they wanted to decrease their reliance on manual processes. They also saw an opportunity to lay the foundation for strong business processes that could flex with the seasonal nature of their industry.
Strike’s minimum viable product (MVP) had three main pillars:
Previously, Strike had relied on either Dropbox or email to request and gather their clients’ documents, but Ventive completed a third-party integration with the Strike platform that would pull information from the documents and automatically fill out forms. This reduced time spent on tedious data entry.
We used Codat and Finch as the third-party integration with any of Strike’s clients’ bookkeeping, accounting, or HR systems. Both of these companies standardized how our system received information, and we saved time by not building custom integration for dozens of different accounting and payroll systems.
For their own team, Strike needed a project management tool that tracked employee time and tasks. Ventive adapted Lyght, a project management tool we’d already developed and launched for our own company. Previously, our users had relied on Lyght for product management, and it had the time tracker and Kanban board that Strike needed. Plus, our developers were already familiar with the code and could avoid technical debt by using something similar.
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We’ve already reduced the factor time the Strike team spends on manual tasks, but the MVP is just the first step. As we roll out new integrations and features, including more automation in the client onboarding experience, they can continue to reduce their time spent on low-level tasks and focus on relationship building, research, and discovery.
Heavy integration is the future for the Strike Portal. As an R&D tax advisory, their focus is finding and claiming every penny their client is owed. Their new fintech product puts an exceptional customer experience at the center of everything they do. Ventive is proud to partner with companies ready to embrace digital transformation.
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