One Email Address. Same People.

We are moving our client email off Outlook and onto a platform called Front. You will not notice it directly, which is the point. What it changes is how well we hand things off internally.

If you write to your tax Pod with a bookkeeping question, we do not simply forward the email or reply-all and add your Accounting Services team member.  Rather, we move the message to Accounting Services, tag the responsible person, and it keeps going. Same thread, same conversation, no forwarded chain and no “please resend this to someone else.” Front lets us do that cleanly in a way Outlook never could.

Sidebar: Outlook is a decent email client, no doubt, but it has limitations especially across teams. Competition validates the product, right? Sidebar to the sidebar: Front is expensive. For our 110 person team, we are looking at around $80,000. For email! But it is critical for our client satisfaction and our team’s internal communications.

Our Accounting Services team keeps its own inbox, because they work with you all year on a different rhythm and folding them into tax prep would create one enormous mailbox that serves nobody. But you no longer have to know which one to use. Write to your Pod and we will route it.

Front sits on top of our existing Microsoft 365 system rather than replacing it, carries an annual SOC 2 Type II security audit, and encrypts everything in transit and at rest. Sensitive documents should still travel through ShareFile rather than email, which has always been our guidance and has not changed.

Pod Assistants and Daily Communication

This is the part we are most excited about.

We are adding a new role called a Pod Assistant, and there will be one or two attached to every Pod. Their job is to read every message that arrives, get it to the right person via tagging (or perhaps a direct call: “Hey, Bob has a question about his tax return. Email tagged to you.”), and handle the things that do not need a tax professional.

That last part is where you will feel it. Pod Assistants handle ShareFile password resets, adding an email address to your ShareFile account, address changes, tax return reprints, securely sending your tax return to a lender once you have approved it, e-signature resends, billing questions, scheduling and rescheduling your tax return review appointment, proof of filing, paper filing instructions, and the very reasonable question of where your tax return currently sits. And all the crud we couldn’t immediately think of when writing this.

Those are the requests that used to land in a tax accountant’s inbox during the last week of March and wait. Now they get answered by someone whose actual job is answering them. Daily.

Your tax return preparer and client manager will continue to read and respond to emails on Mondays and Thursdays. That has not changed, and it is deliberate. Tax work requires long stretches of uninterrupted focus, and a preparer checking email every twenty minutes is a preparer making mistakes. The Pod Assistant covers the rest of the week, which means the routine stuff now gets handled daily instead of waiting for Thursday.

What Does Not Change

Every email is signed by an actual person. No no-reply addresses, no ticket numbers. If Tina writes to you, it reads “Tina” in the signature complete with direct phone number should you want to call.

Same CPA, same Pod, same people who already know your situation.

And when someone is out on vacation or Family Leave, a teammate, or what we call “Podmate,” can pick up your question instead of it sitting in one person’s inbox waiting for one person to surface.

Still a Lot of People

It is a lot of people. If Amanda’s team set up your LLC or Michelle opened your payroll accounts, those came from somewhere else too, and they will continue to.

We have not solved every version of this. What we have fixed is the part that caused the most confusion, which is the tax return process itself. Five emails during tax season now come from one address, in one conversation, from a team you can name.