Tanya Baber: Empowering Teams in Tax Accounting

In this episode, KC Brothers interviews tax expert Tanya Baber, who shares her journey from a solo practitioner to leading a successful accounting firm. Tanya discusses her unique approach to work-life balance, empowering her team, and optimizing client experiences. She emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in the ever-evolving field of tax services, including the role of AI in accounting. Tanya's insights provide valuable lessons for accounting professionals looking to enhance their practices and maintain a healthy work environment.

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Transcript

KC Brothers (00:05)
Welcome to another episode of Canopy Practice Success. I'm your host, KC Brothers, and I'm here with our tax expert, Tanya Baber. We work with you a lot, Tanya, You do more than just work with Canopy. What do you do?

Tanya Baber (00:18)
It's been always a pleasure of mine since the beginning working with Canopy. I have a passion for helping accountants out there. that's a really fun segment of what I do. But I'm your traditional accountant, other than those things. the usual the accounting and tax and payroll and the services that we do for clients is a big part of what I've been doing for a few decades now.

KC Brothers (00:38)
then you have some really cool hobbies too.

Tanya Baber (00:41)
Yeah, quite a few crazy hobbies, honestly, if you think about it. It's just kind of like

KC Brothers (00:42)
⁓ They're so fun

and unique.

Tanya Baber (00:47)
I think we get a reputation as accountants that we're boring people, but I just look at life like, like how much can we squish into this little tiny time frame that we call life and, and, know, what can I do? And the, in the winter time, I randomly decided just a years ago, gosh, I've lived in Colorado my whole life and I've never been on the slopes. I should learn how to do that. I mean, who does that in like midway through life and

KC Brothers (00:51)
I don't know where that comes from.

Seriously.

Tanya Baber (01:10)
I just decided to pick up snowboarding randomly because it sounded interesting.

KC Brothers (01:10)
⁓

I'm not skiing, so how's your bum?

Tanya Baber (01:17)
well, you know, it took a few years of some, some, ⁓ landing on it and getting used to how to do that. But to be fair, I did try skiing and some of the influence was for my daughters. One ski, one snowboard, but two things on my feet. It didn't work, but it has like one stick, one stick to my feet. I can maybe do this. And it turned out that it was manageable, but it fell a lot initially.

KC Brothers (01:19)
you

Yeah.

I've been there. I've learned both too. Anyway, Tell us a little bit about your firm though and what you do as a firm. You've talked about how your firm is unique. I don't know that people would pair unique and taxes together.

Tanya Baber (01:52)
And it's, I don't know, I've always just been personally driven to like, what's the next thing I can do or, you what's that next step? I'm not ever satisfied. And that's just personality trait, I recognize myself just and still, right?

KC Brothers (02:02)
feel like you're creative and I feel like this is your creative

outlet to try and reimagine this, which I love because again, not many people see how you can be creative with taxes. So yeah, talk to us about how you've set up your firm.

Tanya Baber (02:14)
Absolutely.

And it's the way that I set it up. I started out just a solo practitioner and then you add staff and you kind of like grow with that for awhile And I looked at the bigger picture and said, well, what do really want to do with this growth? And one of those was maybe I can grow by acquisition where you go and this fresh acquisitions were a number of years ago. Now we have kind of a little difference in the industry that you don't really have to go out and seek clients or acquire firms. We just have so many coming to us as it is, but

started growing and that made me busier. I started out, honestly, without an accounting degree. I started out really without those fundamentals and said, you know, I guess this is going to be what I do when I grow up. So even while running my accounting firm, I went and got my degree and, you know, kind of started learning about tax, which was intimidating at first, but I could see that that's the direction that my clients were wanting help with. And I just didn't feel adequate that I could help.

how did I accomplish it is I was so worried about giving bad advice that I became an EA early. Yeah, we don't have to do, I was doing 100 to 200 credit hours a year just to make sure it's absorbing everything I could. So you kind of chuck along and do that for a few years and grow and you.

You know, it's just kind of like, I think that's a normal progression for a lot of accounting companies. But then I got to the point where it was making, making me too busy that I was putting in 80 hour weeks. That was really not where I wanted to be. Cause right off the start, I told myself that we're going to be kind of an abnormal company. We're only going to do 40 hour week work weeks because you know, as an employer, I'm looking at that going, if we put too many hours in the productivity sort of just dive bombs.

KC Brothers (03:49)
Thank you for saying that. I have a girlfriend, her husband, spent his formative years in his career at KPMG. And she'd always tell me during tax season, he's away at a client's for two weeks, working 60 to 100 hour work.

Tanya Baber (03:49)
logical.

KC Brothers (04:09)
week. I immediately think, I'm like, but how productive are you? Your brain needs to rest. Your brain needs to recuperate. We need exercise and sunshine. much more productive we can be in a more typical

work days. So I love, no one's actually, I feel like said it that explicitly. I feel like people skirt around that, but I love that you recognize this. How long ago? How many years ago?

Tanya Baber (04:32)
when I first started bringing Steph and we always had that kind of as our, as our role, but then I would be, you know, like the owner, the, you know, the top repairer, I would be the one outside of that role. And I'm going, well, this is so silly. I can't, I mean, it was wearing me down and physically, and I could tell that the toll it was taking on me mentally, but by these government of post deadlines. We're trying to squishing everything into this small timeframe and

KC Brothers (04:43)
Why am I? Yeah.

Tanya Baber (04:56)
When it started becoming really extreme, I had to look and say, and this was probably five or six years ago, I decided to go, okay, if I don't like where I'm at, how do I get there from here? You know, what do I do? I had already built a staff of some decent folks, but some of that I recognized was I had to be more trusting and be willing to delegate some of these things over. That was the only way I was going to be able to take some of that burden off of me if I'm doing all those returns start all the way to finish.

And a whole lot of them, then it just, became a very repetitive thing that was wearing me down. So one of the things is we set up tasks that were a 10 step process. And I'm like, well, gosh, what do I really, really need to do? I need to be like that last little step and review it. But can I teach staff members to do some data entry? I teach them that? So we got to where we're at now is most all the stages of taxes are handled by all the staff. And then I.

mentored a tax manager on my team, made sure that at least, you know, some of it is you kind of have to push people along. Hey, you can do this. No, I can't. No, you can really do this. I'll be here to watch over. But now it's that we just do the reviews and double check and give feedback to our other team members. So we're constantly educating at the lower and lower levels. So even my receptionist and my, you could say data entry staff, I think knows more about taxes than a lot of average accounting companies.

KC Brothers (05:56)
Yeah.

Tanya Baber (06:16)
because we're just constantly like, hey, you guys, you can do this. I'm impressed constantly at what they know. And that's a decision I had to make to say, you know, this is silly. I had to delegate. I've got to empower my team. And it makes them very loyal to me too at the same time because it's like they have more and more that they can do, more levels they can achieve as well.

KC Brothers (06:35)
I love that you wrapped it up with that statement because I think inherently every adult wants to be capable, wants to produce. This is something I feel like I've been harping on lately. So I apologize for, sounding like a broken record if you're a frequent listener, but they want to be trusted. And when trusting another adult, you give them like,

permission to flourish almost. then what it does is it frees you up and it gets you away from the ADRs and it gets everybody what they want. And I think we forget those basic human needs sometimes and that letting go of control to some extent, you'll actually find it's a win-win. There is no lose.

Tanya Baber (07:16)
Absolutely.

And that was a deliberate effort I had when it's interesting you said permission to flourish. It's also giving the permission to fail. best way, especially as we deal in tax, it's not something you can just absorb by reading in a book or watching a few different things. You have to experience it. So you've got to plug through it and then have the taxman recommend and say, you know, I think we're seeing this mistake often. Let's do a training on it. It is giving the permission to fail as much as to flourish, but then

I found has made a much more cohesive team. My goal, I loved mentoring accountants so much I wanted to be freer to go and create more education courses and teach more. But my time was already taken up. So how do we trade that off? And that was some of the logical mental progressions I went through a few years ago. I don't like where I'm at. How can I get there from here, basically?

KC Brothers (08:06)
you've been on this journey the last five or six years. You haven't said it explicitly, but what does your life look like now? What does tax season look like now?

Tanya Baber (08:13)
it's so much

fun. It is that I don't put a lot of time in. have kind of the way we're structured is I'm at the, I guess the owner or CFO level and then I have tax manager and everybody below him. So I've given him a lot more responsibility, but the kind of returns I work on are the super comp. I mean, the things I think are fun that the super complex, wildly crazy ones that even my tax manager is looking at like, wow. So I have only a handful of ones that I work now.

I'm always available, I can help the team, but we kind of have from like bottom up the system that they love having that empowerment that it's not often they have to come to me. So I have some time freed up that I'm enjoying life more than I certainly did six years ago, that I have a variety of crazy hobbies I love to pursue, the snowboarding one, it doesn't play well in the tax season. So freeing my time I was like, oh, I can kind of go on the weekends where I don't have to work weekends anymore. This is a fun thing.

KC Brothers (09:07)
saying that you can be an accounting firm and offer tax services and not work yourself to death January, February, March,

Tanya Baber (09:16)
Absolutely.

Take a few days off even during tax season. It's unheard of, right? This is my team, right? And what most happens is like you'll hear from accounting companies, you do not take any time off between like January 1st and April 15th. Mine, it's like, I mean, we're not going to all take the same day off at the same time because that would be chaos. There is flexibility if you're like, you know, I would like a day off this week because maybe there's just so much that they need that mental day off.

KC Brothers (09:20)
What? That's heresy.

Tanya Baber (09:42)
I find that my team is far more productive having that kind of, and we call it internally, we call it, we want a good work-life balance. It's a term we hear out there, but what is it in actual practice?

KC Brothers (09:52)
I love that you've seen that and that even like, even just saying, you glazed over it so fast though, but like, yeah, it's okay if you need a day during tax season. Like let's stay mentally, emotionally, physically healthy because then again, we're all just one human and let's give ourselves the best foot forward to perform and perform well.

Tanya Baber (09:53)
Right?

place.

you

Exactly. like our client's experience, if we're like so stressed that they may see us once a year, or maybe that first time, we're so stressed that they feel like, I don't ask them questions ever. If you're kind of refreshed and you're like, let me tell you how that works. Or this is your experience for that client, that one singular client. And we look at it as accounts because we have so much to do. It's kind of like they're all just one big conglomerate. But that client's experience is better as well.

KC Brothers (10:14)
And

Tanya Baber (10:37)
better from my staff, better from me, better from every step of that journey, if you will. And that's ultimately what we want as well.

KC Brothers (10:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah. talk to us more about your workflow or your rules of engagement, your values as a firm. What do you do to make it so that you can take a day off in March or that you can ensure you're sticking to those 40 hours during tax season?

Tanya Baber (11:00)
And some of it is over the years, every year after a tax season, we kind of do an after action review and see what worked and what didn't. It's being willing to constantly evolve and change and evolve and change. So we've developed by this point in time, because like 30 years into this game, that really concise system that is from the very first moment, you know, the client contacts us and we kind of help them all the struggle points we have, like getting the client to get us data.

And then we start doing the data entry and we come up with, we're missing information. So we actually literally call that the missing information step. We have staff members that their job is just to kind of poke the client or to use, we honestly, we do a tongue through the tools and can't use the little poking devices in there. And it's like, it's assigning, we call it homework, but sending over to the client as a reminder emails. when we get it and we review it, the top level.

person that we're really just kind of looking for other opportunities for tax savings or whatever. And then it goes back to the team when it's ready for, you know, signing and sending. So we have a kind of a 10 step process that no matter where we are in that process, anybody can pick up that return. They see who it's assigned to and who's working on it. We have notes in there that help to accomplish that as well. So all these various steps in there.

have been developed into a repetitive task list that we can duplicate for every single client. And that's what allows us to achieve that. But then how we do it on the big scale so that we all have even amount of time is I've embraced having more virtual sort of a space as well. I'm physically located in Colorado. I have a second office. I'm actually at my second office today. But then I have team members in various states.

that do a lot of this work as well. And we just work cohesively as a team across various time zones in the states now.

KC Brothers (12:45)
That's awesome. pivoting just a little bit, I feel like tax is pretty heavily rooted in the history of what a typical accounting firm would look like. And we're seeing a lot of pivoting to CAS and advisory. Where do you see the future of tax services for accounting firms?

Tanya Baber (13:05)
And it is that every firm has their specialties and their makeup. So just because we've chosen to kind of do, I would say do it all in the sense that we can help with the accounting level or help with the tax level advisory. But every firm, every owner, that may not be their particular niche that they want to go into. Going into tax, well, it requires a very high level of understanding or willingness to go.

In tax, it's basically we have to have the knowledge or we have to be able to learn it and be willing to, or we have to hire it out to somebody else. So having a great resource of where do we get the data. maybe that's not right for everybody, but where it's going, as I talk with my clients, the more complex the taxes become, the more nervous they become. And some of them, I've talked to some, it deterred some from even wanting to go and start those businesses. that is a very high value.

to the business owner, to the individual, like peace of mind is not something we even put a value on. And even with AI coming onto the scene, we're just kind of trying to figure out what to do with that as an industry. It is that that interaction between the client is just going, yeah, I didn't know if I can trust that information. But now hearing from you, I kind of feel peace now. That is a very, very big value for our clients. Things that we are kind of like, that's such a pain.

KC Brothers (13:53)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Tanya Baber (14:20)
payroll, not our favorite thing in the world is accountants has a high value to our clients because it's anything that you alleviate stress is going to have a high value to them. I don't think it's going to be like it goes away. We have seen over over time it evolves. So the best thing I can tell any accounting firm, be willing to change, be willing to evolve, look back and do those after action and say what worked, what didn't, where do I want to go from here and be willing to

constantly adjust and you will find that you are, if you're not heading in that direction, you have a opportunity to change and head that direction again.

KC Brothers (14:54)
Yeah.

I love that. in my career, I've called those postmortems. And I know that's coming. We're stealing that from the medical world. But every time I've done one of those, it's been so valuable, and especially if you do it right after. whether it's April 16th or maybe May 1st, right, give yourself some time to breathe. But I love that you've brought that up because

You are bound to repeat history if you don't evaluate and think about, what did I like? What did I not like? Are there new solutions, tools, opportunities? Can I, even you said something that I wanted to actually ask about that.

Tanya Baber (15:16)
if you don't change it.

KC Brothers (15:28)
It sounded like you didn't have a process written down, but then when you wrote out a 10 step process, seeing it maybe with your eyes, you're like, my gosh, yeah, I don't need to be involved in every step. Even doing something as simple as that. If you don't have your processes outlined, put them down and just look at them and think through it.

Tanya Baber (15:41)
exactly.

Exactly. And one of those middle steps kind of has, we call it a churn because it's like, get missing information. it's not what we needed. And it goes back, but it started out maybe about a four step process and it gradually evolved over time. But kind of what you were mentioning, what brought to mind for me is when we're looking at afterwards or the after action or postmortem, we have to be willing to go to our team and say, what do you notice? Cause they're in the trenches and they're going to see things that I'm not aware of.

And yeah, I have the decision-making responsibility, but I'm going to be interested in like, that's something the clients are telling you often. Okay, let's see what we do about that. Be willing to, and that is one of those pieces, again, how are we empowering our team? And that makes them valuable. If you're going to be aware of something that I have no idea of, take that information in and figure out how we can make everything and everybody's position stronger

KC Brothers (16:33)
that. Something I've been trying to encourage accounting firms to do recently is to take a look at their client experience. If you have more than one client portal, for example, you go through, treat yourself like a fake client and make yourself do the things that you're asking your client to do. But I think what you just hit on is another great twist on that. Look at your admin and you go and do what you're asking your admin to do and maybe just sit over their shoulder for an afternoon.

Tanya Baber (16:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

KC Brothers (16:58)
we're already in middle of June, but you still have time. There's still plenty of time to reassess these things before things get crazy again. But again, they don't have to be crazy because you are our proof point that you can be a tax, would you say you're a tax centric firm? You offer other things, but.

Tanya Baber (17:17)
Yeah, I mean, it's a big part, obviously, because the clients are so worried about the compliance part, but we're tax and we do tax planning and we do advisory. But that's also kind of hand in hand with the accounting part. And maybe we have a bookkeeper that handles it and we're just the tax. So we really customize it for our clients, but we definitely are a tax firm in that sense, or the traditional description of it.

KC Brothers (17:25)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, but

you are the hope, the light at the end of the tunnel. That it can be...

Tanya Baber (17:46)
It's really, I was just frustrated.

I don't like this. I can't do any of crazy fun stuff I like to do. I need to change this. And that was the, the, the spurring me into action to figure out what I need to do to change it and being willing to delegate being willing to, you know, bring my team in and be like, Hey, this is, this is how it's of a value to you. And not just, we all want to go to work and do something that has definite value. don't just want to be like,

KC Brothers (18:12)
Yes.

Tanya Baber (18:13)
in the machine rate that we want our ideas heard and our observations and be able to learn more and be able to earn more. Once I changed my mindset to doing all that quite a years ago, it's like everything became easier and it just didn't click until then, I think for me, as the change point.

KC Brothers (18:29)
Is there something that caused your mindset to change?

Tanya Baber (18:31)
just getting just so tired, so exhausted that it was like, don't know why I'm not getting past this hurdle. And kind of started looking at what my team was doing for me and just some of it was testing. My tax manager, he'd been with me a lot of years, very bright individual. He just needed some prompting, some pushing. he would come to me always like, what's the answer to this type of thing? What's the answer to that?

KC Brothers (18:38)
Yeah.

Tanya Baber (18:54)
I just made that out because I was very busy often. like, you know, I'm so busy at this moment. Go check that out and then let me know what you find out and we'll talk about it. It kind of started helping him to realize he can find those answers. And then when I just confirmed it, he was just wanting somebody to confirm it. He didn't need me to give him the answers, but he needed a way to figure out how to find them on his own. I started doing that and little light bulbs like, you know, maybe this will work on a bigger scale. just, I think that's where the little,

and change in my thought came from was just going, okay, if he's just always asking me those questions and I know he knows the answer, how do I change that? And let him know that it's, yeah, you're on the right track, I'll confirm it for you, but go find the answer first and then we'll talk.

KC Brothers (19:37)
Since you are our in-house tax expert, you always write the infamous tax guide that gets so many downloads. I think I know the answer because you talked about how you were doing like 100 plus hours of learning in a year when you only need like 60 over three years.

Tanya Baber (19:44)
Right.

Yeah.

KC Brothers (19:56)
How

did you become an expert in that? And what are you doing to stay on top of that?

Tanya Baber (20:00)
Always be willing to continue learning. I was so afraid of giving bad advice that I did that from the standpoint of wanting to go that route. And I just felt like it was only me out there in the world. So I really, really had to know myself kind of this why I was working so hard at it. But for somebody, I mean, it's cute that I know say I'm described as a tax expert. Those who are really aren't experts, I guess we will never call ourselves expert because there's so much out there and they're just

KC Brothers (20:25)
Yeah.

Tanya Baber (20:25)
The real

trick is, do you know where to go find the answers? Because we can't in our human brains remember everything. It's like, yeah, there's something about that. Let me go look that up. when we're giving the answer to the client is doing it appropriately. Like, you know, I can get a little bit more information on that and get it back to you. That's acknowledging that we know how to find it. So that's one of the ways that we can truly genuinely do this.

KC Brothers (20:28)
Mm.

have you started to use AI in that regard? know there's been a few AI tactics.

Tanya Baber (20:52)
We haven't, I've kind of tested it

some because I do enough on the education side that I'm curious of. Sometimes with AI, it's like the general answer, but we often have that it can't do what we can do. And that is to find the exceptions to the exceptions. And that seems so far that I'm looking at seems to be a lot of the failing of it is many times I'm helping clients and I'm like, but do you have, you know, you ask them questions, this and that.

KC Brothers (21:06)
Mm.

Tanya Baber (21:15)
you find out that is the case if we had just gotten directly to AI with a general question, it would have come up with the wrong answer. I use it in the sense of testing to see what is coming up with three answers because I'm kind of always working the problem with two hats, which most accountants do is, you know, for the client, but then also for the accountants out there that I'm mentoring or teaching, then I'm looking at it with both hats. So can we do it if we don't have the answers, just know where to find the answers.

KC Brothers (21:36)
Yeah. Yeah, I think.

Yes, I think in regards to your comment about it not knowing the exceptions to the exceptions, one thing that I've learned about AI, AI is not a critical thinker. AI is not a human. AI is a robot. And it can speed up the finding of the information, but it can't do the critical thinking for you. And so it might be able to find some of the rules, right, and speed up the initial process. But to your point, it's not going to be foolproof. But speeding up is still valuable.

That's how we get to 40 hours and away from 80 hours.

Tanya Baber (22:12)
Yep, that's part of it. Being willing to change and utilize all the tools available to us. It is that we're directed, and speaking kind of from the how to being an enrolled agent, we're directed to, okay, for helping clients, we either have to possess the knowledge, we already know it, or be willing to learn it, or be willing to hire it out. So that may be like going to your colleagues and saying, I've had accountants out there that I've helped with just special returns or cases or things.

because they recognized and I respect them so much for it is, hey, this is out of my realm, but it's something I still need to do. I still want to do, I'm gonna learn from it. There's a lot of ways we can approach that question if we don't have the answer. And even if we think we have the answer, being willing to constantly double check ourselves, because stuff changes constantly. So if you're a solo practitioner, and that's when I started out, it felt very, very alone in the world.

is using those resources and trying to learn as much as I could to make sure I have the right answer. Now that I'm growing my team, have my tech manager. I can balance ideas off like, does this sound right to you? This is what I think I remember. you have that ability with more people. But when it's yourself, just be willing to know where do you find the answers. And having maybe a resource, different software companies that are awesome out there that help us in our industry, there's a lot of resources that we don't have to.

just be us against the world.

KC Brothers (23:26)
Yes, I love