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joining us today for another fantastic webinar this is in client collaboration automate every touch point in the tax engagement and we have andrew hatfield who's going to be presenting for all of you today before we get into the presentation i want to do some quick technical checks and a little housekeeping and make sure that all of you are able to see and hear in the audience so if you haven't done so already please go over to the go to webinar questions area on the right side of your screen inside that question section just give me a quick hello let me know that you can see the title card of the slide let me know you can hear my voice feel free to let me know where you're listening in from as well i see people checking in from all over the country glad that you're all able to see and hear thank you for letting me know that of course if anyone is having trouble seeing or hearing answering any polls or having any other technical uh troubles throughout the webinar go ahead and let me know in this questions panel i'll do the best i can to get the troubleshooting done quickly and put your focus where it needs to be of course please keep in mind there are a lot of you there's only one of me so i'll get around to all of you as quick as i can i want to quickly direct you over to the handout section of the go to webinar control area now that i know you can all see and hear and you'll be able to download a copy of the handouts for today's webinar right in that handout section so you can follow along with those handouts at home or refer back to them in the future now for some quick housekeeping regarding polls and credit for this webinar this is a one hour webinar qualifies for one cpe credit and the way you earn that credit is straightforward you need to do two things you need to stay logged in for at least 50 minutes out of the 60 minutes of our time you also need to answer at least three out of the six polls that will be offered throughout the webinar excuse me we here at cpa academy are going to use those polls in your time logged in to issue credit by the end of the day today and that will be available in your cv accounts within 24 hours along with an archived copy of today's webinar and a copy of those aforementioned handouts now that we've gotten through all the housekeeping up front i am going to step out of the way and turn things over to andrew so andrew the floor is yours and let's get started great thank you so much uh appreciate um allowing me to be here today to share an hour with you as thank you for going through the housekeeping that sounds like we've got all of those bases covered i was just looking at the attendee list and it looks like we're going to have a really nice large group today and we've got folks from all over new orleans puerto rico oklahoma georgia colorado dallas texas indianapolis pennsylvania chicago vancouver orlando i mean thanks for those people that were checking in letting us know where they're from uh that's a that's amazing to see so many folks from so many different places on here today so today we're going to talk about client collaboration and how we can automate um not even on every touch point the tax engagement life cycle but automate a lot more uh touch points than maybe you're doing inside your firm today and we'll get into the content there and go through that in some detail i'm also going to show you uh some software today that has a lot of touch points in that tax engagement life cycle and sort of explain what we're doing as a company but also keeping in mind uh your options out there in the market for just getting a better automation around the documents you're exchanging with your clients electronically and remotely increasing your efficiency internally but but also giving an elevated better experience for your clients so we know more than ever that's really important right now that clients can get through interaction with you know engagement letters organizers tax return packages your invoicing etc then we'll cover all this in a little more detail as we move through it so as was mentioned earlier i'm andrew hatfield i'm the chief growth officer for safe send i'm going to skip my bio here but it's in the slides if anybody is interested in that i do want to give you a little bit of personalized information about myself i attended wichita state university so i'm a wu shock we need a full 60 minutes to probably explain that mascot to everybody but if there's anybody out there from kansas uh kansas area or wichita state alumni i just say hello to to you and give me a shout out on the q a panel i'm actually a co-founder uh uh we formed the company in 2008 it is really focused around helping firms become more automated and more electronic when it comes to their tax engagement life cycle and i look up and i've got you know just over 17 years in the public tax and accounting space i'm not a cpa by trade or an accountant but i have been involved with developing technology around technology that has been implemented into public tax and accounting firms from document management systems to scanning solutions uh back in the day to portals to secure file exchange solutions to e-signature products and then uh things like um automating tax return assembly delivery nissan and so i'm gonna walk through some of that with you today i see somebody gave a go chiefs so we got some some kansas uh fans coming in there and some missouri fans i guess as well for the chiefs so i saw that on the q a um i actually am in austin texas uh today this is where i live i've lived in most places i feel like in texas at least the major cities i spent time in dallas in houston outside of houston in an area called the woodlands if anybody's familiar with with those uh two cities and then i moved i transitioned during 2020 in this chaos i transitioned in may uh here to austin texas i'm actually in an area about 20 minutes outside of austin in an area called lake travis uh for those of you that are familiar with this area it's sort of where hill country starts it's rolling hills and very beautiful up here and it goes all the way down into san antonio for those that come to visit this area of texas they are shocked when they see that we actually have these rolling hills and kind of how pretty it is in this stretch so if you ever come uh to this area i want to give you something that i think is just a great piece of advice and for those of you i see on the chat line that graduated from ut and uh live in the the area you'll know what i'm talking about next the oasis so literally up the road from my house is um a restaurant almost a city within itself called the oasis on lake travis it is something that if you come to austin um for conferences or for business or for relaxation or travel make a short drive out to lake travis it's beautiful out here and go to the oasis i'm getting people chatting in i love the oasis it is a cool place it has the best location that i've been to to watch a sunset it is known for its sunsets uh reservations can be a little uh difficult usually you have to come out here and stand in a little bit of a line uh in the busy season but they have a brewery a restaurant shops all sorts of different things and it is great that uh it's a great place to watch a sunset so i highly recommend it and i don't know if you're like me but i do partake in a margarita once in a while and they make great margaritas have a nice mexican restaurant there and lots and lots of outdoor patio space so just a tip for those that that may be coming to the area so today we're going to talk about the most common pitfalls of traditional client portals and online delivery systems a lot of you today are probably using a solution um to deliver you know pdfs of your tax packages to your clients whether that's email or email attachments uh or secure file transfer that's you know a plugin or something inside of outlook like a share file type product or whether you're using a client portal to do that or even an e-sign solution i'm going to talk about some of the pitfalls there and just some of the things to watch out for because there's a lot of folks right now that are going to higher volumes of electronic tax package delivery through these type of systems and there's a lot of folks that are just moving from believe it or not still heavily uh paper-based moving towards uh a more electronic document exchange with their clients of course because of the what's going on in 2020 and the more remote nature there's been a lot of quote laggards not necessarily firms but also clients who are sort of intersecting now with technology and pandemic to become aware that they need to embrace more remote electron talk about some of the hurdles that can happen there those are some of the most frustrating pieces of the tax filing journey and then we'll identify some best practices you know for [Music] go and deliver uh completed tax returns from anywhere so from home or on the road or in the office so that you can serve clients remotely and i talk a lot about client-centric approach look firms can can direct themselves to improve their processes internally they may have some internal battles that they have to get through to you know push change forward especially when it comes to electronic or paperless type methodologies but they can get it done and kind of control that it's really about i think right now the focus is about how will you win the battle with your clients so that they can embrace these more remote and electronic processes and document exchange and interactions and how can you be uh putting your best foot forward so that you don't frustrate the clients um they don't get frustrated with the delivery of the tax package or frustrated with how they can get access or get through it and how can you have a better or at least as good if not better solution than the firm down the road because there is a battle going on right now for uh client interaction and elevated um you know elevated interaction with firms and those remote practices so we'll talk about that today as well the agenda is really simple uh we're going to walk through a little bit of a company update usually our clients and also that know about our company so i just do a very very brief 2020 update about us um we'll get a few chat questions that'll come in about that so i'll cover that and then we're going to go through uh just a quick history of tax return delivery and we're going to jump right into tax process workflow and remote delivery and then talk about some of these hurdles that go along with some of the solutions you can use to electronically exchange pdfs of tax packages and other document types with your clients and then we'll do a demo um of saves and returns and sort of what we do around the tax engagement life cycle just to give you an idea of what's out there so very very briefly i'm just going to hit a few bullet points here about our company uh you know our tagline is automation is in our dna what we really try to do is automate process document exchanges in the tax engagement life cycle again engagement letters organizers tax packages your invoicing etc and we've got a history of being pretty innovative there this is in the slide deck if anybody wants to go through it but for those of you that know us we've sort of had this historical path of creating software solutions that interact in your firm really in your tax department around secure file exchange electronic signatures and automated tax package delivery including engagement letters and now we're just releasing um four electronic organizers which i think is very exciting as a company we've got about 7 000 customers that are vast majority or public firms and uh we're actually headed to we'll probably be over a thousand firms on safes and returns the product i'm gonna highlight today uh towards the end of our production and that represents over 60 of the top 300 firms are using uh safes and returns to deliver their tax packages and help manage their engagement uh tax engagement life cycle touch points with the various documents we've mentioned here so we offer these products again this is in the slide deck so i'm not going to cover uh much about this but these are the various products that we offer organizers are just being released this year we're also releasing some feature sets around extensions for tax return packages that are going to go on to extension i'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through it today what i really want to focus everybody in on is this tax process automation concept so if we look at the graph on screen really think about this we are uh i don't know if anybody's seen that hopefully some of you get this this analogy if you've seen the movie groundhog's day it's a famous movie with bill murray in it and he the concept is that he wakes up on groundhog's day and he just starts reliving the same day over and over and over and i kind of feel like you know our tax seasonality and our tax cycle is like that too ours starts at october 15th is the end of the season right to last deadline and then we just start right over again and we go through the cycle of the entire year you know repetitively every year what i mean by that is we start new after the 15th of october we get into engagement letters those have got to start going out to our clients that's kind of and engagement letters should be going out electronically uh that's how really firms should be delivering their engagement letters i know a lot of you are and then they should be going out with the ability for your clients to engage in electronic signature on those engagement letters and then the third thing is when you really look at automation here we want to try to get these batch processed out and what i mean by that is um technology you're probably well you're probably familiar with the word mail merger and we probably use that in some of our paper delivery but the concept is that if you have a list of your clients in the csv file their salutation email address client name and you have a template of your engagement letter whether it's a 1040 or 1065 or a jal or etc then you can actually use a feature set that we have and there's other stuff in the industry that can help you do this as well you can actually mail merge those create unique engagement letters automatically so you don't have to do that work and then you can deliver those to your clients electronically in a big batch and then we can track who has received the engagement letter who's opened it who's looked at it who has signed or not signed the engagement letter and bring those back signed to you so i just that's automation around your engagement letters is very important make sure you're doing electronically make sure you're adding any signatures to them get to a place where you can do batch processing i know some will be too unique for that they'll have to go out one at a time and they get to a place where you can track these in a way that shows you your clients are engaging in these getting the emails opening them or not and also being able to be uh reminded meaning your clients are getting reminded to sign these that's all out there in the market so that's how we should be handling engagement letters organizers when we looked at the space of organizers we look out in the market and we said you know there's just one area where firms are still heavily delivering paper and that's uh with the organizers and so there have been solutions out there in the market from tax vendors and others that helped make this electronic um haven't caught on uh in a in a high volume yet in the industry uh there are some very sophisticated solutions i should mention um an integrated partner of our sureprep as a product tax caddy we're integrated with that with our product saves and returns it's a great option uh for organizers and gathering data and documents from clients we're actually uh coming out with this year an organizer functionality that's going to allow you to send electronic fillable form pdf organizers to your clients and then allow your clients to have a really nice workflow where they can return answers to the questions you need they can provide the documents you need to prepare the returns and they an answer shorter long film organizers we can't promise we can get all the clients to fill out the organizers we know that's kind of a dream uh scenario that probably won't happen but we can certainly get more of them to do it and most uh importantly lower your costs and make you more efficient in it so you're still sending out paper organizers you know it's it's something to look at here uh our concept is also that we think you should be able to send the engagement letter in the organizer combined in one process and then eventually be able to track who did not sign the engagement letters so that you can resend those engagement letters can be automatically placed in with the tax return package and delivered uh with the tax return package for those clients that did not sign the engagement letters when they first went out so also you've got to securely exchange documents with your clients throughout this seasonality and throughout this life cycle here so if you don't have some kind of a secure file document exchange program a lot of times these are plugins to outlook that allow you to send documents back and forth from your clients securely like share file is a big name out there we also have a product called safe zone exchange that does this it's a plug-in to outlook as well you got to have something in that space to make sure that that's being facilitated and then of course uh we don't have a lot of products in the preparation area there are tons of products from companies like your tax vendors and sure prep comes to mind uh we do have a plug-in to out with two adobe acrobat that helps you manage work papers in a more efficient manner and gives you a lot of tools that you lost from the paper to electronic transition but i'm not going to cover a lot of that because there's so many products in this phase again sure prep cch tr uh have uh us that are available to facilitate that and then we feel like there's nobody was really handling extensions very well we file a lot of extensions as we know this is a big part of what we do uh going past the 415 getting into the 415 deadline so we're working on a feature set that's going to help automate uh the process and tracking of these extensions and also kind of combines it in the workflow with the tax package so that we can say this client received an extension and then we're now sending the tax package to them so we're sort of letting them know that we're now giving the tax package after the fact it's just sort of a workflow that goes throughout the seasonality where it all kind of gets tracked in the same place so that you have good reporting and uh some more efficiency around it and then getting into like kind of the heart of what we're going to talk about today is the assembly delivery and e-sign and return of the required things you need to file the tax returns so getting tax packages to clients in pdf doing that in a way that eliminates a lot of your internal labor inside your firm to do it and then getting an experience with the client where it's hand holding it's easy for them to get to the tax package and it's easy for them to walk through the steps they need to complete and there's a lot of things inside those tax packages that are you know there's obviously documents to review and there's things to sign like fbars and 8879s and um llc flow throughs etc there could be uh power of attorneys there could be all sorts of things in there that come up that need to be signed and addressed but there's also k-1s that need to be distributed there's your invoicing that needs to be paid there's estimated payments and tax payments that need to be paid throughout the year and clients need to be reminded to do this so there's a lot of stuff going on here that we'll get into and i'll show you some solutions for it then you got to store everything so your clients can access it and receive copies so and everything's got to be secure it's going to be encrypted and we probably you know most of us want this now in a cloud environment so it's easy for everybody to access and manage so that's your tax engagement life cycle here's the point i want to make the in the market today this is pretty disparate meaning most firms have two or three vendors playing in this space so if we take out preparation and we just talk about when we take out the tax software let's look at how are you exchanging the documents in this lifecycle with your clients that could be from an e that could be email attachment that could be through a portal that could be through a secure file system that could be through an e-sign product how are you storing your documents online when i talk to firms they're using two or three methods to deliver documentation to their clients in the tax engagement lifecycle and they're using a few different vendors the goal here is to shrink that footprint get a single solution to do all of this and allow your clients to just have one touch point with one platform or one product line to simplify everything that's the goal of our business is that single touch point in the tax engagement life cycle and automating the documents that are a part of it uh whether that's us or somebody else that's sort of what i think we should be striving for and then um just a couple uh quick updates here i see that there's you know some folks on here that i know are uh thompson reuters uh users alter tax go system rs etc if you guys know um scott bazar he was at tr for 25 years i bring this up just to tell you that he came on board with us last year he's our chief operating and strategy strategy officer for the last year he has just been uh elevated to our uh chief executive officer he's now our ceo so if you guys on here know scott and i'm sure some of you do uh hit him up on linkedin or send him an email and congratulate him he's done a great job we're lucky to have him here and then during copen we've actually doubled our staff so we've been a growing team these are some people from industry that if you know them send them a nice you know note uh we open an office in ann arbor michigan that's our new company headquarters we did that during the pandemic actually on the same day that the nba said they were suspending play so we've had some interesting times there but uh our new headquarters is in ann arbor michigan we've got our new office open and we have staff properly socially distancing but in the office we have offices in boise idaho corona del mar california ann arbor as i mentioned and banglador uh we've won some technology awards along the way i'm going to show you one of the products today that won the 2020 technology award innovation award from cpa practice advisor and then for those of you we get chat questions what software products do you support uh with safe send returns uh here's the platforms that we support today we do have a special relationship with thomson reuters that we formed in may 2020 where we are uh strategic partners what that means is integration deeper into their product lines and both companies see value there but these are the the tax software systems that we support today so look it's been a long strange trip this year uh i don't know if you know the rest of us a lot of us have kids at home and things we've had to get used to like kids being in the house all day um you know so i like this meme here it says looking for a wine that pairs well with my kids being home all day and believe me i know some folks have been looking for that wine at the end of a long day and then it being this you know strange year we're not going to talk about it we're moving forward we're talking about the future not you know what's happened in the past but i just think this is funny when we were on the call earlier before the webcast kicked off my dog was barking and uh there was a comment they said well that sounds like a large dog i do have a great dane it's a very big bark i've been trying my best to train uh my dog to not bark when my headset is on uh but you know we'll see you might might hear that in the background because i am working from home uh doing the webcast today so i thought that was funny trying to get these dogs not to bark when amazon rings the doorbell has been difficult so let's run through a very quick uh history of tax returns and then we'll get into some of the the deeper content and jump right into showing you some cool stuff with some software that can help eliminate and get through some of these hurdles around document exchange in the tax engagement life cycle but before we do that you want cpe today and we want to make sure you get it so let's pause here and have our polling question number one i will turn it back to the moderator uh to pose the question all right thank you andrew poll question number one is live on everybody's screen we're going to leave this open for a little less than a minute while you get your responses in the quicker you vote the quicker we can close the poll and return to the presentation this is poll question number one everyone go get your responses in and if you're having trouble answering let me know in the questions panel wow i appreciate how quickly everyone is voting we'll be able to close this poll down in about 10 seconds all right we're gonna close this first poll down in three two and one okay perfect um are we gonna see the results or are we just going to move through the next slides oh sure i can show the results right now it looks like a little over half the audience said 10 or less and about 20 19 said 76 or more okay great let's keep that in mind we've got another question that relates to that as we move through uh the presentation we're gonna move through this part pretty quickly um look we all know how we deliver tax returns today uh paper email attachment if it's electronic portal if it's electronic e-sign or secure file exchange that's what's available out there for a long time in the profession we were delivering the majority of our tax return packages to clients uh in a binder and i love this increase the perceived and billable value of your professional spend a lot of money making these binders look good and very presentable the positives are that if you deliver in a paper binder it looks great it also walks the client through step by step the review the signing etc and you can put the sticky arrows in there where to sign and it's very good at getting the client to understand what they need to do the the problem was the cost and the slowness of it and if you mail it you know you've got to chase the clients down to get the things back you need to do a lot of work to get it back as well mail it back or come in and drop it off etc so one of the things that you know clients didn't realize but firm certainly did is getting these paper uh tax packages was a real mess and it was costly and frustrating and i'm sure there's uh you know been a few people out there that threw their hands up and walked out during the during busy season when you're assembling thousands uh hundreds or thousands of tax packages and paper and so it as we mentioned it's slow there was a lot of chasing down to get the things back from clients you need there wasn't much tracking of what was going on outside your door from the client's perspective but then there's kind of like this big shift in the market a decade ago where okay we can start doing things electronically and we can start sending pdfs instead of paper and then we realize you know what there's still a lot of work around assembling and putting together and getting these pdfs ready to go out the door and we started thinking okay portals are you know coming into view now for client-facing storage let's use them to deliver tax packages as well it'll be a great delivery system for the pdf files of these tax packages and guess what number one problem is clients can't remember login or passwords you can't access the tax package how are you going to get through it and you still have to provide you know a lot of assistance to the client to get them through the process resetting passwords reminding them to sign things reminding them to return things to you and it just became this big frustrating cycle and i'll go through this in a little more detail in the next section but the point is although electronic has become more normal uh and it alleviates some of the uh slowness and cost of paper there's still a lot of hurdles and problems especially when you're going to volume and so if we start looking at the main types of tax returns that we want to deliver through electronic means to clients then we've got to also think about what's inside of them it's not just a 1040 or 1065 its transmittals filing instructions federal state local returns its e-file authorization forms it's f bars it's llc flow through docks it's k-1s that have to be distributed estimated payments um you know vouchers and even your billing and so what i want to talk about next is you know how are we handling these requirements inside of your firm so if you have a completed tax return package we just talked about the documentation that makes up a typical tax package your firm has a lot of requirements and labor around getting these put together for assembling delivery how are you signing these from an ero signature perspective how are you getting these prepared for signature by your client if you're using e-sign you're doing manual dragging and dropping of signature boxes you still got to chase clients down to get the stuff back you got to remind clients to pay their quarterly estimated payments you or the client still has to figure out how to distribute the k1s to shareholder partners and then you've got to get paid so this is the problem we're trying to tackle is automating uh all of this stuff including the chasing down and the reminding and the labor that you're going through inside your farm to do it and then your client gets the same set of uh documents or tax package and you basically uh have to have your client review everything they've got to you know approve it that's the point of delivering the tax package and signing the 88.79 is that they're approving you to go e-file it they've got to get all this back to you they've got to remember to pay their estimated payments distribute the k1s and pay your invoice so we wanted to hold through this process the taxpayer to make sure they get all this done without having to interact with your firm from a perspective of an email or a phone call to help them do it and so in the industry today to sort of solve that problem these are the available solutions portals secure file exchange uh e-signature solutions um you could also argue that just email uh with attachments is part of it and then there's what i'm going to show you in a minute space and returns in fairness we have a product in all of these categories uh we're the only one that has a product on the very far right side which is safe and returns that fills all the boxes that in full disclosure we really feel like automate the tax return uh assembly delivery e-sign and return process and on the left-hand side are all the services and features we think need to be a part of a solution that's going to really get an elevated client experience and get a lot of efficiency inside your firm this gives you a perspective of what the different solutions do to solve the various items on the left hand side so again the whole point of what we built up to here is that there's this tax engagement lifecycle going on it's not good enough to just deliver documentation electronically to clients and get things back from clients electronically you've got to focus on the work the devil and the details that's hidden inside of each of these document types and the requirements that you have to complete or the client has to complete and then automate yes and then trying to get closer to a single solution look in general with technology in your firm you want to lower your footprint of the number of the number of software systems that are doing various things that could be combined uh you're always wanting to expand technology to become more efficient automated but you don't want to have too many cooks in the kitchen uh doing stuff when it's unnecessary especially what touches your clients in multiple differe t ways so let's jump into pulling question number two i will turn this back to the moderator and let everybody answer these so we continue to head towards our cpe requirements all right poll 2 is live everyone go ahead and get your answers in we're going to leave this open long enough to get the majority of responses i appreciate how quickly everybody voted on poll question number one and let's see if we can do the same on poll number two we're going to leave this open for about another 20 seconds or so everyone get your responses in all right we're getting pretty close to being able to close this poll down if anyone's having trouble answering the poll question the easiest way to access it again is to hit the escape button on your keyboard if that is able to reload the uh resize the pole for you he has exit out of full screen mode and reload the pull we're gonna go ahead and close this pull down in three two and one all right and if we could quickly view the results all right so 32 said 10 or less 24 said 76 or more and a pretty even split amongst the rest all right perfect thank you uh for going do that thank you for the audience for answering and now let's uh switch gears and talk a little bit about the hurdles you face if you're using some of these delivery systems and then very quickly we will get uh do a couple more uh pulling questions and then i will show you the safes and return solution so let's go to polling question number three all right oh poll number three is up and live everyone go ahead and get your answers in the question is what method will you use to deliver electronic tax return packages to clients this april 15th deadline everyone go ahead and get your getting pretty close to being able to close this poll question down i'm going to leave this open for about another 10 seconds while you get your responses in everyone go ahead and answer the polls and we're going to go ahead and close this down in three two and one andrew do we want to share the results yeah absolutely please um let's take a look at that all right 30 say more than one of the above 29 says email pdfs as password protected attachments and then again a close split between secure file transfer portals or e-sign solutions absolutely so i think most firms in this poll reflects it most firms are or are heading towards using multiple options depending on preference in the firm and preference by the client and what technology existed when they started sending pdfs to the clients of tax packages um it's usually a mix and that's why we talk about the single solution because it's usually multiple uh options that firms are using and so let's talk a little bit about those firms that use uh portals first of all i have to say portals are great technology i'm not beating them up on being a great client facing storage system for your clients they have a lot of good feature sets but i do have an issue with some of the hurdles that they can cause when delivering tax packages in particular to your clients so let me just walk you through a scenario and see if this resonates um this happens all the time staff sends clients tax returns and form 88.79s through the portal the client receives an email notification your tax returns ready uh please review it and sign it and then the client clicks a link in that email to try to access the tax package to begin the process they can't remember their password uh so they send an email back uh to the firm hey i can't remember my password uh you staff is usually pretty busy they try to handle the request the track the client tries to reset the password and fails um the frustration just kind of keeps building the client asks why can't you just get the documents to me i need them i want to complete the process i'm ready to do it the firm spends some time getting this into a pdf file with a password securely sends it you know as an email attachment that way but the client then gets it and now they want to forward it to somebody else but they've got to remove the password and the whole thing just starts to break down and what happens in a lot of firms is the staff's at a loss and they just email the file without encryption to the client which sort of defeats the whole purpose of having these secure file transfer solutions in the first place so these are some of the frustrations that happen every day in firms plus it takes a lot of your staff's time to handle these requests and again right now is not the time to frustrate clients uh with problems uh when they're when they're already probably having enough frustration uh in general that could potentially be going on so anyway that's the portal duration which leads us into a perfect polling question about e-sign so that we can move to the next frustrating uh circle around e-signatures i'll turn it to proceed with the question all right that poll is up everyone go ahead and get your answers into poll number four we're going to leave this open again long enough to get majority of responses in everyone go ahead and get your answers in to poll question number four i'll leave this open just a bit longer everyone get your votes in as quickly as you can we're going to get ready to close out of poll number four in three two and one all right when we have the results we can put those up there for a moment all right it looks like over half the audience says docusign followed by adobe sign and cch e-sign and then ultra tax and citrix right after that docusign is probably uh the most widely used um as we see from the pulling results all of the e-sign solutions listed here are usually one of those is what tax and accounting firms use they all have some circle of frustration issues if you've been using these to deliver tax packages you'll understand this circle of frustration if you haven't been using esign as part of delivery of the tax packages and for the required signature documents like e-file authorization forms this is what you got to watch out for so we're going to play a simple game of monopoly we're going to deliver a tax package to a client using an e-sign solution pick your flavor and we are going to ask the client to sign the required documents and get it back to us filing jointly with the taxpayer and a spouse and the goal here is can you pass go or will you be stopped and go directly to jail so here's the scenario staff doesn't have a spouse email address it's a 1040 married filing jointly they need to send the taxpayer and spouse process is over go directly to jails go you can't send it in most solutions to two people to sign unless you have both email addresses well my client and the taxpayers file sharing email address in almost every solution the answer is no they can't do that they can't be a shared email address to go to two unique signers if you've got to most of these esign solutions make you prepare all of the documents for esign by dragging and dropping signature boxes uh uniquely for each signer and if you do that across a bunch of documents in a tax package like fbars and 8879's federal and state you're going to put the taxpayer signature box where the spouse's signature should go and vice versa and that causes corrections and errors and you can't pass go so you know a lot of times also firms are breaking up the process they send the 88 79s to e-sign and the tax package through portal uh that's just not a natural path going back to the paper binder you should be separating out the total tax package because there's a process uh and an order that a client should go through uh to get through the review and then the signing of the e-file authorization forms we got a lot of spam issues going on in there um you know a lot of taxpayers are struggling with the identity verification or the kva questions that the irs is you know asking um taxpayers to answer prior to being able to do an e-sign on the 1040 e-file authorization forms and then you know sometimes the spouse doesn't even understand that they have to sign separately and they're not looking for the email so that stalls the process some but the spouse manually prints it on the signs or vice versa and it's hard to combine those back into a legal uh document for signature and then there's a lot of confusion around the trust and the business entity returns can they be e-signed or not e-signed right now there's a temporary allowance by the irs to allow e-sign no identity verification questions needed through 1231 we hope that and expect that to be extended to 415 and hopefully it becomes permanent although i got to tell you a lot of our clients have been signing business returns and trust returns electronically um for the past several years so just to give you an update there and then you know at the end of the day we're just trying to get the tax package of the client i'm review and sign everything get it back to us and a lot of times firms just do it a different way than e-sign if they're experiencing these frustrations so this is the fun part where we get to jump in and see safes and returns can i go through and how we handle uh these processes live and we'll all also have time for q a at the end here so i'm going to put the powerpoint aside and we're going to jump in and take a look at saves and returns and how the process works i want to point out my inbox i'm in my gmail account and inside of my inbox these are the the items that i've been receiving through the safes and returns platform that are documents inside of my tax engagement life cycle so i've got reminders here that tell me that i've got tax payments due this is telling me that i've got federal in california that i need to pay if i click this link it'll take me in and help me actually make those payments this is k1 that's been distributed to me so i'm a shareholder partner in this company and if i click this link i can access my k1s electronically and then i'm receiving my engagement letter from my firm so here i can click this link and i can actually sign uh my engagement letter so that's a nice process here that i can go through and i can assign somebody else if it's a document that they need to sign i can decline the signature but i'm just go ahead and sign it and i can draw my signature here and hit apply and i'm finished so signing my engagement letter was just i've got uh my organizers here and then i've also got um my tax return so i'm going to jump in and take a look at when it's ready for my review and signature so i'm going to open this up i can see my firm's logo and some messaging that they've provided me i'm going to click this link i could do this on my mobile phone or tablet or pc and it is going to take me to a branded web page for my firm jhw accountancy and they're not asking me for a login and password which is nice because i rarely can remember those they're asking me for the last four of my social and by the way in safes and returns this is an automated question safesin returns reads the tax packages through our recognition technology so it already knows who's trying to get access and what that social is and then this is gonna uh have me request an access code i'm doing this by uh it's gonna be sent by email although this is gonna be available for text coding is or text message delivery as well pretty soon so let me just copy that and then i'm going to paste it in and now without having to go through a password and log in i am now inside of my tax package here's what's really cool about this rather than just being delivered some pdf files that i with instructions i'm actually getting a really unique experience it's branded to be my firm that i'm a client of it also has my name in here it's got uh messaging from the firm andrew please find your tax returns ready for uh your source documents are in this package as well we're returning those to you as a pdf file along with our text our tax prep fee so you can make your payment follow these easy steps um in this process so we can get your taxes filed i've got a video i can watch if i'm you know have some questions about what i'm being asked to do so i've got messaging from the firm to me then i've got contact details of the right person in the firm to get a hold of if i have a question and then i like the fact that i'm being shown my refunds over applied payments and payments due because if this payment's due number is bigger than i'm expecting guess what i'm going to use the details here to get a hold of the firm and ask them what's going on so we want to inform the taxpayer the messaging from the firm and then we also want to show them the basic liabilities do now numbers and refunds etc because we want to identify any corrections or questions right here if everything looks good i'm going to walk through three simple steps i'm going to basically be able to view my tax package and review it i'm going to sign the required forms 88.79s fbars etc and then i have the option to make payments on liabilities that weren't scheduled for automatic withdrawal or also for um estimated payments throughout the year or the tax prep fee so let's get started and kind of go through this guided you know hand-holding experience where i can open up and view any part of the tax package that's being presented to me here or i can download the entire tax package by using the button over here in the top left hand corner this is all going to be stored for up to seven years that's very important making sure that your clients can get access back to these tax documents if they need copies or you can resend them that is included seven years of storage and then clients in various situations they may need to electronically sign or they might need to print and sign so most clients and most uh taxpayers that go through the safes and returns experience will do an electronic signature but some cases require that they need to print the documents manual filed returns those that can't get through or don't want to do an electronic signing process so we have both options we're also going to have the taxpayers check this box that says i have reviewed my tax tax return why because we don't want anybody to come back a few years later and say i never had an opportunity to review my tax returns you shouldn't have filed we're making sure that not only is it presented in the right order but we've got the check box here that shows that they reviewed it and then for those of you that understand the hardships uh you know an e-sign request for a taxpayer and spouse i know we went through the circle of frustration for esign but the spouse's signature is required transaction from the taxpayer that's part of the e-sign act almost 20 years old now but why would your clients understand that or care they don't but you need to understand it and we need to have a workflow and safe senators that handles it so that we can let the taxpayer know right here that the spouse's signature is required we're going to let them know that they can provide an email address for the spouse so if you didn't have the email address when you got started with the process we're going to collect it from the taxpayer they can use this shared email address if that's the case which is totally fine and they're also going to know that the spouse is going to receive a similar request asking them to sign their forms those are three really big workflow hurdles letting the spouse the taxpayer know the spouse signed separately so they look for the email letting them know where that email is going to go asking them to provide an email if you didn't have it or edit it if there's an update and being able to handle the shared email address situation now let's move into the to the knowledge based authentication questions required by the irs for the 8879s on the 1040. whether you use this or not it's up to your firm there's a turn on turn off like a light switch feature it is required by the irs on the 1040s for the e-file authorization forms it is an automation in our system your client nor your firm has to put in any data or set any of this up the process is the client has to answer three out of five questions correctly to pass go they get up to three sets of five questions so like a total of 15 questions to be able and guess what if there's a client that lives out of the country or just moved to the u.s or is a ch ld earner who's been married like five times those situations can create hardships on answering the identity verification questions we just default that client if they can't pass to the manual print and return process where they can just print the paper sign upload a scan or a picture of those e-file authorization forms right back to the safes and returns website right here now we're going to go through the signing process we are our own e-sign platform so we don't have a back-end partner or some other company to deal with we kind of control the workflow and process ourselves we are safe and returns esign platform is part of the solution it is included and we can just walk your taxpayers right through the process of electronically signing everything one document at a time until completion it's a very very simple hand holding experience here they get to finished they get messaging that everything has been signed and completed and now we're going to click continue and we're going to move into the final step so the final step here is payments we're going to show all the payments that are going to be not only due now but also do throughout each quarter and even your tax prep fee so if a client wants to make a payment they can click the pay button that pay button is going to allow them to download the voucher for a mail-in but they can also click pay online and that's going to take them out to the irs in this dot gov forward slash payments or over to the state website the authorities website right to the payments page where they can make a payment now keep in mind that as we move through the due dates for example we've got some 715 estimated payments due here your client is going to be getting reminders reminding them to pay those payments so remember we saw the reminders here in my email reminder your current tax payment is doing five days or 10 days or 20 days they click that link it's going to bring them back in to the system and it's going to bring them in so that they can make the payments and then also for your tax prep fee we can display your tax prep fee they can download it and mail in a payment check your money order or they can pay online this pay online button is going to allow your client to be driven to your preferred web page where they can make payments here is a partner of ours called cpa charge widely used in the industry it could be paypal um within uh within the next three to six months we'll be our own payment processor as well through a relationship with stripe so you'll have an option to use us or any flavor of payments that you want through any processor okay we also have an ability to offer k1 distribution your taxpayers could create an address book with um the shareholder partner email addresses and our system would automatically get the k1s in a position to be mass distributed through email they'd be tracked who received them who didn't who downloaded them who didn't and also have reminders that can be sent out reminding those shareholder partners that they have to download those k1s that's your taxpayer experience now the great news and i know we're headed to the top of the hour here but the great news is that this is for your firm to do so let me show you very quickly what it looks like from your side to get this tax package delivered to your client so basically your staff logs in the station it's just a website uh or just a url say cinderturns.com your staff can do this from home the road or in an office and they're just out and they are going to attach a tax package let me just jump in here let's do an assert they're just going to attach a tax package and so i just uploaded the pdf files for a 1040 married filing jointly click submit and just that quickly the tax package becomes a line item here in safe send returns and that is going to allow us to to go in let me actually upload a different one here but it's going to collate and assemble it it's going to read through the whole thing it's going to uh collate and assemble everything and it's going to allow that tax package to be put together prep for e-sign and ready to go and i made a mistake and i uploaded a assert return instead of ultra tax and i've got my system set up to the integration or the support button for alter tax so let me redo that and i'll show you what this looks like so here's the return that was just uploaded right here when i open it up you're going to see that our recognition technology has already recognized this as a 1040. it's already identified the taxpayer and spouse information nobody has to set up an account nobody has to create a profile for the client it collates and assembles the entire package so all the transmittals are together all the returns all the e-file authorization forms all the vouchers and estimated payments we also have the ability to place all of the signature boxes so nobody has to place the signature boxes for the taxpayer and spouse signing nobody has to place the ero signatures that can be automated as well you can add invoicing you can add attachments and then you simply route it to somebody for a quick review before you send it to your client or you just deliver it to the client like this metric here is three to five minutes per return admins upload them admins quality control it admins send it to partner for review or send it out the door to the client three to five minutes to do that um inside of station returns from your internal process includes really in-depth tracking down to audit logging includes reminders for clients to sign until they do includes the ability for you to send any documents for electronic signature we mentioned engagement letters and other things outside of the tax package i know we're right at the end of the hour i'm going to stick around a little while longer after this to answer some questions but i'm going to turn it back to the moderator if we need to wrap up all right well first we do have a couple of other poll questions so is it okay andrew to launch those while we're wrapping up absolutely uh let me get that back on screen for us i'll do that now no worries while you're doing that i'm going to go ahead and launch the fifth poll question right now so it should be available for f oh for everybody to see poll number five is up while this is up i'm just going to do some end of webinar housekeeping uh cpa academy will be able to issue credit for those of you here for cpe credit that will be done by the end of the day and that will be available in your cpa academy accounts within 24 hours along with a copy of the webinar and the handouts mentioned earlier uh we'll be having a webinar evaluation for those of you who are earning cpe through cpa academy that will have gone out by email as well we're going to keep this pole open for just a little bit longer and then andrew is it okay to go right into the sixth pole following this one and then we can turn it over for a few minutes of q a yes perfect right all right so poll number five is up right now we're going to go ahead and close it down oh you know what before i say anything if you don't use any of the software mentioned go ahead and let us know in the questions panel we're going to go ahead and close poll five and three two and one and we're going to just go right into polling question number six so everyone go ahead and answer that poll i am going to close this app when it's appropriate to do so so for right now andrew i turn it over to you and to stephen for some questions uh now that we are at the end of our time okay perfect so uh thank you very much we'll have a couple of minutes here before we end to answer some questions that we may not have gotten to i know we had a colleague of mine steven lyon was on live time answering questions but let's go through and see if we have so one of the questions is again what tax software do you support we support the cch line pro system and access the thomson reuters line of ultra tax and go system rs and into uh lessert uh we do not support drake unfortunately uh we will get there at some point in the future but not today i know we had a question from a drake user on that we're not quite there yet um so let's see if we have a few other questions here the cost of the system so the cost is broken into two areas there is cost for things that need to be electronically signed uh that are not part of the tax package so let's think of engagement letters it's about two dollars per envelope uh that is delivered to your clients requesting electronic signatures on documents that are in that envelope could be a coupling in 48 1065 or 7216 and then in addition to that uh the other pricing that i should disclose is that when we have tax packages that are delivered through safes and returns it includes the e-sign it includes the automation and the assembly delivery etc uh it includes the k1 distribution the reminders um you know the full bell and whistles of everything that we kind of walked through and showed today those are max price 15 and they worked their way down per delivered tax package based on volume of returns that your firm would do through safe safe returns so um that is the pricing it's also on our website at safesend.com pricing tab and then uh how do we see a demo of this um can we can we try it out so we got a few questions like that just go to safesim.com.com on the home page has a 10 minute video it basically goes through a presentation of the product you can easily watch it or share it with others in your firm and then there's a button right there on the home page where you can click to set up a demonstration with this and we'll be glad to do uh to do a demo with you so i think we've gotten through most of the most of the questions here um we will answer all of these even though we've got to shut it down and go offline now uh at five minutes past the hour and we're basically right there on that deadline we will go ahead and get these answers out to those that have asked questions that we have not answered yet so i just like to thank everybody for their time today we will answer your questions we appreciate the questions that have been asked and visit safesin.com if you have some interest and set up a conversation with us we're glad to talk through it with you all right with that we're going to go ahead and close out so we've gone through the end of webinar housekeeping and the only thing left to do is say thank your attendance and of course thanks to andrew and to stephen for uh bringing today's webinar to all of you today andrew thanks so much for your time and now we're just gonna go so thank you all again for your time in attendance we hope to see you all on future webinars and hope you all have a great rest of the day you