Internal tools for accounting firms.

It is a specific irony that accounting firms, which tell clients to get off spreadsheets, run busy season on the biggest one of all: the return status tracker, with every 1040 and 1120 marked received, in prep, in review, waiting on client, extended, or filed, and three people editing it at once in March. Around it sit the staff scheduling sheet, the WIP and realization exports from practice management, and the AR aging. The numbers the partners watch are realization, chargeable percentage by staff level, turnaround days per return, the extension count, and write-downs per engagement.

These files break under exactly the load they exist for. The status tracker forks into copies and nobody trusts any of them by April. Capacity planning is a whiteboard argument, so the same two seniors end up over 60 hours while a first-year sits idle. Fixed-fee CAS engagements burn past budget with nobody noticing until the write-down, because the burn lives in an export someone runs monthly. Proposals and engagement letters are tracked in an inbox.

The templates here are the purpose-built versions: a capacity planner that shows who is booked on what for the next eight weeks, a utilization dashboard that catches idle or overloaded weeks as they form, a profitability tracker that shows effective hourly rate per engagement, and a retainer burn view for fixed-fee work. There is no return-tracker template yet, and that is a fair test of the product: open the proposal pipeline template, tell it your stages are received, in prep, in review, waiting on client, extended, and filed, and it becomes one. Every template ships with sample data; every change after that is a prompt.

Common questions