How Delta Wealth Boosted Realization and Slashed Prep Time in the Same Season

Delta Wealth Advisors advertises itself as a one-stop shop for a reason. The wealth advisory, tax, and FP&A teams work tightly together so clients don’t have to juggle five or more touchpoints to manage their business portfolios, tax bills, and other complex financial dealings.

“We’re integrated and forward-looking for the advisory space,” said CEO and co-founder Dino Efthimiou.

The firm’s clients are accomplished entrepreneurs: business owners, families passing down a legacy, and founders deciding what to do with the wealth they’ve built. As head of wealth and co-founder Niko Finnigan put things, the clients are “tight on time and looking for optimized solutions.” Their finances rarely sit in the same place over long periods of time, and changes in stocks and bonds create chain reactions that need to be timed against investment events outside their control. And the IRS certainly doesn’t care about complexity when it comes to filing deadlines.

Delta Wealth’s demanding client book is handled by a lean team. Five tax preparers handle roughly 600 individual returns, 300 business returns, and 80 monthly accounting clients, per Efthimiou. The CEO grew up around an accounting firm before moving into wealth management, so when helped start Delta, he set his sights on a firm that would max out its capacity for advisory rather than getting bogged down in compliance.

“A lot of CPA firms are stuck in the day-to-day, the transactional work,” Efthimiou said. “Everything we’ve done since is about how we eliminate some of that compliance work to give our advisors time to meet with clients.”

There’s not much wiggle room for a small firm that handles close to a thousand returns. Every hour spent chasing missing 1099s is an hour that can’t be spent on a call with a client.

In the firm’s early years, the tax season battle was fought on two fronts. There was the manual grind of getting documents into the system, and then there was finding the capacity for prep. That left very little slack built up to accommodate wasted time, let alone a sudden gap in staffing.

The firm tried a few different intake portals, and according to Efthimiou, it never was able to click. Head of tax Chris Makin spelled out that pain point from his front-row seat in the compliance function.

“One of the main things that comes to mind would be following up with clients on documents we may be missing,” Makin said. “Previously, they just kind of sat in a queue where we know we’re waiting on something from them, but they’re not being followed up with through the summer. It relies on the client to know that they need to get us something, and ends up scrunching a lot of those returns near the extension deadline.”

Too much reliance on clients to be self-aware meant that a high percentage of returns were getting pushed back. That created chaos and panic around filing deadlines. So Delta, like many firms, had tried outsourcing to increase its prep capacity.

The promise was returns prepared overnight, but the reality was quite different.

“What we found in reality was we just woke up to questions,” Finnigan remembered.

Efthimiou met with Truss in the fourth quarter of 2025, and the fit was obvious almost instantly. He wasn’t sold by an individual feature; it was the overall shape and structure of the platform that fit exactly what Delta wanted to do. By bringing in integration partners, like Filed for AI prep, Delta could move through the entire workflow without having to build anything new or leave the new platform. It was also easy enough that he didn’t have to spend much time retraining his team.

The employees at Delta had already prepared to run tax season the old way when leadership made the pivot to Truss only weeks before the documents started pouring in. A taskforce of four people – two client service associates and two operations specialists – switched the firm over to Truss in a matter of weeks.

“That’s a testament to how easy it is to set up,” said operations specialist Mackenzie Hayden, who doesn’t have a tax background, but has become an integral part of the firm’s intake process. “It’s extremely user-friendly. I didn’t feel like I had to have a background in it to help the client.”

Client adoption was instant, easily clearing the bar that other tools failed to reach. To Efthimiou, the zero-login magic link was the golden feature. If a client didn’t need to remember a username or password, there was no friction to simply getting those documents in upon first clicking the link to the Truss platform.

That feature also set Truss apart from the alternatives Delta had considered, as the firm’s sophisticated client base already had a lot of other software to navigate.

The stress test for the new software came during a true busy-season crisis scenario. Delta lost one member of its five-person intake team shortly before the April 15 deadline – the kind of last-minute change that can derail a season.

Efthimiou’s first reaction to the change was apprehension about how the team would be able to absorb the hit, but as he put it, “Thankfully, we were using Truss.”

The consolidation held, and instead of relying on one person’s emails and spreadsheets, the entire team could step in at any point on any project to see what was outstanding. Makin and his team simply picked up the rest of the work, and clients never felt the change.

“We lost the CSA during tax season. But our remaining CSA, Gavin, was able to pick everything up, in part due to the efficiency that Truss created overall,” Makin recounted. “He was able to step in and just pick up the baton and keep running with it.”

The payoff was evident in all the places Delta had been losing hours to the tedious stuff. Document collection accelerated and clients were entering the prep stage earlier than ever.

Once documents were in, AI prep partners helped to solve the problem that outsourcing had failed to fix. In essence, the employees were showing up every day to find review-ready returns instead of questions in their inboxes.

“Huge improvements in prep time. I mean, you go from hours to minutes,” Efthimiou said. “Coming through AI, we’ve had a lot of good success with the accuracy, so the review time came down quite a bit. It’s really streamlined the entire process for us, from start to finish.”

Delta pushed 459 returns through Filed, its chosen AI prep partner, and uploaded tens of thousands of files throughout the season. Yet, whenever a client needed a quick turnaround, the entire team was caught off guard by how easily that was achieved.

The firm saw a black-and-white impact on the bottom line. Year-over-year realization was easy for the firm’s leadership to see; Efthimiou described it as a “night and day” difference. Finnigan, meanwhile, put a rough number on it.

“I know our realization rates jumped more than 10 percentage points,” Finnigan said.

That big a jump in realization can be a game-changer, especially for a lean tax team like Delta’s. It signals that all the work being done throughout the course of the season is being billed much closer to full value, creating equally significant gains in the year-end bottom line.

There was another major benefit to prep becoming so efficient. Junior team members who were used to keying in 1099s and K-1s by hand were able to focus on review, while leaning on Truss’ user-friendly dynamic checklist to familiarize themselves with all the forms and minimizing the time they needed to spend asking for clarifying data from clients.

As anyone who works in an office knows, the operational improvements are one thing, but the energy in the building is another. And successfully pulling off the last-minute pivot to Truss delivered a noticeable jolt to the energy in Delta’s already-vibrant Indianapolis office.

“We’ve tried other things in the past, and they just haven’t had the payoff we were expecting,” Efthimiou said. “To be able to say, ‘Hey team, let’s pivot — it’s the fourth quarter, we’ve got to be ready before tax season,’ and then have it go as successfully as it did, it just gets a lot of energy to the team. We’re heading in the right direction, and we made the right decision with Truss.”

And with reclaimed time, a firm that’s always wanted to shift its focus to advisory is finally able to start envisioning its goals become a reality.

For Delta’s leadership, the whole partnership comes down to one word: comfort. It’s about knowing promises about the product itself will be kept, and that results being returned from the platform will come back without any lingering doubts about their accuracy. One season in, they’re confident that Truss will deliver when it says something will happen.

Efthimiou was asked to reflect on the entire experience of working with Truss, and rather than focusing on metrics, he saw his vision for the firm quickly taking shape.

“It’s gotten us to the closest point we’ve ever been to the kind of firm we set out to build, and we got there quicker than I thought we would,” Efthimiou said. “I didn’t expect the payoff to come as quickly as it did, especially being such a lean and small team.”

Meanwhile, Hayden’s gratitude came from being able to spend her time at work doing what she enjoys most of all, and seeing how her colleagues were able to do the same.

“For Truss to give us so much time back, we’re able to focus on the people aspect of everything,” she said, “which is really what matters at the end of the day.”

Truss is proud to partner with firms like Delta Wealth because a motivated team should be able to be there for its clients without getting bogged down during compliance, and every member of that team should get to focus on the parts of the job that keep them going.