How Foard and Company Earned a 94% Positive Rating While Automating Its Busiest Season

A 60-year-old Charlotte firm running 5,000 total returns per year made sweeping changes to dramatic effect. After replacing a manual, PDF-focused intake process, Foard and Company received a 94% positive client rating in year one with Truss.

Foard and Company is a CPA firm in Charlotte, N.C. that was founded in 1964. The firm has roughly 35 year-round staffers, including three partners, and routinely calls in seasonal tax help. Steeped deeply in both tax and nonprofit audit, the firm runs roughly 3,000 individual returns, 1,500 business returns, and 500 nonprofit returns in a typical season.

Firm

Foard and Company, PA

Location

Charlotte, N.C.

Founded

1964

Size

~35 year-round staff plus seasonal tax help; 3 tax partners

Practice highlights

50-50 time split between tax and nonprofit audit

On Truss since

Fall 2025

Tax prep software

Lacerte

Serving the Charlotte area for over 60 years, Foard and Company has grown quite a lot from the boutique firm it was when managing partner Terry Lancaster first arrived in 1987.

“When I came, it was very small, there were about five of us,” Lancaster said. “We currently have about 35 employees. About 50% of our total time is spent on tax, and about 50% on nonprofit audit. Those are kind of the two things we do.”

Lancaster was admitted as an owner in 1991 and is now the longest-tenured of the firm’s three managing partners. Under his leadership, the firm has struck a deliberate balance between tax and nonprofit audit, which allows workloads and staff counts to stay consistent year-round.

“The nonprofit audit allows us to shift people over to work on taxes during tax season, but we have plenty of work for them the rest of the year,” Lancaster said. “So we don’t have to rely on contracted services or things like that.”

Tax season is no small task for Foard, with roughly 3,000 individual returns, 1,500 business returns, and 500 nonprofit returns to handle between a team of 35 full-time staffers, per Lancaster’s estimate. Any holdups in the return process are bound to cause disruption.

Until the middle of 2025, Foard was used to starting tax season from behind the 8-ball. To start the process of preparing returns in Lacerte, the firm conducted a manual intake process that created client friction from the moment an organizer was sent out.

“We would send out a traditional organizer, in a PDF format,” Lancaster said. “The clients mostly used it just to know what to send to us. We had a few people who actually completed it.”

After documents trickled in at random intervals, the firm had a lot more work on its hands. As most accountants are painfully aware, getting random files to play nice with a long-existing tax software is rarely simple.

“Everything would come into the portal, and then we would have to manually combine PDFs and things like that to get to a file we could import into our tax software,” Lancaster said. “The main thing I was trying to accomplish was to get that more efficient.”

Foard was also hiring seasonal staffers on a yearly basis to help organize paperwork due to the heavy workload. The troubles also didn’t stop at the front of the workflow; the delivery process proved to be a time drain too.

“Before, to send out a return, I would pull it, attach it to an email, and password it manually with the PDF files, and then it would go to the client,” Lancaster said. “Now I don’t really have to do that. I just send an email explaining the results, and we send out drafts of the returns in batches.”

Lancaster didn’t know much about Truss heading into the fall of 2025. But a well-timed message caught his eye, starting a whirlwind process that paid huge dividends.

“I got an email reaching out about it, and I scheduled a demo,” Lancaster said. “We liked what we saw, so I decided to try it out.”

Not even requesting a second demo or sales call was a leap of faith from Lancaster and his two partners, plus the firm’s tax manager, the other person involved in the decision-making process.

As a firm, Foard was already comfortable with other AI-enabled technology tools that served other parts of its tax practice. But Truss was the first AI-enabled tool the firm used for its intake and delivery work, and that was something Lancaster took pride in introducing.

“There was no AI component to getting this information in and organizing it prior to us using Truss,” Lancaster said. “That was a big aspect of it, wanting to embrace AI and have these more routine tasks automated.”

The timing of the firm’s onboarding came after the major fall filing deadlines, so the team was able to send out extension returns through Truss and get acclimated with the system ahead of busy season. When the new year hit, Truss was ingrained in the workflow, and results were easy to measure.

Foard ran 6,365 projects through the Truss platform in year one, so there was nothing held back when it came to a total workflow overhaul. And across that large, diverse client base, the sentiments were overwhelmingly positive.

In one year on Truss, Foard:

• Ran 6,365 projects
• Completed 62,672 client tasks
• Delivered 4,261 returns
• Sent 3,390 organizers
• Collected 2,991 e-signatures
• Produced 2,727 workpapers

The most overwhelmingly positive reviews came from the change from a static intake process to an interactive one, tailored to each client based on an automated parsing of their past organizers.

“I rarely hear a client say anything bad about that process. Most of them embrace it,” Lancaster said.

Another major upgrade for the staff was the amount of control users had over the tracking process. Foard was previously limited by Lacerte’s relatively short list of statuses that could provide updates on the progress of specific returns.

“Our tax software, Lacerte, is very limited in that area. We could only have about 20 statuses,” Lancaster said. “Being able to have as many statuses as we wanted, completely customize it, just made a huge difference. For us, the tracking was huge.”

Where there used to be a mountain of manual compliance work, there was now a seamless transition to the prep phase, with no friction when it came to importing any documents or workpapers into Lacerte.

“A lot of it has to do with that whole automation of getting those documents organized before we submit it to our software,” Lancaster said. “That’s where we’re really saving the most time.”

The other quantifiable improvement that Lancaster saw immediately, and is looking forward to planning for in the future, was the lessened need for outside staffing help.

“We generally employ people to organize the information on the front end as seasonal tax help, and we’ve decided we just don’t need as many people to do that in the future,” Lancaster said. “I’m quite sure there’s a significant savings there.”

Foard is on pace to add an average of two tax preparers per year moving forward, in anticipation of increased client volume. In the 2026 return season, Foard expects to not only run more than 1,000 returns through Truss Prep, but to build Max AI into its operations.

“We’re going to make it a standard part of our prep process for staff to drop those returns into Max AI and have it analyze them for tax savings,” Lancaster said.

Lancaster sees AI as a building block of any successful tax practice moving forward, and as the talent shortage in the profession persists, he’s determined to get more out of the team he projects to have.

“There’s just not as many people, so every firm out there is looking to leverage their human resources with AI to make it more efficient,” Lancaster said. “The more volume we have, the more we’re going to have to lean on AI to help manage that.”

A firm that has been in business for over 60 years cares deeply about the trust it’s built with its clients. Implementing Truss had a purpose: minimizing the tedious compliance work and the client communication headaches that come with it so the team at Foard could spend its time cultivating those client relationships over topics that show a deeper level of expertise.

From an organizer clients complete without a second thought, to a tracking system that finally provides what the firm was looking for, to the lessened demand for extra seasonal hours, Foard is well on its way to constructing its optimal tax season workflow.

Truss is proud to partner with firms like Foard for that exact reason: to take the repetitive organization off the team’s plates so they can spend their time on the audit work and client relationships that have defined the practice for six decades.