How HRX CPAs Erased Its Admin Burden and Turned an 80-Hour Tax Season Into 50

HRX CPAs was built around a core belief: Financial success shouldn’t come at the expense of family time or peace of mind. The Irvine, Calif. firm specializes in multi-generational wealth planning, and president and founder Hiren Parmar is quick to distinguish his business from a run-of-the-mill compliance shop.

“We’re a boutique CPA firm serving business owners and high net worth individuals,” Parmar says. “Our work spans tax planning, CFO-level advisory, exit planning, and full-cycle bookkeeping. Our niche really is entrepreneurial families, business owners, and highly compensated executives.”

The team at HRX is deliberately lean, with six people on staff. Three are bookkeepers, and the tax side is comprised of a manager, an administrator who also prepares returns, and Parmar himself. That group churns through roughly 200 returns a year for a client base that has expanded to over 300 individuals across Orange County.

With a firm this size, every hour of administrative red tape takes precious time out of the calendar of someone who is supposed to be doing the high-value advisory work clients actually pay for. To sell the kind of proactive, year-round planning it wanted to live up to, HRX had to get out from under a mountain of busywork.

Parmar tells the story of his firm in two chapters: before Truss and after Truss. That “before” chapter started with a heaping stack of paper organizers and a struggle to get clients’ tax documents in house.

“Half the time you didn’t know what was missing versus what was not,” Parmar recalled. “So it was a little chaotic.”

In his efforts to modernize the firm, Parmar moved to organizers inside HRX’s practice management system. That was an improvement, but only a small one.

“It was great to fill out the questionnaires and have the work papers in one place, but we still fell into the same issue,” Parmar said. “It was still hard to check during tax season what was missing and what was outstanding, and to communicate to the client what we still needed. It felt like a Google form with PDFs attached. It didn’t really help.”

There was an opportunity cost that came with all that friction. Parmar could feel the wasted time and added stress in the workflow before actual tax work even began. He estimated that 60% of the effort was making sure the firm had the documents it needed and constantly reminding clients to send them. And the root issue was that the organizers simply weren’t getting completed.

“A lot of clients, even if you hand them an organizer, they won’t fill it out,” Parmar said. “A lot of firm owners will just send their organizers and then they won’t get it, and then they kind of have to make it up as they go.”

HRX knew it needed a better intake process, and there was a clear set of goals: make that process more efficient, cut the amount of admin time, and most of all, make clients’ jobs easier to maximize the amount of organizers that would actually be completed.

Parmar sought recommendations on tools to solve the intake problem from the content of accounting software influencer Jason Staats. After watching some videos, he narrowed his search down to two options: Truss and Stanford Tax. Truss won on the strength of what it did beyond the intake.

“Based on the videos, Truss had more enhancements to our service. The delivery was a huge thing. The easy startup was a huge thing,” Parmar said. “We liked that clients didn’t have to go into another portal. It’s just a magic link.”

Rather than immediately migrating the entire client base into the new system, HRX ran a controlled Truss trial with its clients who received extensions during the previous season, then asked them for feedback.

“We basically got 100%. This is awesome, I love it, it’s super easy,” Parmar said. “Then we rolled it out to the rest of our clients. … We used it with some of our older clients, and they were able to figure it out without us training them, which was huge for us.”

Quickly, Parmar found that several key features of Truss were transformational for HRX’s workflow. Those features were:

• Prior-year import. “The basic functionality of just having everything imported from last year was awesome.”
• Tax return delivery. Parmar called it “really awesome,” and credited it with helping the team get returns out the door faster.
• Estimated payment reminders. “That was great, because it’s one less email I had to write.”
• The summary output. “Really easy, and flexible enough to work with our current workflows.”

Above all, the flexibility Truss gave Parmar was the most redeeming quality.

“It’s malleable,” he said. “If you’re doing a workflow, you can just add the Truss link into your client work and they have everything.”

Accountants love numbers, and the hours saved in Parmar’s calendar told the story in black and white.

Truss erased the admin burden that used to hold up each and every return. And the reclaimed capacity allowed the firm to focus on exactly what it wanted to spend extra time on. To that end, Truss became a tool not only for tax intake, but a vehicle for prospective tax planning clients to test out the proposed services.

“It’s cut down the sales process for us,” Parmar said. “We’ve been able to use it as our intake service, but also really as our project management tool.”

Ask Parmar what he’d say to a skeptical firm owner considering Truss, and he’ll ask two questions in response.

“One: how many people actually fill out your organizers versus not? Two: how much time do your admins spend chasing documents and setting up reminders and doing the back and forth?” he said.

Most firms quietly accept both of those problems as the cost of doing business, in Parmar’s estimation. Putting out an organizer, having clients ignore it, and starting the scramble was all too familiar. His fix was not doing more chasing, but lowering the barrier to entry for his clients.

“People actually filling out the organizers is a huge thing, and trying to make it as simple as possible,” he said. “Because a lot of firm owners will just send their organizers and then they won’t get it, and then they have to kind of make it up as they go.”

Parmar also believes it’s important to distinguish between bolting on one more disconnected system, which was a fear that came with adding a new tool to his firm’s tech stack, and the system slotting into whatever a firm already does and making it flow more smoothly.

“Honestly, it’s a link,” Parmar said. “If you’re doing a workflow, you can just add the Truss link into your client work and they have everything. It’s malleable.”

That malleability hasn’t gone unnoticed with HRX’s peers. Parmar reported that other firms in his network who knew he’d adopted Truss had come to him asking for a reference.

Parmar built HRX to be forward-thinking and an early adopter of cutting-edge technology. Truss turned out to be proof of that concept on top of a time and energy saver.

“One of our missions is to be a technology leader, and Truss has really helped us capitalize on that,” Parmar says. “It gives us a feel of simplicity while also being effective, and it just lets us not waste time on things that don’t move the needle for us or the client.”

Truss is proud to partner with firms like HRX for just that reason: to take the busywork off tax professionals’ plates so they can focus on their clients, their growth, and their lives outside the office.