Like many full-service firms, HighPoint ran client intake on a short, mostly yes/no questionnaire. It told the team almost nothing up front. The only way to know what a client was missing was to manually compare this year's documents against last year's return, and that discovery usually happened mid-preparation, during the busiest weeks of the season.
The firm tried to fix it themselves. They built custom Excel-driven document request lists for every client, which worked in concept but took too long to execute. They tested SurePrep and GruntWorx for document handling, but the manual upload-and-wait cycle, per-page scanning costs, and manual work of the UltraTax integration made both cumbersome. And once returns were finally ready, signatures became their own bottleneck.
What drew HighPoint to Soraban was simple: the entire engagement, including documents, questionnaire, and signature, lives in one place instead of scattered across systems.
"It's a game-changer." – Jonathan Pieper, CPA, Advisor, HighPoint CPAs
HighPoint now runs Soraban alongside UltraTax and Karbon, using Connect to auto-populate document data into returns. When a client's document set comes in incomplete, staff request just the outstanding items and close out the rest, instead of resending an entire organizer. The Prospect Upload Link gives prospective and one-off clients a secure way to send files without a full portal setup.
For paper-heavy clients, staff bulk-scan and upload entire stacks at once rather than pre-sorting pages, and use client chat for quick follow-ups on missing items.
Accountants described the change as a season-defining improvement in their workload. Dropping several accountants’ extension load in half, from 100 clients pushed to extension to 40-50 after just the first season with Soraban.
Signing returns got noticeably smoother. Replacing knowledge-based authentication with Soraban's e-signature flow was, in the team's words, a major upgrade for clients, and the firm fully processed more signed returns this year as a result.
"The way that Soraban processes signatures on returns was a million times better than the old KBA system where you had to know what street you lived on twenty-five years ago and what color your car was." – Shantel Anderson, Operations Manager, HighPoint CPAs
Client adoption came easily for most. When someone did need help, the HighPoint team used the client portal view to see exactly what the client sees and walk them through it live over the phone.
On the admin side, the team gained a shared view of outstanding documents and tasks across the client base, so staff could support clients directly instead of routing every question back to the preparer.
"It's almost like an assistant for you, too, so that you can do the work. You're not doing all the grunt work, the boring stuff. It makes everything so much faster. I feel like you can focus on doing the work and not getting ready to do the work."
— Zane Kuhbacher, EA, Advisor, HighPoint CPAs
Under 30 days to your first live season. No migration, no commitment until you're ready.
