# Marcus Heller, Managing Partner at Heller & Dorn CPA — read of CPA-AI, May 11 2026

> 14 years in public accounting, currently running 5 staff and about 310 active clients out of a strip-mall office in Naperville, IL.

## How I got here

Spent 20 minutes Sunday night Googling "best client document portal for cpa firm 2025" because my admin Sarah quit in March and I'm back to being the person who chases W-2s. Found a Reddit thread where someone mentioned CPA-AI in passing and linked to it. Not an ad, not a sponsored post. Just a guy saying it cut his onboarding time down. That's worth five minutes of my Sunday.

## What I clicked first

The hero line stopped me: "solo CPAs, stop losing billable hours to manual reconciliation." That's not my situation exactly (I have staff) but I kept reading because the framing was right. It wasn't "transform your practice" or "AI-powered growth platform." It said a specific thing that costs me money. The "nine days per new client" number on the onboarding pain section is the one I kept thinking about because I know mine is longer than that and I've never actually timed it.

## Where I paused

The testimonial from Margaret L. The quote is: "Tax season used to mean 60-hour weeks just to stay on top of document chasing. This past April my team averaged 48 hours." I stopped here for maybe two full minutes. Twelve hours is a lot to shave off a 60-hour week. But I'm also suspicious of it because "8-person CPA firm, Denver CO" is not a verifiable person. No last name, no firm name, no way to look her up. If Margaret ran an 8-person firm in Denver she's got a LinkedIn. Why isn't it linked? The specificity of "20 staff-days" is either real data or the most compelling-sounding number a copywriter could pick. I genuinely cannot tell.

## What I distrusted

Two things.

First: "8.4 hrs saved per staff per week on average." That stat is just floating there with no footnote, no sample size, no explanation of how it was calculated. Is that across 10 firms or 1,000? Is it self-reported by users or measured in some actual way? "On average" needs a denominator. Every SaaS company has a stat like this and it's almost always based on a five-firm beta and one survey question.

Second: the "AI Client Communications" feature. "Generate status updates, document request follow-ups, and billing summaries in your firm's voice. Review and send in one click." Okay. I've used a lot of these AI-draft tools and the output is either embarrassingly generic or weirdly formal. "In your firm's voice" requires setup that takes longer than just writing the email. What does "firm voice profile" actually mean in practice? One page in a questionnaire? Twenty examples you have to upload? I've been burned by this promise before.

## What would convince me

A real firm I can Google. Not "Margaret L., Denver CO." Give me "Margaret Lindqvist, Lindqvist Tax Advisors, Denver CO" and I'll go find her on LinkedIn and see if she posted anything about it during April. One verifiable reference from a 5-10 person firm that looks like mine would do more than all the stats on this page.

Also: a number on document classification accuracy in context. The page says "above 96% accuracy on common types." But what's the error mode? Does it put a 1099-B in the wrong folder or does it skip it entirely and I don't find out until prep? 4% wrong on 300 clients with 8 documents each is almost 100 misclassified files. I need to understand what "flagged for staff review" looks like in practice before I trust this.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The 8.4 hours saved per staff per week: how many firms is that based on, and are you measuring it from time-tracking software or from a survey you sent to users?

2. Can I talk to one firm in the 4-6 staff range that's been using this for at least one full tax season? Not a name on your website, an actual introduction where they agreed to take a call.

3. The Drake integration: does it pull client data bidirectionally or is it a one-way import at setup? If I update an entity type in Drake mid-season does CPA-AI see it or do I have to re-import?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The page is more specific than most and it's not trying to sell me on "AI transformation." But the testimonials are unverifiable and the one stat I'd actually use to justify this to my business partner has no sourcing. A real reference call would move me.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-11. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*