FOR CPA FIRMS · DESIGN PARTNER SOUGHT
Building a done-for-you review service for small CPA firms.
With one design partner.
Review season capacity is the bottleneck for small CPA firms in NH, MA, and ME. We're building an AI-assisted fieldwork service to solve it — and we're looking for one firm to build it with us.
WHY NOW
The math of small CPA firms doesn't add up anymore.
Capacity is concentrated; demand isn't.
Review and audit work clusters into Q1 and the first half of Q2–Q3. Salaried staff don't. Most small firms either over-hire and carry the cost the rest of the year, or under-hire and burn out their partners during season.
AI changes the fieldwork math.
What used to take a junior staffer a week of fieldwork can now be done in a few hours of human review on top of automated processing — if you build the workflow correctly. Most small firms don't have the time or appetite to build that themselves. That's the gap we're filling.
Junior staff are the bottleneck.
Hiring qualified review staff is harder than ever, training takes a year before they're useful, and the ones you do train often leave for industry roles within two. The labor problem is structural, not cyclical.
You keep the client.
Engagement letter, signing authority, and ultimate professional responsibility stay with your firm. We never touch the client relationship. Our work product flows to you; your name goes on the report.
We do the fieldwork.
Trial balance, GL, and supporting documentation flow through our review workflow. AI does the bulk processing — ratio analysis, fluctuation explanations, sampling, supporting schedules. A senior reviewer (founder, currently) walks the output, escalates anomalies, and produces the workpaper package. Output is structured for partner review and intended to support your peer review obligations.
Your partner reviews and signs.
Your partner conducts the review-level procedures required by professional standards, signs off on the workpapers, and issues the report. We are the workpaper preparation layer. We are not, and will never be, a substitute for partner review.
THE SERVICE
We are not a software company. We are an accounting firm building a service that uses AI to do what junior staff used to do — with senior human review on every engagement.
Where we are today
The workflow exists in working form. The AI processing layer has been built and with preliminary testing. What we don't have yet is a live engagement under a partner firm's name.
What we're building, in plain terms.
Why we need a design partner
Every CPA firm has its own conventions — workpaper formats, review checklists, documentation standards, peer review program expectations. We need to shape the output to a real firm's actual standards before it can serve broadly. The first partner firm helps us do that, and gets meaningful long-term value in return.
THE PARTNERSHIP
What the design partner gets. What we need in return.
WHAT THE DESIGN PARTNER GETS
Permanent rate advantage.
The design partner firm gets long-term partnership terms meaningfully more favorable than the standard rates we'll offer subsequent firms. This is permanent for the life of the partnership, not a pilot discount that expires.
Workflow shaped to your standards.
Workpaper format, documentation conventions, review checklist structure, peer-review-program alignment — all built around your firm's actual practices, not a generic template.
First-mover capacity advantage.
Your firm gets review-season capacity that competitor firms in the region won't have access to until later. This is a real competitive advantage during a season when capacity decides what work you can take.
Direct line to the founder.
You work with the person building the service. Decisions get made in the room. No account managers, no support tickets, no tier-two escalations.
WHAT WE NEED FROM A DESIGN PARTNER
Two to three real review engagements.
We need to test the workflow against live client data and live partner review, not historical samples. Two to three review engagements through the firm gets us there.
Partner-level engagement on workflow design.
A few hours of a managing or review partner's time across the engagement — reviewing workpaper output, flagging where format or substance needs to change, weighing in on peer-review considerations.
Written feedback after each engagement.
Short, structured — what worked, what didn't, what would have made the workpapers more useful. We use it to refine the next iteration.
Willingness to be a reference if it works.
If the partnership produces results you'd recommend, we'd ask you to be a reference for subsequent firms. If it doesn't work, we walk away cleanly. Either way, no NDA gets in the way of you being honest about your experience.
What this is not.
This is not a free engagement. The design partner pays for the work — at the partnership rate, which is favorable but real. We are not a vendor doing free pilots; we are a firm structuring a partnership that benefits both sides for the long term.
What we're not asking for.
No exclusivity. No equity. No NDAs that prevent you from talking honestly about the work. No commitments beyond the design partnership engagements themselves.
If your firm is the right design partner, the next step is one conversation.
30 minutes. We walk through the workflow, the workpaper output, and the partnership economics. You get to ask the hard questions. If we're a fit, we move toward a written design partner agreement. If we're not, we both move on with no obligation.