Tavola Group Eliminates Deadline Stress with Canopy Templates

The 2025 Canopy Template Award Winners

Tavola Group earned the 2025 Canopy Template Award for transforming a historically stressful process—quarterly estimated tax reminders—into a seamless and automated experience for both clients and staff.

Before building the template, the team spent hours manually tracking deadlines, emailing clients, and following up on documents. Tasks often came down to the wire, creating stress across the board. Their new template eliminates those headaches by generating recurring tasks, assigning internal subtasks, and automating client reminders on a predictable schedule.

Their template saves the team hours per quarter, has eliminated missed deadlines, and has significantly improved client satisfaction. Clients receive reminders every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday leading up to the deadline, along with clear instructions on what to send. Subtasks ensure consistency even when team members change.

In their words, the goal was to "transform one of the most stressful recurring processes in tax compliance into an automated, reliable, and client-friendly workflow." 

They succeeded and set a new standard for how automation can reduce risk, save time, and build client trust.

Profile

Tavola Group is a fully remote tax planning, accounting, and advisory firm that has grown steadily over the past five years. What began with just a few employees has expanded into a 20-person team offering full-charge accounting, tax return preparation, and proactive tax planning services.

With a flexible and collaborative team structure, Tavola Group needed a practice management platform that could bring everything into one place, improve visibility, and support their continued growth. Since adopting Canopy nearly three years ago, the firm has modernized how they operate by automating client workflows, simplifying invoicing, streamlining e-signatures, and building custom templates to ensure every engagement is consistent and efficient.

Tavola Group was named Canopy’s 2025 Template Award winner for their creative use of quarterly tax templates and their commitment to continuous process improvement.

These tools have helped the team save hours each month, speed up payment collection, and deliver a better overall experience for clients and staff alike.

Automated Client Workflows Save Hours Every Month

Since Tavola Group has grown so rapidly, efficiency is just not an option, it’s essential. 

Before adopting Canopy in 2022, the team spent hours each month manually emailing clients for documents, updates, and monthly requests. Every point of communication had to be tracked. followed up on, and double-checked. 

Now those same workflows run automatically in Canopy. Monthly client requests go out like clockwork, with no manual emails required. Automation doesn’t just save hours. It creates peace of mind. 

By reducing manual admin work and standardizing communication, the team has reclaimed valuable time to focus on higher-value client work which has turned what was once a major bottleneck into one of their biggest productivity wins.

E-Signatures + Document Management = Seamless Client Experience

Before switching to Canopy’s built-in e-signature tool, Tavola Group relied on a third-party platform to collect signatures for client documents. The process required downloading, uploading, saving to the client folder, and manually updating records. It was a lot of extra work for the admin team and created unnecessary complexity.

With the recent release of fillable custom fields in Canopy’s e-signature feature, the firm made the switch, and immediately saw a difference. Everything from sending to storing signed documents now happens in one place, and the team receives automatic notifications when clients complete their forms.

“Now we can just set up the template in Canopy, send it from there, and it automatically is connected to the client and the team gets a notification when they've completed it.”
— Maria Sentic, Chief Operating Officer

This improvement not only streamlined the internal workflow, it also simplified the experience for clients. Signed documents are stored directly in the client portal, along with their invoices, requests, and other files. By centralizing the entire process inside Canopy, the firm eliminated duplicate tasks, reduced turnaround times, and improved visibility across teams.

Custom Templates Enable Consistency

Templates are not just a helpful tool for this firm, they are a core part of how the team maintains consistent, efficient service across every client and engagement. 

From client onboarding to quarterly tax estimates and year-end prep, Canopy templates help standardize workflows, reduce manual effort, and support repeatable processes across the remote team.

A prime example is the firm’s quarterly estimated tax process. The team created four separate templates, one for each quarter, each aligned to IRS deadlines and tailored to the timing of information requests. By using dynamic fields like “previous year” in the task names, the templates are reusable and automatically generated each year.

“We actually have four templates. So we have one for each quarter and they're all tailored to the exact dates that the IRS requires those payments to be made at and at the points that we're supposed to be requesting the information in the first place. So it was a cooperative thing where we went through and developed the base template that we've been using for a while and then added automation and split it into four different templates.” — James Kelly, Director of Operations

Templates start with Canopy’s prebuilt versions, but the team fully customizes them to fit their processes. Once assigned to a client, each template is further personalized to reflect that client’s needs, documents, or deliverables. The team continuously updates templates with checklists, client requests, and automation to improve them over time.

Because of this structure, any team member can jump into a workflow and pick up where someone else left off. It ensures a smooth handoff, consistent client experience, and operational clarity that supports the firm’s fully remote model and ongoing growth.

Simplified Billing, Faster Payments

Billing used to be a separate, manual process that required multiple tools and too many steps. Now, the firm handles all of its invoicing directly inside Canopy. This change has simplified payment collection and improved cash flow across the board.

Clients receive their invoices through the same portal they already use for document uploads, signatures, and client requests. Because the portal is familiar and easy to access, there is less friction and fewer questions. Clients know where to go, and the team knows when payments come in.

“We’re doing all our invoicing out of Canopy. So obviously that’s the one-stop place that clients can go to, to look at their invoices and pay them and then access documents, of course.” — Maria Sentic, Chief Operating Officer

The team also uses the portal as a selling point for new clients. From the start, clients are encouraged to download the mobile app, which makes it even easier to scan documents and pay invoices. The app’s built-in scanning feature reduces file issues and cuts down on unnecessary back-and-forth.

By bringing invoicing into the same system as the rest of their workflow, the firm has reduced administrative overhead and made the entire payment experience more seamless. With fewer tools and clearer visibility, they can stay focused on client work instead of chasing down payments.

A Partnership That Powers Growth

Tavola Group’s success with Canopy goes far beyond features or checklists. It’s the result of a true partnership. As a fast-growing, fully remote firm, they needed more than just a tool. They needed a platform that could evolve with them, support flexible workflows, and actively respond to their feedback.

That’s exactly what they found in Canopy.

From automated client requests to integrated e-signatures, templates, and invoicing, the team has rebuilt their operations around systems that save time, eliminate stress, and create consistency. Just as importantly, they’ve found a product team that listens and delivers. Canopy has rolled out requested features like fillable e-signature fields and improved engagement tools on time and with intention.

By leveraging Canopy’s capabilities, Tavola Group has transformed some of the most tedious and deadline-driven parts of their work into streamlined, client-friendly processes. The result is a more productive team, happier clients, and a stronger foundation for future growth.