Year-End Tax Planning Starts With a Phone Call | Moses Mann
Luke Frye Hi there, and welcome to the Canopy Practice Success Podcast, where we interview industry leaders and accounting professionals to share insights, uncover new strategies, and inspire action to build a successful accounting practice. I’m your host, Luke Frye, CPA and accountant in residence here at Canopy
Today, I have the great pleasure of sharing the microphone with my friend Moses Mann. Moses started his career at Deloitte and worked there for a while before starting his own firm about 10 years ago. He’s primarily focused on international tax, but does a lot more than that.
Moses, welcome to the show. I’d love for you to share a little more about who you are and what you’re up to.
Moses Mann Luke, thank you for having me on the show, and it’s good to see you too. Hi, everyone. My name is Moses, and my firm’s name is M Square Tax.
We’re a 10-person CPA firm headquartered in Kirkland, Washington. We also have an office in Bend, Oregon, which is where I currently live. I moved to Bend about three years ago.
Our team of 10 is spread all over the US, plus one person in Taiwan, so we’re a very remote team. About 90% of our clientele are multinationals, so we do a lot of cross-border transactions and cross-border tax reporting for individuals and small businesses.
Luke Frye I love it, and you’ve certainly helped me out a lot too, so I can vouch for the credentials there.
Today, we’re going to talk more specifically about year-end planning as it relates to setting up your firm and your clients for success. What I’d love to hear from your point of view, Moses, is what your typical year-end looks like. We just finished the 10/15 deadline, had a lot of activity there, and I think people are mostly recovered by now. What’s your typical process?
Moses Mann Luke, that’s a very good and timely question, because just this morning I was meeting with our office manager to plan out what the next two to three months look like.
First, I’d say the type of year-end planning firm owners engage in really depends on where you are as a firm. Our firm has grown tremendously over the last three or four years. When we first started 10 years ago, there really wasn’t much planning. It was more like, “Hey, let’s get the work done. Let’s figure out a way to get more clients and get organized.”
But as our firm and our headcount have grown over the last year or two, I’ve put a bigger emphasis on not just year-end planning, but year-round planning.
To give you an example, what we talked about today is what our revenue pipeline looks like between now and February. Tax season is done. Most of our work has already been billed. But as a small business owner, we still have payroll to meet and bonuses we want to give out. We want to plan Christmas parties. Do we have enough in the pipeline to sustain all of that?
That’s what my admin and I sat down and mapped out this morning: what’s in the revenue pipeline over the next four months, so we can make strategic decisions based on that.
Luke Frye So there’s an element of capacity planning, billing, receivables follow-up, and planning for next year. But there’s also an element of advisory.
I know we’ve talked a lot about the shift from compliance to advisory, and people can get kind of tired of hearing that. But I think year-end is an especially perfect time to either introduce or double down on advisory.
So I’m curious, as it relates to your clientele, how are you choosing who needs an advisory conversation? What’s included? What do you charge more for?
Moses Mann First, I think it’s important to categorize your clients. At our firm, we have three tiers: A, B, and C. These tiers are all related to complexity.
For the tier A and tier B clients, we’ll proactively reach out to each and every one of them beginning the first week of November. Using Canopy, we have a task built out to systematically follow up with these clients. The idea is to have a one-on-one meeting with each of them.
We want to get them engaged. This is a message I’m going to convey to my team over the next few weeks: there are really two goals to year-end advisory work for us.
The first and most important goal is to have the client feel like we’re reaching out to them proactively. Putting revenue aside, selling projects aside, the number one priority is for the client to feel, “Hey, M Square is calling me. M Square wants to know how I’m doing.” That’s it.
And part of our training for our staff is, on that phone call, really listen to the client and see if there are any issues that would trigger a year-end projection or year-end planning project.
If we’re able to do that successfully, it’ll definitely help not only with client engagement, but also with revenue generation.
Luke Frye Because I’ve worked with you for a while, I know you’ve been pretty innovative in how you bill. You charge people a fixed fee, so you’re not penalizing someone for taking more time, and it aligns the incentives around being more efficient, taking advantage of technology, and getting things done.
But if you’re on a call with somebody, how do you identify whether you’re going to charge them more? What’s that conversation like? How are you talking about engaging for next year?
Moses Mann During that call, we really listen in. A lot of these clients, we’ve already done their tax returns for many years, so we generally know what their complexities are. But on the call, we try to find out: was there anything that happened in 2026 that was out of the ordinary?
Part of what we talked about this week was how to have tiered fees for the year-end tax projection. If it’s a simple W-2-type projection, maybe we charge $1,000. If a client sold a house or sold a massive amount of stock, maybe that’s a different tier.
We want to make it simple for us, but we also want to make it simple for the client. Every client’s going to be different, but we want three tiers of pricing for year-end projections.
Luke Frye So someone like me, who moved from Canada back to the US and has some consulting income and W-2 income, would be a category you’d want to amp up and make sure you have a good conversation with before the year is over.
Moses Mann Correct. And part of that conversation too, Luke, is that one thing the client also wants to know is, “Hey, what would my fee be to do the tax return for next year?”
So there’s really a third component to year-end planning. The first is client engagement. The second is doing the year-end tax planning work. And the third is getting the client to commit to working with us next year.
One of the incentives we’d offer is, “Hey, as part of this year-end conversation, we’ll determine what your fees will look like for next year. We can set up a payment plan or…” We haven’t thought that far out yet. Do we give them a discount for signing up now? Do we give them time to pay over the year and make it a subscription-type model? These are things our firm is still working through.
Luke Frye I know because we’ve had lots of conversations about this. For people thinking about how to incentivize staff or managers who might enjoy this little bit of a lull: how can we have these conversations with clients and get ahead of some of this? And how are you aligning incentives with your managers to do more work during a time of year when they might ordinarily take more of a break?
Moses Mann Luke, I think you might have secretly listened in on our meeting this morning, because everything you brought up is exactly what my admin and I talked about today.
There are two ways we incentivize our team to do this. The first: at the beginning of the year, we set up a bonus structure for our entire team, and a big component of it is meeting our revenue goals for the year. This year-end tax planning push will help us get to that goal line so everyone is eligible for the bonus. That’s incentive number one.
The second incentive is yet to be determined, but we did talk about it this morning. Perhaps everybody who engages a client on a year-end tax planning project gets X percent of the revenue generated from that projection project. I think this would be a very good incentive for people to get engaged.
Luke Frye Because you’re the owner, right? You obviously want to increase revenue as much as possible and maximize your EBITDA for lots of reasons. But ultimately, people working for you feel a lot more buy-in if you’re aligning those incentives, and they get more of a Christmas bonus to go on a vacation or buy something they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.
Moses Mann Yeah. I don’t want to force the year-end planning process on my team. I want to make it fun. I want everyone to enjoy this process as much as possible, and I think building in some incentives will really align that.
Luke Frye You mentioned this activity of booking meetings with clients and having a few different components, and the first one you said was engagement. I just want to make sure I follow you. When you say engagement, you literally mean having some sort of touch point, a conversation. Not necessarily signing the engagement letter. Is that right?
Moses Mann Correct. Engagement in that context just means picking up the phone and saying, “How’s it going? How’s the year been?” I think clients really appreciate that.
There are zero expectations of signing up or anything like that. It really is just picking up the phone and checking in on your clients.
Luke Frye And I can say that about your whole team: really focused on the relationship and building rapport with people.
Do you think that uniquely positions you as AI promises to take over some of the more tedious things? Are you betting on the relationship more? How are you thinking about the evolution of technology in your firm?
Moses Mann I am all in on building personal relationships. I think technology will replace the manual work, like doing a tax return. But clients will still need to hear a human voice. And the consistency with which they hear that human voice from us will drive long-term relationships and long-term value.
Luke Frye Great. Switching gears a little bit, I’m curious if you could share some stories from the past. Something you wish you hadn’t done, a big lesson learned, maybe a small failure. Obviously not totally detrimental, because you’re still here.
For people who are earlier in their career, or earlier in owning their own firm, is there a lesson you learned or a big win you could share?
Moses Mann Lessons learned. What I’ve learned, both myself and working with my entire team, is the power of a simple phone call.
As accountants, we deal with a lot of ambiguity. Sometimes clients email us facts and stories: “Hey, this happened, that happened.” What we often find ourselves doing is reading the email and trying to decipher what the client is actually trying to tell us. We could spend 30 minutes or an hour on it. Did he really mean this, or did he really mean that? Because this and that lead to two different paths.
So a lot of times, I’ve asked my staff, “Hey, why don’t you just call him? Just talk to him.”
A lot of accountants, by nature, would like to just sit at our desks and do our work on our computers. But that extra skill set, that extra push to call clients and understand their situation, clients really appreciate it.
I have yet to have one phone call where the client said, “Why did you call me? I’m busy.” That has never happened in my entire career. They appreciate it, and a lot of ambiguity gets resolved through one simple phone call.
That goes back to trying to have that engagement. A phone call will solve a lot of problems.
Luke Frye Do you ever get questions from clients like, “How much is this phone call going to cost me?” If not, how have you been able to manage that?
Moses Mann We haven’t had any. When we bring on a new client, one thing we’re very clear about is that we don’t charge for these one-off phone calls.
We actually want you to call us before you make a decision, before you make a big financial decision, because that’s what we’re here for. We want to help you think through these things. We certainly don’t want you to make a mistake and then have to pay us later to fix it.
So we rarely charge for these phone calls. And if we do have to bill, which is pretty rare, we tell the client what the expectations are beforehand to avoid any surprises.
Luke Frye What do you think is one of the biggest challenges for clients at year-end in working with their tax accountant? And why do you think most of this doesn’t happen for people?
Moses Mann I think clients don’t know where to start. They don’t know what questions to ask. They just don’t know what they don’t know.
I have two examples. Two phone calls over the last month where a client called me and said, “Hey, Moses, I don’t even know what to ask you, but I just want to talk to you about things that have been going on.”
As CPAs, when we think of year-end tax planning, a lot of technical tax stuff comes to mind. But from a client’s perspective, they may have zero idea what that means. They might be afraid it’ll be a heavy lift for them, but really it’s not.
So clients don’t know what they don’t know, and I think that causes friction for them to engage with us at year-end. But if we approach it as, “Hey, just want to catch up. Just want to see how you’re doing,” it removes a lot of friction. It gets the client to engage with you, and you can listen in on what needs to be done.
The answer could be nothing. The answer for year-end planning for a particular client could very well be nothing. But it’s that 15- or 20-minute phone call where you can determine that.
Luke Frye Rather than sending an old-school questionnaire or being really robotic with a spreadsheet, you’re having a call with me. You’re learning I moved back to the US. You’re learning there’s a marriage, or a divorce, or a new kid, or a new job, or stock options. All this stuff will naturally come up, and you’re not forcing the client to know that’s a taxable event. You’re listening for it, keying into it, and then helping them understand, “Maybe we should do some planning around this. What are my options?”
Generally speaking, I think we overthink this stuff. For us, it may seem very simple, but for non-accountants, it’s pretty helpful. What are some of the most common year-end tax planning strategies you use? What are a few examples of things you’d typically advise people on?
Moses Mann I’ll put it in two buckets.
The first is how we advise our multinational clients for year-end planning. Especially in the year somebody moves to the United States, there are a lot of tax planning opportunities. There’s what we call pre-immigration planning.
If this is the first year they moved to the US, presumably they’re a nonresident for part of the year. Is there anything we can do while they’re a non-tax resident that can help save them US taxes in the future?
For example, if you sell stocks while you’re a non-US tax resident, the US isn’t going to tax you on it. So say they have a bunch of stocks in Germany. Can they liquidate those stocks before they become a US tax resident, so it saves them taxes in the future? That’s pre-immigration planning we can do right now, before the year is over.
On the domestic side, common things we do: make sure they top up their 401(k). Really look at their AGI to see if they’re eligible for a Roth, and if they’re not, have them think about a backdoor Roth option.
And a DAF, a donor-advised fund, for those who are charitably inclined and have a lot of money or appreciated stock. Doing a donor-advised fund before the end of the year can be good. We had a lot of clients with spikes in their income. They sold their business or sold a house in 2026. Those are really good years to do donor-advised funds.
On the flip side, you have a down year. Unfortunately, we have clients who’ve been laid off or whose business shut down. If you have a down income year, the silver lining is maybe you can do some Roth conversions.
These are things that, if we don’t have these conversations, we’d never find out.
Luke Frye Maybe one more question on tactics. As it relates to gathering documents, I think that’s probably most everyone’s biggest pain point, both on the client side and on the professional side. What have you seen work really well for gathering documents from clients, especially for these one-off engagements, but even more generally?
Moses Mann Nothing has worked well.
What I’ve gotten comfortable with over my career is that there will never be a perfect solution, and the reason is that every human is different.
Oftentimes, I try to put myself in the client’s shoes, because I have to do my own tax return too. I have a bunch of tax documents. I’m super busy. What would make it easy for me?
Usually that means a checklist. Do I want to spend an hour or two filling out an organizer? Probably not. An organizer feels a bit impersonal, especially if it’s not rolled over properly and the client has to reenter everything.
What works well for me and for some of my clients is a really detailed checklist the client can just check off. That checklist could be built from what was sent last year, and I think technology, Canopy, is probably equipped or will be equipped to do that next year.
So in my opinion, a simple checklist is the most effective.
Luke Frye All right. So it sounds like taking advantage of advisory conversations, doubling down on relationships, and using the phone to call people.
Is there anything else in closing you’d recommend to a firm that struggles with year-end planning or struggles during tax season? What could they be doing now to avoid being as overwhelmed in March?
Moses Mann Write things down.
We just got through 10/15. Part of the exercise we’re doing last week and this week is to first write down the pain points. Keep a diary. Keep a journal.
If you have a team, get your whole team to write things down. I ask them three questions:
- What did we do well?
- What can the whole firm improve?
- What can you do to improve yourself?
Really write these down, then take those answers and start thinking about how to approach next year.
I’m a very goal-oriented person. I write everything down. If you have these points of reflection now in October, and really commit to holding yourself accountable to these goals and fixing these things for next year, I think you’ll look back next year and be a lot happier.
Luke Frye I love it. Moses, thank you for chatting with me. If people want to find out more about you and your firm, where should they go?
Moses Mann They should go to www.msquaredtax.com. We just built a beautiful website. You can subscribe to our newsletter; we send one out once a week. Or if you have any international questions, or clients with international matters, feel free to reach out. Happy to be a resource.
Luke Frye Awesome. Thank you again, Moses. Really appreciate the conversation.
And that is the news from the Great Salt Lake, where all the books are closed, all the tax returns are e-filed, and all the clients have paid their invoices.
Moses Mann All right. Thank you, Luke.
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