What's really going on

You have three desks handing work down a line: intake creates the job, preparers do the work and talk to the client, billing closes it out. With 800 clients and 20 people, your losses aren't leads slipping — they're returns stalling between desks, clients pinging you for status, and bills going out late. A sales pipeline won't touch any of that. You need one shared queue where every return moves through named stages, the client sees status in a portal, and the invoice fires when the job closes.

What to do instead

1. TaxDome — roughly $1,000/user/year Pro (verify current pricing) — templated job pipelines move through stages as tasks are completed, plus a client portal for documents, e-signatures, and payments built for tax firms.
2. Karbon — roughly $59/user/month Team (verify current pricing) — integrates email, tasks, and client information in one place, reducing the need for back-and-forth emails, which fits if your client comms live in inboxes today.
3. Before you buy either, this week: write the 6–8 stages a return actually passes through in your firm — from "client contacted" to "invoice paid." One page. Every tool below templates jobs against those stages. Wrong stages, wrong software.

What you're being oversold

If someone pitched you HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, or Zoho for this, walk away — those close deals, they don't move a return through three desks. No tax organizer, no return workflow, no client portal tied to billing. You'd pay for a CRM and still buy TaxDome next year. Every week without a shared queue is another client asking where their return is and another bill going out late.

When to revisit this

When a partner can't answer "how many returns are in review right now" in under a minute.

The part worth getting right

The real choice is TaxDome versus Karbon, and it turns on one thing: how standardized is your work? TaxDome wins for firms whose work is mostly tax preparation with high seasonal volume, where the pre-built workflow templates do most of the configuration, and its monthly seats for short-term employees at $100 per seat, per month cover your busy-season hires. Karbon wins for firms doing mixed compliance and advisory work where collaboration and AI summarization matter more than tax-cycle templating. Pick wrong and you migrate 800 client files inside a year — with TaxDome's annual-upfront contract, that mistake stings twice.