Of individual returns processed end-to-end across six offices
Existing tools replaced with one platform
Client portal acceptance rate (vs. 10–40% industry standard)
Reduction in preparation hours on complex returns
Median time to draft a tax return
"Implementing a new tax platform at scale is hard, especially in the middle of real client work. In a matter of months, Armanino onboarded hundreds of clients and fundamentally changed how tax review happens. Instead of spending time verifying data line by line, our teams can now start with Accrual's AI-generated preparer insights and focus their expertise where judgment matters most — delivering deeper tax analysis and better outcomes for clients."
Armanino is one of the Top 20 independent accounting firms in the United States, with a significant individual tax practice spanning multiple offices nationwide.
The firm primarily serves middle-market businesses and high-net-worth individuals, with a comprehensive service portfolio spanning tax, audit, and consulting. Their tax practice covers individual returns, partnerships, corporate taxes, tax consulting, SALT, international tax, R&D credits, transfer pricing, and managed tax services.
As part of the firm's Vision 2030 strategy, leadership identified AI-powered tax preparation as a core pillar of how the firm delivers services. Their ambition was clear: leverage AI to deliver a high-touch, high-net-worth experience to every client.
Armanino's existing workflow relied on three separate tools, including SurePrep, TaxCaddy, and K1X for client intake, extraction, and data reconciliation. The result was sequential, manual, and wasn't scaling fast enough to meet the firm's goals.
The legacy stack was limited in its ability to process the diversity of source documents that show up on real high-net-worth returns. Forms like Schedule C and Schedule E, complex 1099 elements like tax-exempt interest and foreign dividends, brokerage statements, and K-1s required heavy manual cleanup. Reliance on human verification services introduced delays at the worst possible time in the season.
Document handling was its own bottleneck. With no centralized tracking, splitting and organizing source documents accounted for 20% to 50% of total project hours. Partners spent significant time on basic data validation before they could even start reviewing. The multi-level review process required field-by-field worksheet comparison between source documents and the tax return.
And there was room for improvement when it came to the client experience. Only about 20% of clients completed tax organizers, and TaxCaddy utilization sat around 5%. Outdated technology was creating a poor client experience and, increasingly, a competitive disadvantage.
Armanino needed a platform that could:
From pilot to deployment, Accrual delivered on its promise to produce review-ready returns with the fewest interventions. The platform stood out for its performance on the kind of complex work undertaken by national public accounting firms.
Tax Season 2026 was Armanino's first season on Accrual in production. The platform absorbed production volume on first contact, processing thousands of returns end-to-end across 43 states with hundreds of practitioners on the platform daily through peak.
The rollout plan reflected the full complexity of Armanino's high-net-worth practice. Roughly 70% of returns carried partnership, trust, or S-corp income. More than 1 in 4 carried four or more K-1s. Over 12% included international compliance forms. The most complex single return carried 213 K-1 schedules.
Time savings scaled with complexity. On the larger, multi-entity returns that drive the firm's economics — where document volume, K-1 reconciliation, and worksheet preparation are most cumbersome — practitioners reported reductions in preparation hours of up to 60%. These are the returns where AI-powered preparation pays off most, and they're exactly the returns Armanino's practice is built around.
The clearest read on Accrual's Tax Season 2026 impact came from Armanino's office champions: the partners, managers, and senior preparers who ran the most volume through the platform.
74% of invited clients accepted the portal, well above the 10% to 40% industry standard. 91% of those clients uploaded at least one document. The numbers represent thousands of clients self-serving the document collection process that historically required preparers to chase.
"It was so much easier this year, not having to send 15 emails a week saying I need this, this, and this. Document collection was probably the biggest win from my perspective this spring."
The old ways of working were seriously slowed down when 200, 500, sometimes 1,000+ page broker PDFs arrived.
"Some brokers just give you a 500-page PDF, and it's locked. I used to have to print it myself, scan it, then have a staff sort it. That seriously is a fantastic feature. Really time saving."
Accrual created enough capacity that Armanino could even take on late-season returns that historically would have been turned away.
"My biggest win with this product was that I got pulled in on some last-minute returns where people were sending documents on the day of or the day before. With SurePrep, you get to a certain point in the season where you can't send anything and get it back in time. Accrual completely eliminates that bottleneck."
"The biggest win I would say was Accrual support, hands down. The team was always available, always responding with solutions. There were problems but there was also resolution and a way to reach a person to help."
Throughout the season, Accrual resolved 532 support tickets and shipped 453 feature enhancements informed directly by Armanino's feedback. That worked out to roughly 30 new product capabilities per week through peak.
"Before using Accrual, review meant checking fields line by line. Now I start with the agent's preparer notes and work through the items flagged for judgment. It changes the role of review from data verification to real tax analysis."
Reviewers shifted from validating fields to making judgment calls. Preparer notes and citation trails meant managers and partners arrived at review with the work already organized and traceable.
Accrual scaled with complexity. Over 1 in 5 document types Accrual processed successfully were previously not supported by Armanino's prior extraction tool. This includes charitable receipts, property tax notices, client emails, and Excel spreadsheets that used to require manual data entry.
The shape of the work shifted. Tax administrators absorbed more of the setup and coordination, including client onboarding, engagement creation, portal invitations, document uploads, and triggering return generation. Preparers spent less time on data entry and more time on the items the agent flagged for human judgment. Reviewers focused on tax analysis rather than verification.
Adoption stuck. 82% of surveyed Armanino users plan to expand their use of Accrual next season. 88% report stable or improving trust in the platform. 62% increased their reliance on Accrual as the season progressed and deadline pressure intensified.
Client experience improved on a metric that matters. Clients reached out directly with positive feedback on the portal, including from non-champion offices. The 11th-hour spike in client uploads after April 13 told its own story about how comfortable clients had become with the workflow.
Armanino's deployment is the model for what enterprise AI adoption looks like in tax: structured, deliberate, and built to compound across seasons.
Office-by-office, champion-led. Accrual is now live across six offices: San Jose, San Ramon, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City. Each office elected local champions who served as first-line support and helped translate the platform into the working habits of their team. The champions program is doing real work: offices with active champions consistently outperformed on adoption, sentiment, and time savings.
Training calibrated to the work. Training was delivered in person at each office in January, with CPE-qualified sessions.
Data prepped before the season started. Four to six weeks before peak, the team worked through client data reconciliation to ensure accurate intake before portal invitations went out. That investment paid off in clean imports and high portal acceptance.
The pattern is starting to repeat across other firms beginning to follow Armanino's lead: a structured pilot with measurable benchmarks, a scoped rollout with deliberate partner selection, and a production deployment that treats the first season as a foundation for compounding returns. For firms thinking through their own evaluation, our guides on running a successful pilot and moving from pilot to production walk through the same playbook in more depth.
The 2026 tax season story isn't finished. Roughly half of Armanino's returns went on extension, including the most complex returns in the book, and they'll run through Accrual on the way to October.
By next April, our goal is that 100% of individual returns at Armanino will be processed on Accrual. From there, the integration deepens into Armanino's advisory and audit practices, with each new product line building on the foundation already in place.
Armanino set out to deliver a high-touch, high-net-worth experience to every client. 2026 is the first season they have the platform to do it.
To learn more about how Accrual is helping firms transform their tax practice, contact us.