Rodney met the accountants at the BaCo Group in 2017 when he took on the CFO/Controller job at a large agricultural construction company that operated out of Texas but managed projects throughout the country.

Rodney explained, “We were essentially a remotely managed company with a legacy desktop accounting solution that sat on a computer network in our office. Project cost management and reporting was a lot of my job and we used QuickBooks at the time to manage that and our payroll. In addition to our business, we had real estate, a management company, an equipment holding company, and other investments that we maintained. Getting all of that information consolidated and then shared with ownership was something that had not been done effectively or efficiently in the past.”

Rodney’s problem is one experienced in many other businesses that have multiple different operating entities. The limitations in the accounting platform made consolidating reports so time-consuming that he never had a chance to prepare them, let alone analyze any trends until the financial statements were reviewed each year. That is when the team at the BaCo Group approached him about using a tool they had created that would combine the entities into one combined report and deliver them to him and his ownership group in an efficient manner, eventually all online. It would also do something else that no other CPA or online financial reporting platform offered, it would help make the year-end process of getting tax returns completed and filed more efficient by integrating that directly into their CPA firm’s workflow.

Rodney was, of course, very interested and began working with the team at BaCo Group. Beginning in 2019, Rodney was routinely delivering combined financial statements to the owners of the company thanks to the technology utilized at BaCo Group. He was able to work with the team to create custom reports, like a trailing 12, that helped him close out each month. Most importantly, by year-end, BaCo Group could provide him with reports so he could see what his taxable income was, before year-end, not at the deadline.

Ford Baker is the founder of the BaCo Group and the primary innovator behind the patented technology from their sister technology company, BaCo Tech. Ford said, “The difficulty most firms have is many clients report on an accrual basis and file returns on a cash or tax basis, with accelerated depreciation, etc. A year that may be bad on an accrual basis may be profitable on a cash basis, so before the year is over, there is a need to spend some of the reserves for next year, in December rather than January. For many businesses, they don’t find that out until the taxes are due in April and it is too late to spend.”

Baker went on to explain why, “It is hard on CPAs because we spend most of our time putting last year’s numbers on last year’s forms and we don’t have time to work on estimates and plans. It wasn’t an enormous achievement just for Rodney, it was the proof we needed to show what we were doing was not only possible, but that it worked, and it was the kind of service businesses were eager to receive.”

It was possible because The BaCo Group had constantly updated access to all the reports and details for the entities Rodney managed. And the most important thing for Rodney was that “I didn’t have to do a thing.” Rodney explained, “BaCo Group had a solution that automated how I transferred my data to them, and it was done throughout the year, so the questions I used to get asked after year-end from activity that took place last year, had already been handled by BaCo Group as the activity happened. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have to send things after year-end, it was that I could address problems and questions with my CPA as they occurred, real-time.”

Baker explains how this is all possible; “ours is a patented process that works a lot like online banking, a process we describe as a transaction-based workflow. The efficiency and effectiveness of online banking is not that they e-mail you a statement with a balance on it at the end of the month, it is that the accounting software and your bank talk to each other during the month, exchanging and creating transactions, automatically. Our transaction-based workflow does the same thing for our clients and our firm. Transactions are delivered to us automatically and our technology allows us to do something client-focused, like notifying a client that they used a word in a memo that the IRS may not like in an audit and coaching them on alternatives. It allows us to be proactive with our client, instead of reactive and that really makes a difference in how we operate.”