Insights on tax, equity, and building wealth
Guides and analysis from the Harness team and the advisors on the platform.
Tax Traps in Shareholder Buy-Sell Agreements (And How to Avoid Them)
When it comes to business succession planning, buy-sell agreements determine how an owner's interest will be bought or sold upon specific triggering events like death, disability, or retirement, ensuring business continuity and a clear exit strategy. While these agreements may seem straightforward, they conceal complex tax implications that can take even seasoned business owners by surprise, triggering a cascade of tax consequences.
Tax Advisor Weekly — August 15, 2025
The dust still hasn’t settled around Trump’s sweeping tax-and-spend legislation—and the headlines this week reflect the ongoing fallout. From IRS leadership turmoil to new tax breaks reshaping tech hiring and car sales, we’re seeing rapid changes ripple across industries and income brackets.
Tax Advisor Weekly — August 8, 2025
From new tariffs and audit crackdowns to updated tax rules on overtime and Social Security, this week’s headlines signal an era of deeper scrutiny and shifting opportunities for clients.
How the One Big Beautiful Bill Impacts Tax Advisors
Love it or loathe it, the "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" (OBBB) has arrived. Tax professionals everywhere are assessing its implications for clients, including new thresholds, deadlines, and the best ways to educate clients.
Why the Modern Tax Firm Doesn’t Need a Traditional Back Office
For decades, tax firms have relied on a familiar structure: a front office engaging with clients and delivering tax advice, supported by a sizable back office that handles administrative tasks, data entry, and compliance. This model is becoming increasingly obsolete, however, in the wake of sophisticated digital technologies.
How to Automate the Tax Engagement Letter Process
Of all the variables involved in the client/tax advisor relationship, one of the seemingly simplest, yet surprisingly time-consuming, is the creation and management of engagement letters. These key documents, which lay the groundwork for the client-advisor relationship, often serve as a bottleneck in the onboarding process, delaying tax work and frustrating both firms and their clients.
What If Your Back Office Ran Itself?
A tax advisor’s back office has traditionally involved extensive amounts of paperwork, manual data entry, and continuous client chasing. When you add the demands of continual deadlines and the relentless need for accuracy to the equation, it’s a complex administrative engine that requires a great deal of attention to keep running smoothly.
The Best Way to Manage Billing and Collections
In the long list of day-to-day administrative tasks that tax firms face, billing and collections sit near the top in terms of the amount of time devoted to them. While the established methods of manual invoicing, chasing overdue payments, and handling client queries may get the job done, what are these methods costing your tax firm in terms of efficiency?
Back Office Bottlenecks You’re Not Accounting For
Supporting a tax firm’s client consultations and strategic tax planning is a complex system of back-office operations. More than just a collection of minor administrative tasks, this system is a major component of your firm's profitability, efficiency, and client satisfaction. Far too often, however, a back office system quietly siphons away time, money, and even talent via unnoticed operational bottlenecks.
How Tax Firms Can Turn Post-Tax Season into a Growth Opportunity
Spring and Fall are typically when an accounting firm’s gears are in full operation. The mid-season lulls, however, offer valuable opportunities beyond mere recuperation. These less intense periods are important windows that allow your tax firm to evaluate its performance and efficiency, and implement improvements that will not only prepare you better for next year’s peak seasons but pave the way for wider growth in general.
Tax Advisor Weekly — July 31, 2025
From retiree tax breaks to IRS staffing freefall and a looming tariff deadline, this week’s tax headlines reflect a fast-changing landscape for advisors and their clients.
How to Minimize the RMD Tax for High Net Worth Retirees
For high-net-worth retirees, Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) present a significant challenge. RMDs are mandatory withdrawals from retirement accounts, starting at age 73. These mandatory withdrawals can create major complications for many retirees.
Tired of Chasing Clients for Documents? Try This Instead
Tax advisors may be experts in IRS regulations and tax strategies, however, they also need to be gifted in the art of polite persistence—certainly, when it comes to chasing clients for documents. Inefficient client data collection isn't just an annoyance, it’s a drain on a tax firm's resources, often costing a substantial amount of time over the year.
How to Manage Multi-State Tax Clients
Managing multi-state tax clients is no longer a niche issue—it’s a defining challenge of modern tax practice. As businesses expand across borders and remote work redefines physical presence, tax professionals are expected to navigate a patchwork of state rules that rarely align.
How IRS Updates in 2025 Could Impact Your Tax Practice
The IRS updates for 2025 are more than routine adjustments—they mark a turning point for tax professionals navigating an increasingly complex regulatory environment. With major shifts in tax brackets, standard deductions, and digital asset reporting, firms will need to rethink how they serve clients across income levels and asset classes.
What the IRS AI Audit Push Means for Tax Professionals in 2025
The Internal Revenue Service is ushering in a new era of tax enforcement. In 2025, the agency's strategic deployment of artificial intelligence represents a fundamental shift in how tax compliance will be monitored and enforced, with over 68 AI-related projects already transforming everything from routine audits to complex investigations.
Why Multistate Tax Issues Are Becoming a Bigger Risk for Your Clients
How states approach taxation is undergoing a seismic shift. Across the United States, revenue departments are reaching beyond traditional boundaries to capture tax from businesses in the digital age.
How Founders Can Use QSBS to Minimize Capital Gains Taxes in 2025
For founders anticipating a liquidity event in 2025, Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) planning is no longer optional—it’s essential. The potential to eliminate up to $10 million in federal capital gains tax per shareholder isn’t just a tax perk; it’s a meaningful wealth planning lever that can reshape outcomes for you and your family.
How to Grow a Tax Firm: Proven Strategies for Building a Referral-Driven Tax Practice
For tax firms looking to grow sustainably, referrals consistently outperform paid marketing and cold outreach. Referred clients are more likely to engage, stay longer, and generate greater lifetime value—without the rising costs and uncertainty of traditional lead generation.
The Benefits of Tax Deferral: Using Deferred Compensation Plans as a Founder
It's not uncommon for founders to face unique challenges in managing compensation while optimizing tax efficiency. Standard compensation structures often fail to align with founders' long-term financial strategies, creating potential tax inefficiencies and limiting wealth accumulation opportunities.
What Tax Firms Need to Know About the IRS Voluntary Disclosure Program
When a taxpayer has knowingly failed to report income or foreign assets, the risks go far beyond penalties—they can include criminal prosecution. The (VDP) IRS Voluntary Disclosure Program offers a critical opportunity for these individuals to come forward before the IRS initiates an investigation.
Asset Location vs Asset Allocation: Which Has More Tax Impact for Your Client?
When it comes to investment management, tax advisors generally have 2 main considerations: asset allocation and asset location. While allocation decisions tend to dominate tax advisor attention, strategic placement of assets across different account types often yields greater tax benefits, especially for high-net-worth clients.
How to Use the Installment Sale Tax Treatment to Defer Taxes on Business Exits
Business owners who sell their companies can often be landed with substantial one-time tax bills that drastically reduce their net proceeds. As financially painful as this can be, installment sales under Section 453 of the IRS Code offer a way to manage this tax burden by deferring payments spread across multiple years.
Private Equity Explained in Everyday Terms
For most people, investing tends to revolve around familiar assets such as stocks and bonds. Beyond these traditional assets, however, lies a more esoteric realm of investment that has historically been the domain of institutional giants and ultra-high-net-worth individuals: private equity (PE).
Get the newsletter
Tax and equity insights, delivered to your inbox.