The year they stopped hiring for tax season.
JCG Tax files 2,500 to 3,000 returns a year from six offices in southwest Missouri. Cory Gayman spent three years looking for something that would do the data entry and let him review it.
I'm in the Midwest. We're all very skeptical. We like things conservative and old school. I'm the exception to that.
The constraint was never review.
Cory Gayman built JCG Tax from scratch and is going into year twelve. Six offices across southwest Missouri, 18 people, and 2,500 to 3,000 returns a year. Roughly 80% of his clients have a small business attached to the return, weighted toward agriculture and real estate, which means Schedule C, E and F work sitting on top of a heavy load of K-1s and 1099-Bs.
The bottleneck was everything that had to happen before review. Getting a return ready meant paying people to type, and that meant finding competent seasonal staff every single year.
"I had to have competent students, which is very difficult to find because nobody wants to stay at that level. Either they're a student and they want to move on... the cost of that, the cost of the training, the cost of finding people."
Forecasting how many seasonal hires to make was a standing risk, with idle payroll on one side and a short-staffed crunch on the other.
He looked at the alternatives and turned all of them down. Two established prep tools were ruled out, one as too expensive and incompatible with his software, the other as page-priced OCR that cost more than it saved. Offshore prep was the obvious industry answer, and he rejected it on his own comfort and his clients'.
"Clients in the Midwest aren't comfortable with offshore either. They're just not. So that was the alternative, and I was really holding out on that. I did not want to. I wanted something like this."
A pilot of 150 returns, then a pod.
He found the product in November 2024, under its earlier name, Numiro.
Year one was a real pilot and nothing more: Cory plus one staff member, about 150 returns.
Year two he systematized it. Three staff aged 25 and under, all on a CPA or EA track, plus one staffer with nine years at the firm who was put in charge of owning the Filed workflow so Cory didn't have to stay hands-on. The work is individual return data entry, and forms-heavy returns are where it earns its keep.
"It really worked well with the investment accounts, it worked well with the forms. With all the forms-based clients, the K-1s, the 1099-Bs, that you don't want to type all that information, all that works great."
The part he keeps returning to is not speed. It is not carrying the labor.
"With Filed, I can use it or don't. I don't have someone sitting there waiting for something to do that I'm already paying for."
Adoption was not instant and not universal. One employee in his sixties took work to bring around, and so did some of the younger staff, which surprised him less than it might have. Nobody left and everyone got on board, though Cory says they are all still pretty hesitant. What eventually normalized it was structural: once a Filed-prepped return reaches second or third level review, the reviewer isn't reacting to AI at all.
"It doesn't feel like it's been AI anymore at all. It's just they're just reviewing someone else's work."
You know how you have to hire these people every year, have to train them every year. Well, you don't have to do that anymore. And you have this front line taken care of, and you can focus on the bigger picture.
The numbers speak for themselves.
2,500+
Between 2,500 and 3,000 returns annually, across six offices Cory built from scratch as the firm goes into its twelfth year.
18
The firm historically added about two seasonal hires each season. Ending that cycle, rather than getting better at running it, is what Cory is actually buying.
~80%
Schedule C, E and F work weighted toward agriculture and real estate, on top of heavy K-1 and 1099-B volume.
150
Year one was Cory and one staff member on the beta. Year two, a four person pod runs the workflow without him.
Review is the next thing to hand over.
Prep is off Cory's desk. Review is the piece he wants to hand over next, and that is where his focus goes in the off-season: running the complex returns his team preps through Filed Reviewer, and putting the Tax Planner to work on the advisory side.
The reason it matters is succession. Complex and business returns still route through Cory or his other CPA, who wants to retire.
"I would like to not be the specialist on anything anymore."
Then there is the entity work. On the day of this conversation, Cory had been up before dawn finishing a nonprofit 990 ahead of the May 15 deadline, because business returns were the one thing he could not push through Filed.
"Today's the non-profit deadline right now, so I just finished one even before I got on this call, and got up early because I literally was kept up at night by it. I hope that someday their solution is there for those too."
Filed's business return support went live a month later, covering 1065, 1120, 1041 and 990, the exact set that was sitting on his desk that morning. He had already said what happens when it lands: "we're going to run really fast with Filed."
"I foresee, with the tools we're getting, doubling production without increasing staff. I've been saying that for a while, and I think that's what's coming."
When we're worried about just the numbers being correct from our junior associate, we are not thinking about planning. We are just focused on the mundane. And there's only so much that our brain can handle in three and a half months.