How Elevated Tax Strategies 10x'd their practice with Kick

I bet my firm on Kick. We pivoted off QBO completely, and our team now outputs 10x what we used to without adding a single headcount. For a tax and advisory firm, that’s not an efficiency gain. It’s a completely different business model.

Ramon Liriano was an Elevated Tax Strategies (ETS) client before he was a partner. He saw first hand what a difference the right tax and advisory support could make for a business owner, and eventually joined the firm he’d already come to trust.

Today ETS serves business owners, doctors, attorneys, real estate investors, and crypto investors. Tax advisory, preparation, and bookkeeping all under one roof. Their clients range from growing businesses at $300K in annual revenue up to $100M, handling both business and personal under one relationship. The philosophy is long-term.

“You start with us,” Ramon says, “and eventually your kids will also be with us.”

That kind of relationship demands exceptional work. And at ETS, exceptional work starts with the books.

The challenge

ETS has never been a firm that cuts corners. Before a single set of books gets locked each month, the team inspects the profit and loss against the transactions. Every time, with every client. Doing that work properly takes time, and as the firm grew, the hours required were becoming harder to absorb with the platform they were on.

We used to open QuickBooks on one side, the statement on the other, and sit there and go line by line.

For a client with 400–500 transactions a month, closing the books took a full day - sometimes two. And when a client needed their full transaction history (5,000 entries or more), it wasn’t instant. A pop-up would appear: we’ll compile this and email it to you. This could take thirty minutes. Sometimes half a day. Work came to a standstill.

The workarounds started to pile up. Even simple tasks like accessing a client’s bank account could bring everything to a halt. Reviewing the books meant bouncing between windows just to verify basic details.

Meanwhile, onboarding a new bookkeeper took weeks, and flagged issues often went unresolved. With a team that could only handle so much, these inefficiencies were starting to hold them back.

The firm was growing, but its systems weren’t keeping pace. They needed a tool that could keep up.

Why Kick

Like most accountants, Ramon was inundated with new AI tools, all promising to change the way firms operate. Knowing which one was actually worth adopting, especially while serving clients, was the hard part.

So he paid attention. Following voices like Jason Staats, watching where the space was heading. Kick kept coming up on YouTube, on LinkedIn, everywhere. Eventually, the answer was simple: just try it.

What Ramon found surprised them. Not because Kick was flashy, but because it was clearly built by people who understood the actual work.

I’ve extracted data from statements on multiple platforms and they all suck. With Kick, the way [the team has] built out the statement extraction is phenomenal. It makes a huge difference.

The reconciliation workflow clicked next. Statements lined up against transactions automatically. Discrepancies surfaced without hunting. The team had spent years working around their tools. Kick made the workarounds disappear.

We can train new bookkeepers in a day to use Kick as opposed to spending two, three weeks.

For a firm that holds itself to ETS’s standard, that wasn’t just a time saving. It was proof the switch was right and would allow them to scale.

Month-end close is where the difference is most visible.

Before Kick

For a client with hundreds of transactions, closing the month consumed a full day. Sometimes two. Year-end cleanups were some of the most time-intensive engagements on the calendar. The hours required were simply the price of the standard.

After Kick

That same close now takes under an hour. What used to be a full day of careful manual work gets done before lunch.

We enjoy doing full year cleanups now. We’re like, come on, bring it on. We can reconcile a whole year, four accounts, in under 30 minutes, easy.

Kick’s approach, reconcile first, then categorize, then lock the month, replaced years of ingrained habits. It cut out a full layer of rework that nobody had ever thought to question.

The results

Since switching to Kick, ETS has seen:

• 10x more clients served per person on the team
• Under 1 hr to close a month that used to take a full day
• 1 day to train a new bookkeeper, down from two to three weeks

The numbers don’t capture is what this additional capacity unlocks behind the books. This means more time for tax strategy, more time for advisory work, more time for the relationships that define ETS as a firm.

If you want to execute faster and more accurately for your clients - because you care about their business needs, audit risk, cash flow - no platform is going to give you that ability and those insights faster than Kick. Period.

ETS isn’t slowing down. The firm is doubling down; bringing more clients onto Kick and standardizing its close & cleanup workflows so every engagement starts from a clean, reliable foundation.

That consistency is unlocking the next phase of the business: shifting from reactive bookkeeping to higher-value advisory.

• Expanding managed bookkeeping on Kick across more client segments, without adding headcount
• Moving clients from cleanup to proactive monthly closes, so strategy isn’t delayed by messy books
• Scaling advisory services like tax planning, cash flow management, and entity strategy, now that financials are ready when they’re needed

With the operational side running smoothly, the team can focus on what actually drives growth: insight, planning, and client impact.

And for Ramon, the partnership goes beyond just using the product - it’s something he actively wants to be part of.

I’m trying to be the Kick spokesperson. I love it […] I love that you’re all passionate about it. I can feel the passion from every single team member, period.