1-800Accountant uses Salesforce's AgentForce to handle routine client questions and admin work, freeing accountants for advisory services. The company estimates the AI handles about 80% of tasks accountants currently do. It works 24/7, learns from their knowledge base, and escalates financial advice to humans.
February 6, 2025
80%
No one starts a small business so that they can get into tax and accounting work.
It's complicated and sometimes mundane for small business owners.
At 1-800-accountants, we're focused on bringing leading accounting fulfillment tax services to small businesses across the country.
Everybody needs to get their taxes done by April 15. So you've got all of these clients that you're engaging throughout the year. Now come tax season, need service.
It's also our growth period. So we have to balance our fastest grow time of the year with our busiest fulfillment time of the year. It's very difficult to scale in a service oriented business. Without being able to scale people there just aren't enough accountants to hire. And that's why AgentForce is so exciting for us. We have to look to automation. We have to look to a digital workforce in order to grow.
We have to maximize all of the time that those accountants use to make sure that they're answering the questions that clients need.
How am I gonna grow my business? Should I buy equipment? Should I lease equipment? Our advisors were not spending enough time with clients answering those questions because they were handling more administrative questions. How do I log in? My password is no longer working. Or to give them a simple IRS deadline.
80% of the time our accountants are spending time on things that could be handled by AgentForce.
The number one question that we're asked by our clients is what's the status of our tax return? And AgentForce makes that super easy to respond to. You simply activate your data cloud and build database of the knowledge base and then it'll just read from that. I'm not a developer. I'm actually typing these instructions in natural language and not coding at all which saves me a bunch of time. It allows clients to speak in their natural language. They don't have to type something a certain way. We wouldn't want the agent giving out any type of financial advice. Luckily for us, the agent has guardrails which tells it when to transfer the conversation to a human to further assist the client in their request.
I expected months and months and months of pre work. I was just so used to kind of the BOT era. Agent Force is something that you can essentially just turn on and right away is just able to take in questions, take in different assignments when you tell it to. I honestly wasn't ready, like wow, it's really here.
Agentforce is going to allow us to scale at a pace that we previously did not believe was possible. We can drive high customer satisfaction, high customer retention and high customer value.
Where Agent Force is the game changer. And a big difference for us is the fact that it works 24 7. Having that seamless connection between the human and having agent force in the background of that human is really a win win not only for us and our accountants, but also the trust that our clients put in us.
The stories we hear of the person who started their one man show and now has grown to 50 employees, or the floral shop that started with one location and now has 15. These are the things that make us excited about doing our jobs every day. AgentForce allows us to service clients in a way that drives great client satisfaction as well as great employee satisfaction on our side.
