How Collective CPA & Advisors Unifies Accounting Services for Clients

Beyond Basic CPA Relationships and Tools

Collective CPA & Advisors, founded in 2012 by Kyle Pearson, has served entrepreneurs and small businesses up to $25 million in revenue with comprehensive accounting and tax services for more than a decade.

Kyle’s clients often had challenges with self-managing their back-office functions, and other CPA firms weren’t able to provide the comprehensive advisory and bookkeeping services. “There was this real cognitive dissonance between ‘you’re my advisory group, but you don’t have time to give advice,’” Kyle revealed of complaints he’s heard from clients about other accounting firms. Clients were left waiting until tax season with little to no visibility into their books or strategic planning opportunities.

Collective aims to be different. “We are guided by the core purpose of providing relational tax and accounting services,” Kyle explained, “and that means a year round intentional relationships with clients, not just a seasonal transaction.”

But serving entrepreneurs with complex needs across bookkeeping, tax prep, and advising, Collective also needed more than just a series of disconnected SaaS tools.

“As awesome as all these great tools are, when you start using fifty of them… you’re creating a lot of friction with the client.” Kyle said of the team’s previous tech stack. “We used to joke that we need an app.”

Enter, Copilot’s all-in-one customer portal platform.

A Unified Client Experience for Tax Season

After evaluating other accounting specific tools like Canopy and Karbon, Kyle created Collective’s accounting client portal with Copilot. He chose Copilot for its flexibility and integration-first approach that let Collective consolidate all parts of their client experience.

“Copilot was the only one that let us flexibly build our own version of a client portal, uniting elements of their technology with existing external core applications that we wanted to keep using,” said Kyle.

In January 2025, the firm kicked things off by routing every upcoming tax client—more than 200 households and entities—through their new portal experience. They created templated task flows for core actions like engagement letter signatures, document upload, and JotForm-based intake questionnaires.

Copilot also enabled the firm to keep the client experience consistent while implementing process improvements behind the scenes, saving months of change management with clients. A previous migration of client data from Box to Google Drive had taken the firm months of reprovisioning accounts and client access; transferring this data to their secure file center in Collective's new client portal took a week.

Faster Client Intake and a Scalable Future

In their first tax season with a client portal, Collective experienced their fastest intake process ever.

"We had more tax returns in the door, ready to start being prepped, earlier than ever this year than in our entire history," Kyle reported. “Unified task clarity to the client made it really clear what we needed from them.”

Looking ahead, the firm plans to scale up and double their number of relationships to 400. With Copilot’s upcoming features of multi-company clients and visibility rules, Kyle envisions creating bespoke digital ecosystems centered around each unique client relationship. 

“We want one single place for them to go regardless of whom they work with. As long as we’re at the relationship center, we want to unite all of their critical information into one environment,” he explained.

Thanks to their client portal, Collective is positioned to confidently scale their operations while maintaining the high-touch, advisory-focused service that differentiates them in an increasingly competitive market.