The challenge
A CPA firm's busiest weeks are made of admin. Documents arrive in the wrong inbox and have to be found, named and routed. Engagement letters and returns wait on signatures nobody is chasing. Leadership wants to know how the firm is doing, and the answer is a report someone has to build by hand.
At Strickland the people doing that work were the same people the clients were paying for. Tax season made it worse. The firm did not need more software to log into. It needed the admin work to happen on its own, in the tools it already used, on a system it would own.
What we built
Five AI agents, each with one job, on a single AI layer the firm owns.
Together they cover the firm's admin work: documents are routed to the right place as they arrive, signature status is tracked through DocuSign, the weekly EBITDA report is produced from the firm's own numbers so leadership reads it instead of building it, the firm's procedures live in a knowledge base the team can ask, and a partner dashboard pulls it all into one place.
All of it runs on infrastructure Strickland controls, under the firm's own accounts. ShooflyAI built it, runs it on a monthly retainer, and reports against the numbers the firm already tracks.
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The outcome
The firm ran its entire tax season on the dashboard. Documents were routed as they arrived. Signature status was tracked through DocuSign without anyone checking by hand. The EBITDA report showed up every week.
The people who used to carry that work spent the season on client work instead. Strickland now runs five agents in production, and every one of them belongs to the firm: the code, the data and the infrastructure. If the engagement ended tomorrow, the agents would keep running.
- Five AI agents in production
- Tax season run on the Shoofly dashboard
- Document routing automated
- Signatures run through DocuSign
- Weekly EBITDA reporting
- Owned outright by the firm
Why it worked
Each agent has one job. Routing, signatures, reporting and procedures are four different problems, and giving each its own agent kept every one of them simple to build, test and trust.
It runs where the work already happens. The firm did not adopt a new tool. The agents work inside the inboxes, DocuSign and reporting the team already used.
It is owned. Strickland owns the layer the agents run on, so the firm is building an asset it keeps rather than renting a capability it could lose.