Karbon, Canopy, and QuickBooks shouldn't cost your firm $150+/user/month combined. AltStack builds a unified accounting practice management platform you own, workflow automation, client portals, billing, and engagement tracking delivered in 7 days.
These are the challenges costing your team time and money every day.
Your firm juggles Karbon for workflow, Canopy for client management, QuickBooks for bookkeeping, and separate portals for document exchange. Each tool bills per-seat and none talk to each other natively.
During peak season your team tracks 200+ returns across spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected task lists. Missing documents hold up entire batches, and status visibility is limited to whoever last updated the tracker.
Clients receive document requests through one portal, e-sign engagement letters in another, and make payments through a third. The confusion leads to slow responses, lost documents, and frustrated clients who call your office instead.
Staff re-enter client information across CRM, practice management, tax prep, and billing systems. A single address change requires updates in four places, and mismatches cause incorrect filings and billing errors.
Adding a seasonal preparer at $59/month for Karbon plus $50/month for Canopy plus QuickBooks licenses makes scaling for tax season prohibitively expensive. Firms either overpay year-round or scramble to add seats during crunch time.
Partners can't see team workload in real time. Work gets bottlenecked on senior staff while junior team members sit underutilized, extending turnaround times and burning out your best people.
Every module custom-built for your workflows. Delivered in 7 days.
One system for every engagement type, tax prep, bookkeeping, advisory, audit. Custom workflow templates with automatic task assignment, dependency tracking, and real-time status dashboards visible to the entire team.
A single branded portal where clients upload documents, answer organizer questions, e-sign engagement letters, view deliverables, and pay invoices. Automatic reminders chase missing items without staff effort.
Template-driven engagement letters with e-signatures, automatic billing based on engagement type and complexity, time tracking, and recurring invoice scheduling, all connected to your workflow data.
A purpose-built dashboard showing every return by status, preparer assignment, client response state, and deadline. Drag-and-drop reassignment, batch status updates, and automatic extension tracking.
Visualize team capacity in real time across engagements. Auto-balance workloads, flag bottlenecks before deadlines slip, and forecast staffing needs for upcoming periods based on historical data.
Automated email and SMS sequences for document requests, appointment reminders, engagement renewals, and status updates. Every touchpoint logged in the client record for full communication history.
Interactive previews of custom modules built for your industry.
Practice-wide view of clients, deliverables, and revenue.
Tax prep, audit, and advisory workflows with deadline tracking.
Automated engagement letter signing and storage.
Intelligent automation modules that learn your workflows and handle repetitive tasks.
Categorizes transactions, reconciles accounts, and flags anomalies automatically.
Gathers tax documents, pre-fills returns, and identifies deduction opportunities.
One custom platform instead of 8 separate subscriptions.
| Tool | Category | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Karbon | Practice Management | $708/user/yr |
| Canopy | Client Management | $600/user/yr |
| TaxDome | Practice Management | $600/user/yr |
| Calendly | Scheduling | $144/user/yr |
| DocuSign | E-Signatures | $300/user/yr |
| Liscio | Client Portal | $600/user/yr |
| SmartVault | Document Management | $240/user/yr |
| Ignition (Practice Ignition) | Proposals & Billing | $948/yr base |
| Total Annual SaaS Spend | $4,140+/yr | |
Built for how accounting teams actually work — from first touch to final step.
A new tax engagement triggers an organizer questionnaire sent to the client portal. As documents arrive, the system assigns prep work based on team capacity, routes completed returns for review, tracks e-file acceptance, and delivers the final return to the client, all with automatic status updates at every stage.
At month-end the system pulls bank feeds, flags uncategorized transactions for staff review, generates draft financials, routes them for partner sign-off, and delivers reports to the client portal with a notification. Recurring tasks auto-create each month with deadline tracking.
A prospect fills out an inquiry form, the system scores the lead, generates a custom proposal with engagement letter, collects the e-signature and initial payment, creates the client record and all engagement workflows, and sends a welcome package with portal credentials, fully automated from inquiry to kickoff.
Tax season used to mean 80-hour weeks tracking returns across Karbon, Canopy, and email. Our custom platform cut our admin time by 40% and we processed 18% more returns with the same team.
Everything you need to know about custom accounting software.
Custom software from AltStack combines the workflow tracking of Karbon, the client management of Canopy, and the document exchange of dedicated portals into one platform tailored to your firm's specific service lines. Unlike off-the-shelf tools that charge $50–$60/user/month each, you pay a one-time build fee with no recurring per-seat costs. The result is a system that mirrors your exact engagement types, review processes, and billing structures rather than forcing you into generic templates.
Absolutely. We build tax season command centers that track every return from organizer sent through e-file acceptance. The system includes client document request automation, preparer assignment based on capacity and expertise, multi-level review routing, extension tracking, and e-file status monitoring. It integrates with your existing tax prep software (Drake, UltraTax, Lacerte) so you keep your preparation tools while eliminating the workflow chaos around them.
AltStack delivers production-ready accounting practice management software in 7 days. The initial build covers workflow management, client portal, document exchange, engagement letters, billing, and team dashboards. Firms typically add specialized modules like capacity planning, advisory engagement tracking, or custom reporting in follow-up 7-day sprints. You receive full source code and deployment from day one.
Yes. We build direct integrations with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, and FreshBooks for accounting data. For tax preparation we connect with Drake, UltraTax CS, Lacerte, and ProConnect. Bank feed integrations, payroll platform connections, and state e-file system links are also supported. Each integration is built and tested as part of your delivery so everything works together from day one.
Custom software deployed on your own infrastructure gives you tighter security control than shared SaaS environments. We implement AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, role-based access controls, full audit logging, and SOC 2-aligned security practices. Your client financial data never sits in a multi-tenant database shared with other firms, and you control backup, retention, and access policies directly.
That's exactly where custom software shines. Whether you bill fixed-fee advisory engagements, value-based pricing for CFO services, hourly for tax prep, or retainer-based for bookkeeping, we build billing logic that matches each service line. Custom engagement types, approval workflows, and deliverable templates are all included. Firms with unique niches like cannabis accounting, nonprofit audits, or international tax find the biggest advantage over generic tools.
We migrate your data from QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, or any accounting platform via API or structured export. Client records, transaction history, invoices, and chart of accounts transfer with full integrity verification. Your original data is preserved as a backup throughout the process.
Get a custom accounting platform built in 7 days. Full code ownership. No per-seat fees. Ever.