“Do you do tax planning?”
I’ve been asked that a thousand times, and the honest answer is that the person asking and the person answering are almost never talking about the same thing. To one firm it means mailing out quarterly estimate vouchers. To another it means a year end Roth conversation. To a third it’s a six-figure cost-segregation study. Two words, and no two people mean the same thing by them.
We’ve got a vocabulary problem in this profession, and it’s expensive. When we treat tax planning, tax strategy, and tax projections as if they’re the same thing, clients get confused, our best work gets buried, and we leave high-quality, high-value work on the table. Over the years, I became convinced the profession needed a better framework, because the words we use turned out to be one of the biggest things standing between firms and the value they’ve already earned.
So let me lay out all three.
A tax projection is the measurement
A projection answers one question: What will this client owe? You take what you know and what you reasonably expect—income, deductions, entity income, capital events—and you calculate the liability before the year closes. It’s the quarterly safe harbor estimate. It’s the year-end are-we-on-track check. With the right tools it updates in real time as a client’s numbers move.
But a projection on its own changes nothing. It’s the dashboard. It tells you how fast you’re going and how much road is left, but it doesn’t turn the wheel. A client can have a beautiful, accurate projection and still walk into April owing exactly what it predicted, because nobody did anything with it. Projections are essential. They’re the floor, though, not the ceiling.
Tax planning is the decision
Planning is what happens when you look at the projection and ask, out loud, with the client, can we reduce this tax liability? It’s the proactive read on where someone is headed and the judgment call about whether that’s an acceptable place to land. It’s the conversation. It’s the “here’s what we could do about it.”
This is the layer that’s been watered down the most. Somewhere along the way, mailing a client an estimate voucher got rebranded as tax planning, and that’s done real damage. Sending someone what they owe isn’t planning. Planning is advisory work, and it takes knowing the client’s goals, their next five-plus years, their appetite for risk, and the full menu of moves on the table. Done right, it’s where you earn trust. Done lazily, a taxpayer is misled into believing it’s happening when it isn’t.
Advanced tax strategy is the action
Strategy is the route change. These are the specific, named, code-grounded plays you actually put in place to move a client somewhere better: cost segregation, the QSBS exclusion under Section 1202, entity restructuring, retirement vehicle stacking, charitable structures, and dozens more. Every one of them ties back to a section of the Internal Revenue Code, and none of them happen by accident.
This is where the real, multi-year money lives. A single strategy can be worth more to a client than a decade of compliance fees. Yet our profession still lacks a common way to catalog, evaluate, and communicate tax strategies. Most advisors rely on memory, favorite CPE courses, or whatever they’ve implemented before. That’s workable until it isn’t. As the body of tax law grows, firms need a consistent way to identify, compare, and prioritize strategies based on the client’s facts instead of the advisor’s recall. Strategy isn’t simply “more planning.” It’s a distinct discipline, and it deserves its own framework.
Why the distinction is worth this much ink
Line the three up and it gets simple. Projection measures. Planning decides. Strategy acts. Most firms fold all three into one bucket called planning, then bill the whole thing like compliance, by the hour or by the form. That, right there, is why the profession underprices itself.
Separate the layers and you can finally see where the value actually sits, and price to it. A projection is a repeatable measurement, and it can carry a clean flat fee. Planning is advisory judgment, worth far more than a voucher. Strategy is value creation, and value creation should be priced to the value it creates, not the hours it took.
The fee is a quote, not a cut of the savings
I can already hear the question every CPA is thinking. Isn’t this a contingent fee? No. Charging a client a percentage of the tax savings they actually realize is a contingent fee, and on original returns that runs straight into Circular 230 and the AICPA rules. That’s not what this is.
You use the value you’ve estimated to set a fixed fee, quote it up front, put it in the engagement letter, and agree on it before any implementation work starts. It doesn’t float. It never gets recalculated against what the client eventually saves other than for everyone to understand if the cost benefit was there.
And the quote is deliberately conservative and achievable, never a best-case fantasy. Before I set a number, I run a few discovery questions. Does the client actually have the cash flow to pull the strategy off? Where is the return per strategy really maximized? Do they want more advanced planning, or only the lowest-risk plays? A client can stay entirely in low-risk territory if that’s what they want, and the quote flexes to match. It reflects what’s realistic for that specific client, and that’s exactly why it holds up.
To put the entire concept into layman terms, the workflow that is most successful for you and your clients is simply ABCD: Ask questions, estimate the Benefit to client, calculate the Cost, and Deliver the quote to win the engagement.
Scoring the work: The four CURB scores to calculate cost
CURB is a four-factor scorecard you run before you quote, based on the ROI Method of value pricing I introduced to the professional a decade ago. Each factor scores 1 through 5.
- C is Complexity. How hard is the work itself? A simple retirement plan setup is a 1. A multi-entity restructure may be a 5.
- U is Urgency. How much runway do you have? A full year of lead time is low. A December scramble to beat year-end is high.
- R is Risk. This one is scored on the strength of the authority behind the position, in the same language the IRS and the courts use. Safe harbor at the low end, then more likely than not, substantial authority, and reasonable basis as you climb, up to listed or reportable transactions at the top. It’s a straight read on whether the position would hold up under Tax Court scrutiny. Calculating risk levels like this turns a fearful emotional feeling into a logical fact to base engagements on, and you can calculate it for the client’s tolerance, your firm’s tolerance, and then only offer tax strategies within those tolerances.
- B is Burden. The lift required of you to deliver. Referral only, where you hand the client to a vetted provider, sits at the bottom. Or maybe the client is mostly do it themselves and wants to minimize your involvement. That’s a 1. Deep hands-on implementation, concierge services, sits at the top—a 5. The client’s benefit, the other half of the equation, isn’t a score at all. It’s the savings you apply the rate to.
Average the four and that’s your rate. A 1 is worth 10%, so an average of two puts you at a 20% rate. Apply it to the conservative, present value savings and you’ve got the fee. Anyone who runs the same scorecard lands in the same place, which is the entire point. A calculated estimate of what to price the quote at, for the practitioner to adjust.
A standard the profession has been waiting for
There’s a bigger idea sitting underneath the scorecard. Every mature profession develops standards that allow practitioners to communicate complexity consistently. Medicine has treatment guidelines. Finance has investment ratings. Credit markets have risk ratings. Tax advisory has largely relied on individual experience and judgment. That’s one reason firms describe similar work in dramatically different ways and price it just as inconsistently.
Imagine if tax strategies themselves could be evaluated using a consistent framework, allowing advisors to communicate complexity, implementation burden, authority, and expected value using a shared language. Whether the profession ultimately adopts one standard or several, that kind of taxonomy would make specialization, pricing, training, and client communication significantly easier. It would also encourage firms to keep strategies current as legislation, regulations, and court decisions evolve, rather than relying on outdated notes or whatever happened to be covered in the last CPE course.
The accounting profession has standardized financial reporting, auditing, and valuation over decades. Tax advisory is still in its early stages of that journey. Developing a common language for evaluating and discussing strategies is a natural next step.
Pricing a deferral correctly: Cost segregation
Cost segregation is the cleanest place to see the discipline, because it’s the strategy most firms price wrong. They see a giant first-year deduction and price it like permanent savings. It isn’t. Cost seg doesn’t erase tax, it moves deductions forward in time. Over the life of the asset the total depreciation is identical. What changes is when you take it, and the timing is the only thing of real value.
So you price the timing, not the deduction.
Using the CURB framework, cost segregation might receive the following scores:
- Complexity: 3
- Urgency: 2
- Risk: 1, the safe harbor end of the scale
- Burden: 1, referral only
Average of 1.75, which sets the CURB rate at 17.5%.
Now the savings, for an illustrative client:
- Depreciation accelerated into year one: $400,000
- Year-one tax reduction at a 37% rate: $148,000
- Less the present value of the future catch-up tax, discounted at 5%: about ($43,000)
- Less the third-party engineering study the client pays directly: ($5,000)
- Conservative present value savings, the number you actually quote on: $100,000
Illustrative CURB rate from the scores above: 17.5%
Fee, quoted up front: $17,500.
Look at what you didn’t price against. Not the $400,000 deduction. Not the $148,000 first-year tax cut. You priced the present value of the timing advantage, the only thing the client truly gained, and you backed out the study cost she paid someone else. Pricing the headline would have charged her for money she still owes the government, just on a later date. That kind of present value honesty is the difference between a fee a client respects and a fee a client resents.
The bottom line
We’re never going to get paid like the advisors we are until we value our work fairly. Projections, planning, and strategy are three different jobs. Clients deserve to know which one they’re buying, and we deserve to be paid for the one that actually changes the outcome. Name each one for what it is, price it honestly, and watch how fast the whole conversation with your client changes. Let’s work toward standards of definitions, measurement, and tax literacy we can all embrace together.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Jackie Meyer, CPA, is the founder and president of TaxPlanIQ, a tax planning software platform serving 650-plus accounting firms with proactive tax planning tools and AI-powered client discovery. She is a CPA Practice Advisor Most Powerful Women in Accounting honoree and the author of The Balanced Millionaire Advisor Edition (CPA Trendlines, 2025).
Photo credit: 8photo/Freepik
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