About 1-800Accountant
Making accounting simple so small businesses can focus on growth
Behind every small business is a big dream — and often, a lot of paperwork. 1-800Accountant is on a mission to take that burden off entrepreneurs by pairing easy-to-use technology with experienced CPAs. From freelancers to growing companies, the virtual accounting firm helps clients file taxes, manage books, and unlock deductions, so business owners can focus on what they do best.
The challenge
Tax season surges put pressure on scattered systems
Like many companies serving small businesses, 1-800Accountant faces intense seasonal demand during tax season. The company’s teams juggled questions across multiple systems — Google Chat, Jira, Salesforce, and email — causing unnecessary distractions, slower response times, and inconsistent answers for both employees and clients.
“Our teams spend a lot of time asking questions that could live in a knowledge base,” said Salesforce Administrator Tyrrell Cherry. “Those pings disrupt your workflow, but you also don’t want to ignore someone.”
For engineering and IT, the challenge was compounded by siloed tools and repetitive requests. “About 85% of issues are always resolved in the same way,” said Director of Engineering Drew Troutner. “Eliminating the back and forth is critical so we can free up our teams to focus on delivering more value to our clients.”
The company needed a way to scale efficiently without relying on temporary staff or overloading internal teams.
“The Agentforce use cases are endless. Every week someone comes up with something new they’d like to do — and it’s possible.”
How 1-800Accountant works better with Slack
Agentforce brings faster answers and fewer distractions
1-800Accountant turned to Slack and Agentforce to bring automation and AI directly into the flow of work. Their first agent, nicknamed Frank, launched in Slack as an internal assistant for employees, and answered 1,000+ inquiries within the first 24 hours.
Now, instead of pulling reports in Salesforce, managers can ask Frank questions like: “How many messaging sessions happened today?” or “How many came from the phone?” Answers appear instantly in Slack, giving managers and admins real-time visibility without slowing down work.
After this success, Cherry expanded Frank to handle common IT support questions. “Without any inputs from the IT team, it handled a lot of questions by itself pretty well,” Cherry said. “That’s a huge win for automation and making sure IT can spend their bandwidth fixing problems instead of answering the same questions.”
More recently, Cherry introduced a tax advisor capability within Frank to help employees quickly access information on common deductions and forms. “ Frank acts like a real-time sales aid,” said Cherry. “A rep can keep talking to a customer and pop Frank open for instant answers on things like deductions, no need to put the client on hold or leave the call.”
Next, the team plans to enable Frank to automatically validate a prospect’s business registration. Today, this tedious task requires pulling up a spreadsheet, finding the right state site, and manually searching records. By automating this with Frank, the team is expected to cut research time by at least 75%. “Automating coordination with an agent in Slack ensures smoother processes and gives us more capacity to focus on clients,” said Troutner.
Since launching Frank, 1-800Accountant has seen a 50% increase in time freed up for CPAs to focus on high-value client work and a 50% reduction in reliance on seasonal hires. Today, the agent manages 2,000+ conversations per week and is growing, transforming how teams collaborate and serve customers.
This success reshapes how the team thinks about automation. With measurable impact and growing adoption across departments, Cherry is looking ahead to what’s next. “Agentforce is so intuitive, I intend to integrate as many products as we have licenses into it,” he said. “I’ll see major time to value, with no maintenance cost.”
“Being able to develop so many different things on a single platform — Slack with Agentforce — dramatically reduces the time to deliver value to the business. The use cases are endless.”
What’s next
Scaling Slack and Agentforce across the business saves more time for clients
Next, the team plans to expand channel-specific agents for IT, Jira ticketing, and sales development. “Looping an agent into a Slack thread to create Jira tasks automatically would be huge for us,” said Troutner. “It would preserve context that’s often lost when we create tickets manually.” Cherry envisions IT requests triaged by an agent before ever reaching the team, while sales managers will be able to monitor wait times and queues directly in Slack.
Troutner sees Slack becoming the company’s unified operating system: “We’re committed to becoming one of the first truly Slack-focused agentic enterprises, and we’re already well on our way to replacing many of our internal systems with Slack completely,” said Troutner.
By embedding agents into daily workflows, 1-800Accountant is positioning itself to scale during peak tax season without temporary hires, empowering employees to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time helping small businesses flourish. “We’re still in the early stages, but the positive momentum we gain with Slack and Agentforce is taking us exactly where we need to be,” said Troutner.
