As a leader in online tax preparation and business consulting, WCG Inc. has set itself apart by offering excellent digital-first experiences to clients. Senior Partner Jason knew providing a seamless and short online form experience was key to not only attracting clients but keeping them long-term. To achieve this vision, he looked for a way to eliminate cumbersome and inflexible fillable PDFs from their workflows.
When Jason decided to make the switch to online forms, he began looking for a product that was easy to use yet still provided a high level of security. Clients submit large amounts of sensitive information to WCG—like driver’s licenses, social security numbers, and banking information—so robust form security features were a must when selecting a tool. Formstack provided the best of both worlds with a user-friendly drag-and-drop builder paired with security features like data encryption.
Once Jason decided Formstack was the best online form tool for his needs, he engaged with Formstack’s Professional Services team to help him build out all his forms. In total, the team helped him launch 25 forms on a quick timeline, complete with Conditional Logic. WCG now runs all of their client intake and tax form data collection through Formstack, as well as all their internal HR workflows.
There are certain solutions that I've invited into WCG that I have just been, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And Formstack is one of those solutions.
My name is Jason Watson. I one of the partners at WCG Incorporated. We specialize in business advisory services for small business owners. We also do tax prep, but we are predominantly a business advisory firm.
What were the challenges before using Formstack?
Before Formstack, we would have fillable PDFs, and if anybody was familiar with those, they're a big pain in the butt because you have to create your nice, you know, form. Then you have to go into Adobe and you have to convert that into a fillable pdf. And then even within that is kind of a big, you know, pain, let's say a week later.
Oh, the data changed, or I need to ask this extra thing, or I want to add an extra option for one of my questions. You have to redo, generally redo your entire Adobe fillable form, and it just got to be too much.
Why did you choose to use Formstack?
We are trying to collect data from the client and we have to have some security baked in, right? So we have driver's licenses, we have banking information, and we have socials. All that needs to be, um, encrypted form stack allows us to do that efficiently and securely.
Why did you work with Formstack's Professional Services team?
When I got the quote from Formstack and we're talking, we're doing all these things and like, this is amazing. , but how do I take our world and, and launch this overnight? I'm like, I need this online. Within a couple months, I initially ran into a little bit of obstacles, probably self-inflicted on some levels, and also my impatience.
And also the breadth of what we needed to have done and also the tight wind on you put all that together. Pro services is kind of really what was saved it. If you don't have either the inclination or the time, or you have a massive project, yeah, it's a good use of, good use of your resources to be leveraged.
How do you use Formstack?
We have a tax questionnaire that we built out in Formstack. All these different common questions. So you can either take a tax organizer, that's a 20 page thing and they plop it on your desk and you're like, uh, you know, and it asks all these few questions and there's never enough room to really type up what you want.
You know, all these things. So what we use in Formstack is we give you the rule and then we ask you the question, Hey, here's when student loan interest is deductible, or, here's the rules on education expenses. Now having learned all this, you know, taxpayer client, now can you tell me what you did or what you have going on?
We can funnel a lot of the client data into a set form stack or a set of forms or whatever. Then from the preparation side of things, everything looks consistent.
What results have you seen with Formstack?
So we use Formstack not just to gather data, but also to educate the clients so we can be more efficient and actually have a better tax return. A cuts down on the second and third iteration with the client, cuz we're very aware of. The drip, drip, drip, drip, you know, torture that might happen when you get data, it's not enough.
You ask for more, it's not enough, and you finally get everything you need, but that's after you annoyed everybody. So Formstack allows us to cut down on the iterations and be more efficient, and that actually better customer service because the client's not getting bugged all the time.
