Having an in-house tax department at a wealth management firm is not a very common thing.
So, why does Wealthquest do it? What about having your taxes done in-house is so valuable?
It’s because there’s a big difference between coordination and collaboration. Both are important, but they’re different. There’s also a difference between tax preparation and tax planning. Again, both important, but different.
Let’s start with coordination and tax preparation. A lot of financial advisors will offer to coordinate with your accountant or tax preparer. Usually this looks pretty straightforward: the advisor is going to make sure that any tax-related paperwork will be sent directly to your tax preparer so they have most of what they need to do your taxes. That coordination is helpful when it comes to preparing your taxes, but it’s as far as it goes. Taxes are filed, liabilities are paid (or you get a refund), and you pay your tax preparer for their services. Next year – wash, rinse, repeat.
Some advisors will go above and beyond that and offer to meet with your accountant in an attempt to align on strategies that need to be implemented throughout the course of the year. This level of collaboration allows for tax planning to happen – to actually evaluate different decisions and options and create a gameplan for what you will proactively do to built tax efficiency now and in the future.
This is where things can tend to break down:
Not only that, but it’s common that financial advisors serve anywhere between 50 and 200 individual clients. It would be hard for an advisor to do this well for each client. And if they try, it’s likely that most of those clients work with different accountants – that means a different process, different communication styles, different points of contact for each client, which becomes inefficient rather quickly.
At Wealthquest, our in-house coordination and collaboration removes many of those obstacles and provides our clients peace of mind, knowing that we’re all aligned around common goals, philosophies, and strategies.
Not only does our tax team have direct access to important financial statements for Tax Preparation, they have a individual awareness of the ongoing tax, investment, and financial planning conversations that have happened with our team throughout the course of the year, which lend themselves to very affective Tax Planning.
This awareness is important because there are tax implications for almost every decision in your financial life: From selling or buying a home, saving for retirement, taking social security or Medicare, rolling over an old 401(k), selling stocks in your investment account, evaluating company stock options, and so much more.
Preparing the tax return allows us to keep a finger on the pulse of tax planning. It establishes a baseline of what to expect for a given year and provides the framework from which we can run ‘what if’ scenarios for strategies like capital gain or loss harvesting, Roth conversions, or bunching charitable gifts. Coordination plus collaboration means we’re asking the right questions:
Answering these questions allows us to present thorough solutions and thoughtful recommendations to our clients.
Wealthquest offers in-house tax preparation because it creates a seamless connection between tax preparation and true tax planning—something that’s difficult to achieve when advisors and outside accountants work separately. While traditional coordination ensures documents are shared for filing purposes, and occasional collaboration can lead to sporadic planning conversations, these approaches often break down due to conflicting advice, limited time, inefficiencies, or added cost. By bringing tax services under one roof, Wealthquest eliminates those friction points. Our tax team works handinhand with our advisors, sharing realtime awareness of your financial decisions throughout the year so tax implications are understood and planned for. This integrated model limits unwanted surprises and ensures that your tax, investment, estate plan, and financial planning strategies are aligned – ultimately bringing clarity and confidence to your financial life.
