From Chasing Checks to Collecting $700K Before Tax Season Even Starts

For most of its history, Boscia & Boscia got paid after the work was done, if it got paid on time at all. The firm ran no electronic billing system. Invoices went out by mail or email, and the firm waited on checks. It did not accept credit cards, specifically to avoid the processing fees. Payments arrived however clients chose to send them: check, Venmo, Zelle, cash.

Across 1,400 clients, that created constant drag. A Zelle payment would land under a name that matched no one on the client list, and someone had to stop and track down who had paid. At that volume, the reconciliation friction never let up, and it landed on the partners, not a billing department.

Collections was a fixed season of its own. Every summer, after the tax rush, the team spent June and July chasing unpaid invoices. Some balances had been growing for years. By Nick's estimate, roughly $150,000 sat in unpaid AR at any given time, working capital the firm had earned but could not use.

"We would get through tax season and then all through June and July we would be following up with clients, reminding them they might not have paid. Our summers were doing collection work. Now we do none of that."
Nick Boscia, CPA, EA — Partner, Boscia & Boscia PC

The manual process also shaped how the firm billed. For its 200 monthly bookkeeping clients, producing and sending invoices by hand every month was impractical, so the firm billed quarterly instead. That eased the workload but pushed cash further out, leaving the firm to collect three months of bookkeeping revenue at a time rather than steadily.

The through-line: the firm's revenue was structurally slow. Cash came in 30-plus days after the work, often months later. Capacity was spent on administration instead of billable services. And the model gave Nick no easy way to bill for extra work as it came up, so it went unbilled.

Why Anchor

The firm used Ignition for one year before switching to Anchor. The transition did not produce the results they were looking for, and client adoption of the new payment process was slower than expected.

Nick encountered Anchor at an accounting industry conference in Las Vegas. The product demonstration was compelling enough that he was willing to make a second switch. The feature that moved the decision was Anchor's ability to pass credit card processing fees to the client. The firm had avoided credit card acceptance precisely because of those fees. With the option to let clients choose whether to pay the fee or link a bank account instead, that barrier was removed.

“The big sell was being able to transfer the processing fee to the client. You give the client the option: if they don't want the fee, they just link their bank account. I like giving my clients options.”
Nick Boscia, CPA, EA — Partner, Boscia & Boscia PC

The client-side experience was also a factor. Nick valued that clients could log in and see their full invoice history at any time, reducing inbound questions and giving clients more transparency into their account.

Implementation

Boscia & Boscia had a client base built over 50 years, much of it long-tenured and used to mailing checks or dropping off payments in person. Nick knew a hard cutover would create friction with exactly the clients he least wanted to rattle, so the firm phased the change in.

The first year on Anchor was a transition. New and willing clients moved over while holdouts kept their old habits for a while longer. By the second year, the firm made Anchor the required payment method. That patience is why the numbers held: today 99% of clients pay through Anchor, with only a handful of exceptions across 1,400 accounts.

The firm made the billing-frequency change separately, and on purpose. Rather than switch platform and cadence at once, Nick first got everyone onto Anchor, then moved the 200 monthly bookkeeping clients from quarterly to monthly agreements. Sequencing the two changes kept each one easy for clients to absorb, and the shift to monthly billing steadied the firm's cash flow, replacing three-month lumps with predictable monthly revenue.

The clearest measure of the change is when the money arrives. Boscia & Boscia now collects roughly $700,000 before tax season even begins, which Nick estimates is about half the firm's gross revenue, by sending about 1,800 signed agreements each November. The cash now arrives before the work, not weeks or months after it.

That inversion did two things at once. It ended the collections season, and it freed the working capital that used to sit idle. Before Anchor, roughly $150,000 was tied up in unpaid AR at any given time, by Nick's estimate. Today the firm runs a 99% collection rate with an average of five days from invoice to payment, down from 30-plus days and often months. AR is effectively gone, and the cash it represented is now in the business.

The freed cash even pays for the system that produces it. Nick holds the money collected upfront in a high-yield account, and by his estimate the interest it earns offsets Anchor's transaction fees, so the platform costs the firm very little in practice.

Then there is the revenue the firm now captures that it used to lose. Because billing no longer consumes tax season, Nick has the capacity to bill for extra work as it comes up. He estimates he sent about 100 additional invoices in a single tax season, averaging around $300 each, or roughly $30,000 in a year, and that figure covers only existing clients, not new ones. It is revenue that simply went unbilled before.

“When you buy your time back, I love to use it to maximize the value of what I'm doing. I sent out around 100 additional invoices during tax season averaging $300 each. I had zero pushback. That's revenue I would have just left on the table before.”
Nick Boscia, CPA, EA — Partner, Boscia & Boscia PC

The downstream effect shows up in how the firm spends its attention. Collections no longer claims June and July. Reconciliation no longer pulls partners into payment detective work. Nick's own words for the shift: stop wasting time on billing and collections, and focus on high-value services. The engine runs on its own, and the people who used to run it are free to do the work clients actually pay a premium for.