How The Tax-Minded Bookkeeper Nearly Doubled Its Recurring Book Without Adding Admin

Before Anchor, The Tax Minded Bookkeeper ran its client relationships across two systems that never spoke to each other. Proposals and contracts lived in Dubsado. Invoicing and payment collection ran through QuickBooks. Every new client had to move between them, and Hope’s team had to operate both.

The setup was, in Hope’s word, clunky. A single onboarding could eat a couple of hours, with technical issues surfacing on the client’s side and hers. Getting Dubsado to automate the way she wanted meant bringing in a specialist to build and maintain the forms. And because the workflow spanned two tools, she could not simply hand it to someone else. Training a team member meant training them on two platforms at once, which made the whole process something only Hope could reliably run.

That created a ceiling. As the firm signed more clients, the manual work scaled with it. The team was spending eight to ten hours a month on billing and AR administration, and Hope could see where the line was heading.

The bigger cost was quieter, and Hope did not fully see it at the time. Recurring invoices in QuickBooks had to be updated by hand, so annual rate increases depended on her remembering to go back and make them. In the middle of running the firm, she didn’t. Months would slip by. Clients who had grown, and whose work had grown with them, kept paying rates set years earlier.

The same pattern showed up with out-of-scope work. When a recurring client needed something beyond their normal engagement, the friction of drafting a new proposal in the two-tool setup made it easier to just absorb the work than to bill for it. Revenue leaked at every seam: fees paid to QuickBooks and Stripe, increases never applied, and scope quietly given away.

"Once you get that invoice set up, I would miss times where I was supposed to be going back to do those increases. A month would slip by, two, three. I probably lost a lot of revenue because of that.”
Hope Brown, MSA, CEO, The Tax Minded Bookkeeper

Why Anchor

Anchor kept coming up in conversations with other firm owners, and then Hope saw it from the other side: a colleague sent her an Anchor proposal, and the experience of receiving one settled the question.

The appeal was that one platform did what QuickBooks and Dubsado had been splitting between them. The proposal, the agreement, the payment method, and the ongoing billing lived in a single flow, with the signed agreement driving everything downstream. There was no specialist to keep the forms running and no second system for a team member to learn. The work she could previously only do herself became work she could hand off.

Two things mattered most given how revenue had been leaking. First, the automatic annual increase. In her old setup the increase depended on Hope remembering; in Anchor it is written into the agreement at signing, so the client agrees to it once and it executes on the anniversary without a conversation. Second, Anchor’s pricing model. Instead of QuickBooks merchant fees and Stripe charges on every payment, Anchor is $5 per payment with ACH free, and clients who prefer a card can be charged the processing fee directly. Most of her clients moved to ACH.

“Right off the bat, in their original contract, you already know on your anniversary this percent, we’re going to do that yearly increase, so people go into it knowing that’s going to happen. It takes an awkward conversation away.”
Hope Brown, MSA, CEO, The Tax Minded Bookkeeper

Implementation

Hope’s rollout was gradual by design. She is protective of her client relationships and did not want to move people between tools year after year, so she started small. In January 2025 she put two or three trusted clients on Anchor, the ones who were happy to test something new, and used them to work through any early questions.

Once those first months ran cleanly, she brought over the rest of the recurring book alongside every new engagement. The Anchor team stayed responsive through the ramp-up, answering questions as they came, which was part of what moved her from testing to going all in.

The firm rebuilt its onboarding around reusable templates in Anchor, organized by service type. Instead of assembling a proposal across two systems, the team starts from the right template, adjusts it for the specific client, and sends a single branded package. Hope adds a video to the proposal, and clients now sign, select a payment method, and land in their own portal in one flow.

That portal quietly removed a recurring source of admin. The most common request under the old setup, a client asking for copies of past invoices or a payment history, disappeared once clients could log in and see their agreements, paid invoices, and payment methods themselves.

Consolidating onto Anchor did more than tidy up the firm’s tooling. It closed the seams where revenue had been leaking, and it did so while the client book grew. When Hope started on Anchor in early 2025, the firm had about 10 recurring bookkeeping clients. Today it has 19. Over roughly 18 months the recurring book nearly doubled. What makes that growth meaningful is what did not change alongside it: billing and AR administration fell from eight to ten hours a month to one or two. The work that used to scale with every new client no longer does.

"I've been able to free up her time and put it to more useful things that are helping the firm to grow. If she was still managing all of those systems like she was before, she wouldn't have the bandwidth to do that shift.”
Hope Brown, MSA, CEO, The Tax Minded Bookkeeper

The revenue Hope used to lose to forgotten increases is now captured by default. Every recurring agreement carries a minimum 2.5% annual increase, written in at signing and executed automatically on the anniversary. Across her current book that adds roughly $5,000 in additional annual revenue, and because it is structural rather than manual, the effect compounds year over year instead of slipping away.

The most recent shift came from using the Claude-and-Anchor MCP connector to formalize work Hope used to give away. When a recurring client needed something outside their normal scope, the friction of building a new proposal in the old setup made it easier to absorb the work than to bill for it. That friction is gone. A nonprofit client needed payroll setup added to their bookkeeping agreement, and Hope added it in minutes. A business owner needed her at a meeting with his insurance rep, hours that would have gone unbilled, and she added the service to his existing agreement on the spot. A long-standing client with a foreign entity she had quietly supported for months became a formal, billed monthly coordination engagement.

“Before, a recurring client would need something outside their normal scope and we honestly just absorbed it. The friction of creating a new proposal made it easier to let it go than to charge for it. That completely changed.”
Hope Brown, MSA, CEO, The Tax Minded Bookkeeper