LemonbrandHarbourview Tax & Advisory Sample · August 2026
SampleIllustrative firm
12-month roadmap
The artifact a firm walks out of a Team Workflow Audit holding. Harbourview is
invented, and so is every figure below: this is the shape, not a quote and not a client.
What an audit separates
Established from the record
Three of twenty seats opened in the last thirty days, from the licence console.
Ninety days of one shared mailbox, read across busy season.
One person holds every client-portal login.
Four sources keyed by hand into the WIP pack each month.
Not established, and said so
How often a return goes back to the preparer. Estimates ranged from one in five to one in two.
Where a file waits. Everyone agreed it waits; nobody agreed on which step.
What share of Renée's week is chasing documents.
The right-hand column is the point. An audit that returns only the left
one has guessed at the rest.
Harbourview · two offices, 34 staff, 20 seats bought
Who
Position
Source
Dana Whitfield Managing partner
Bought twenty seats in January. No measure of what they returned, and the renewal is in eleven weeks.
Stated
Marcus Oyelaran Tax manager
Reviews every corporate return before it is filed. Work reaches him incomplete and goes back.
Stated
Renée Charest Client services, 14 years
Chases every outstanding document. Holds the portal logins. Retires in three years, nothing written down.
Observed
Tom Beliveau Practice manager
Builds the WIP and realization pack from four sources by hand after each close.
Timed
Kestrel IT Outsourced
Network and mail tenant, on contract. Two people. Not a software team.
Stated
Stated is what someone told us, Observed is what we watched, Timed is what
we measured. A roadmap that does not distinguish them is a wish list.
Four of these need no budget, no vendor, and no decision from anyone outside
the firm. They are worth doing whether or not the rest of this document happens.
This month, no cost
Action
Owner
By
Effect
Cancel or reassign the seventeen unopened seats before renewal
Dana
31 Oct
$6,120 a year, recovered or put to work
Write down the portal logins and the client list behind each one
Renée, with Tom
15 Nov
Removes a single point of failure that currently has no plan
Turn off model training on the three active accounts
Kestrel
31 Oct
Ten minutes. Settings, then Privacy. Do this before any client data goes near them
Put the four WIP sources in one folder with one naming rule
Tom
Next close
Prerequisite for the summer build, and shortens the manual pack meanwhile
Decisions required before the first build starts
Decision
Owner
By
If unresolved
Whether the May build proceeds
Dana
31 Mar
The build moves past the quiet window and into the autumn
Which mailboxes are in scope, and which are excluded
Dana with Kestrel
With signature
No connection can be scoped
Who owns the programme inside the firm
Dana
31 Mar
Every gate below names an owner, so none of them can be cleared
Whether Renée's successor is hired before or after the autumn
Dana
Q3 2027
The documentation quarter writes down a role with nobody to hand it to
A decision with no date is not a decision. Each one above has an owner who
can actually make it.
Harbourview Tax & Advisory · 12-month roadmapThe four levels
The four levels
The difference is who checks the work and who approves it, not how clever the
tool is. Harbourview runs at the first two today. Use the simplest level that holds.
Deterministic
Risk: contained
At HarbourviewThe filing-deadline tracker, if the dates moved out of a spreadsheet into a rule. No model involved.
Approved byKestrel
Harbourview today
Assisted
Risk: low
At HarbourviewThree people drafting client emails and summarising a file. A person reads everything before it leaves.
Approved byKestrel, plus a usage policy
End of this year
Workflow
Risk: real, managed
At HarbourviewThe document chase, tracked and escalated to Renée when it stalls. The WIP pack assembled and checked against source.
Approved byDana, Kestrel holds the connection
Native
Risk: high
At HarbourviewEngagements reassigning themselves across both offices as capacity and readiness move.
Not in this planNothing in a regulated review chain belongs here yet
Further leftRules a person wrote. Outlook rules, a template, a form that
routes to an inbox. ←
Further right→ Standing assistants. The
objective is set, the work comes back done.
Filled circle: a step the system runs. Open circle: a person reads it
first. Squares: a fixed rule. The open circle never disappears from a return.
Harbourview Tax & Advisory · 12-month roadmapThe year
The year
October 2026 to September 2027. Solid is work being built, grey is work running,
dashed is work deliberately held. Nothing goes live during busy season.
OctNovDecJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepTeam Workflow AuditRenéeRanked backlog, counted from the recordDecision on the first buildDanaConfirmed in March, once busy season has been seenBusy season, nothing shipsThe whole firmObserved, not interruptedDocument chaseRenéeMonthly WIP packTomPortal and chase proceduresRenéeMaintenanceLemonbrand
The audit reads across busy season because that is when the work happens.
The builds land after it, so the first live season is measured, not disrupted.
Each quarter opens only when the previous one produced something checkable. A gate that is not met repeats the quarter.
Before
Must be true
Held by
The May build starts
The audit ranked it first, an owner is named inside the firm, and busy season was observed rather than predicted.
Dana
The July build starts
The chase agent has run two months on live work, with before and after taken from the record.
Renée
September documentation starts
Kestrel can read the logs and restart a run without calling anyone.
Kestrel
A gate that is not met repeats the quarter. It does not move the next one
forward.
When the proof actually arrives
Honest answer
A busy-season workflow compares busy season to busy season. The chase goes live in July
2027, so the first real comparison lands in April 2028.
Readable sooner
Requests sent, documents received, and how long each engagement waited, counted from
August 2027. Enough to tell whether it works. Not enough to publish as a result.
Six candidates raised by the people who do the work. Two are funded in this plan.
Raised in the session
Candidate
Why it is on the list
Level
Document chase
Clients send records in pieces. Someone opens each engagement, works out what is still
missing, and asks again. It repeats per client, per year, forever.
Workflow
Monthly WIP and realization pack
Four sources keyed by hand after close, on a deadline, by one person.
Workflow
Preparation-to-review loop
Returns reach Marcus incomplete and go back. Nobody has counted how often, which is why
it is third and not first.
Assisted
Client status questions
"Where is my return?" arrives in a shared mailbox with no owner, and answering it means
opening the file.
Assisted
Engagement letters and renewals
Annual, template-driven, tracked in a spreadsheet one person maintains.
Deterministic
Filing deadlines and extensions
A spreadsheet. A miss is a penalty and a client conversation.
Deterministic
The bottom two need no AI at all, and the audit says so rather than quietly
building them anyway. They are the cheapest items on this page and two of the most valuable.
Considered and set aside
Drafting the return itself
Professional judgment, and a regulated review chain. Not a workflow candidate at any
level in this plan.
Client-facing advice
The relationship is the product. It stays human at the front, which is the whole
premise.
A firm-wide chatbot
Raised, and declined. It answers questions nobody measured anyone asking.
Every line that carries a cost, at Workflow, for two agents. Who invoices it
matters as much as the figure: most of this is not payable to Lemonbrand.
Category
What it is
Paid to
Setup
Monthly
Servers
Two containers in the firm's own cloud, one on standby. Both agents run unattended.
Vendor
$1,800
$190
Storage
A searchable index of the firm's engagement documents, with backup. Retrieval respects
the permissions on the source, so nobody sees a file they could not already open.
Vendor
$3,400
$155
Models, seats
A mid-tier model on a business API, plus the seats you keep after the cull. Business
terms keep content out of training.
Vendor
–
$430
Connections
Mail, the practice management system, the portal. Two read only, one writes back. Gated
on each vendor actually having a usable API, which is checked before the build is quoted.
Lemonbrand
In the build
–
Security
A narrow login per connection, a rollback plan, monitoring, alerting, and prompt-injection
testing before any write goes live.
Lemonbrand
$4,000
$180
Evaluation
Cases with known answers and an accuracy bar agreed before launch. Model version pinned,
so an upgrade cannot silently change behaviour mid-season.
Lemonbrand
$3,200
$120
People
The team trained in the handover, Kestrel trained separately, and an internal owner at
roughly a quarter of a week.
Your people
–
Internal
Not included: on-premises hosting, new practice-management licences, and
anything above Workflow. Setup totals $12,400 and is paid once.
The same answers appear on lemonbrand.io/trust, and in the engagement terms before any access is granted.
Access
Read-only, held by Pipedream, scoped to a security group Kestrel controls. Granted from
your own admin and revoked there, without asking us. No write or send permission.
Who sees it
Software reads and returns counts and patterns. A person at Lemonbrand sees the map, not
your mail. Training is disabled on every model connection we run.
Records
The derived map kept 12 months. Raw message content discarded once the audit is
delivered. Deletion on request, within seven days.
Ownership
Anything built is the firm's and runs in the firm's own workspace.
The audit is fixed at $1,500 and commits the firm to nothing beyond it,
credited toward a qualifying implementation started within 30 days.
If nothing changes
The document chase
It scales with client count, so it gets worse every year the firm grows.
The portal knowledge
Renée retires in three years and it leaves with her.
The seats
Seventeen licences renew at $6,120 a year, opened or not.
Lemonbrand