Editor’s note: This article is the companion piece to Debra Taylor’s presentation “You Can Do This! 6 Easy Steps to Get Started.” It is written for financial professional use only and is intended to help advisors put a working tax planning process in place – not someday, but this quarter.
Tax planning has become the single greatest growth opportunity in our industry. Veteran advisor and tax strategist Debra Taylor walks through the six-step system her team uses to systematically gather, analyze, and act on client tax returns using Holistiplan.
✅ The result: deeper client relationships, more visible value, and a steady stream of planning opportunities you would otherwise miss.
If you are not doing tax planning, your clients already know it
I have been a CPA for more than 30 years, and I can tell you that tax planning is no longer a nice-to-have. It is THE conversation. Clients come in with bigger IRAs than ever before, the SECURE Act has rewritten the rules for the next generation, and the tax landscape keeps shifting under our feet. If you are not having a real tax conversation with your clients every year, somebody else is – or worse, no one is, and your client is quietly paying for it.
The good news is that tax planning is not as complicated to operationalize as most advisors think. We have built a six-step process around Holistiplan that has turned tax review from a once-a-year scramble into one of the most consistent drivers of planning conversations, asset gathering, and client retention in our practice. Here is how it works.
Step 1: Get the tax return
Tax planning starts with the tax return. You cannot plan what you cannot see. Sounds obvious – but this is where most advisors stall out, because asking clients for their return feels awkward, and one polite email does not get the job done.
Our approach is to be relentless without being annoying. We use mass and personal communications throughout the year. In a typical year that means roughly eight general announcements, sixteen reminders layered into our weekly newsletter, up to three personalized emails, and as many as two phone calls for the holdouts. We do not wait until April. We review returns as they come in throughout the year, because plenty of clients are on extension, and the planning window is open longer than people think.
Inside Holistiplan, we use the Tax Return Staging dashboard as our centralized tracking tool. We can see at a glance who has uploaded, who is outstanding, what action was taken last, and what the next move is. It turns a fuzzy follow-up problem into a clean operational checklist that any team member can run.
Step 2: Upload the return to Holistiplan
Once the return is in hand, getting it into Holistiplan is genuinely a thirty-second exercise. Click Households, select Upload Return, choose the year, pick (or create) the household, drag and drop the PDF, and click upload. The system does the heavy lifting in the background – usually a couple of minutes – and produces a fully analyzed return on the other side.
Even better, you do not have to be the bottleneck. Tax Return Staging lets us generate a unique upload link for each client and send it directly to them. The client uploads on their end, the return flows automatically into Holistiplan, and it gets reviewed and stored without anyone on our team touching it. That single feature has eliminated entire days of administrative work for us, and it lets us scale the process across hundreds of households without burning out staff.
Step 3: Use the Tax Explainer to review specific items
Here is something I learned the hard way: most clients have never really understood their own tax return. They sign it, they file it, and they hope for the best. When you sit down and walk them through it – line by line, in plain English – they look at you like you just handed them a key to a room they did not know existed.
The Tax Explainer is easily generated the moment a return is uploaded. It helps explain key concepts, such as adjusted gross income vs. taxable income, with easy explainers and definitions so that you don’t need to research on your own.
This is where you stop being the person who manages investments and become the person who actually understands their financial picture. That shift is worth more than any AUM fee conversation you will ever have.
Step 4: Treat the Tax Report as your client’s tax map
If the Tax Explainer is the conversation tool, the Tax Report is the planning tool. It is a consolidated, automated insights report that surfaces the things you would otherwise spend hours digging out yourself. You upload the return, Holistiplan does the work, and you get back a digestible summary that doubles as a foundation for the rest of the year’s planning.
The Tax Report is hands down, the perfect tool for a tax review meeting. It pulls out the key figures, lays them out in a natural progression, and uses bar graphs to show clients where their income is coming from and how it is being taxed. Instead of staring at a forty-page IRS document, the client is looking at a clean visual story about their own financial life.
🎯 The Tax Report covers the full territory: key figures and observations, standard versus itemized deductions, qualified charitable distributions, required minimum distributions, qualified business income, carry-forward losses, net investment income tax, Medicare premium impact, health savings accounts, and the taxation of large IRAs and Roth conversions. Each one of those bullet points is a planning opportunity. Each one is a reason to call the client and dig deeper.
This is the report I use to drive annual tax return reviews, optimize credits and deductions, build Roth conversion recommendations, run asset-gathering initiatives off the new Schedule B Summary, conduct Medicare premium reviews, analyze carryforward losses, and prompt portfolio rebalancing. One report. Seven different reasons to be in front of the client. That is leverage.
Step 5: Build Roth conversion projections with the Roth Explainer
Roth conversions are the planning conversation of the decade, and the Roth Explainer makes it possible to model them in a way clients can actually understand. You enter the client’s taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth balances, layer in income from various sources, and then model conversions and other strategies – including QCDs – to show the long-term impact on the client’s wealth. The output is a detailed report on the lifetime tax benefits of converting.
Why do we push Roth conversions so hard? A few reasons:
- Take advantage of the income valley – the years when income and tax brackets are at their lowest, often early retirement before RMDs and Social Security kick in.
- Reduce tax-deferred balances now so RMDs are smaller later, which lowers lifetime income tax and helps avoid IRMAA surcharges.
- Prepay taxes for the next generation, especially children and other non-spouse beneficiaries who are now stuck with the SECURE Act 10-year distribution rule.
- Maximize Roth assets for heirs. Inherited Roth accounts are still subject to the 10-year rule, but they grow tax-free during that window – ten extra years of tax-free compounding for your kids.
That said, Roth conversions are powerful, but they are not free. You have to be very careful about phasing out deductions as income climbs. We recently modeled a client where a $100,000 Roth conversion fully phased out an additional $30,000 of SALT deduction. Because the expanded SALT was phasing out at the same time income was rising, the effective tax rate on the conversion came in at 42.72% – far above their 35% marginal bracket. The federal tax cost alone was $42,722. Add state tax, and the total cost of converting $100,000 was just under $50,000.
The point is not that Roth conversions are bad. The point is that you cannot do them on instinct. You need to model them, and Holistiplan lets you do that in minutes instead of days.
Step 6: Run the case studies you should be modeling for every client
Once you have a process for getting returns in and analyzing them, the next move is to identify the handful of scenarios you should be running for your clients. Three rise to the top of my list.
Roth conversions
Use the Roth Explainer and Scenario Analysis together. Show the tax impact of a single-year conversion, then show the lifetime tax savings of a multi-year conversion plan. Clients respond to lifetime numbers in a way they never respond to one-year numbers.
Charitable giving – especially QCDs
For clients age 70½ and up, qualified charitable distributions are one of the most underused tools in the playbook. A QCD provides a tax-free distribution from a retirement account directly to charity, can offset RMDs (up to $111,ooo in 2026, and reduces the tax-deferred balance going forward. Starting in 2026, QCDs become even more valuable: they help clients avoid the 0.5% AGI floor on charitable deductions, and they let clients offset income at the top 37% rate, compared to the 35% marginal bracket cap on charitable deductions. Holistiplan’s Scenario Analysis will calculate the difference between a QCD, a normal taxable distribution, and a Schedule A charitable deduction in seconds.
Change of residency
More retirees are weighing a move to a lower- or no-tax state than at any time in my career. Holistiplan allows you to build a comparison of the tax savings in seconds. You do not have to be a state tax expert to have this conversation – you just have to be willing to put the numbers in front of the client.
Why this matters: Fortune Favors the Bold
Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. Tax planning has been sitting in front of advisors for a long time, and most of the profession has walked past it because it felt complicated, time-consuming, or outside their lane. The technology has now closed that gap. With a defined process and a tool like Holistiplan, you can deliver high-end tax planning at scale, in a way that is repeatable across your team and visible to your clients.
The advisors who lean into this are the ones growing fastest right now. They are the ones defending their fee, the ones gathering held-away assets off the Schedule B summary, the ones whose clients say, “Thank God I have you on my team.” Six steps. Get the return. Upload it.
Walk the client through it. Use the Tax Report. Model the Roth conversions. Run the case studies. That is the whole game.
You can do this. Start with the next tax return that lands on your desk.
About Debra Taylor, CPA/PFS, JD, CDFA.
Managing Partner and Chief Tax Strategist of Carson Wealth.
She is a frequent national lecturer, has authored hundreds of articles, and is the author of My Journey to $1 Million: The Systems and Processes to Get You There.
She can be reached at 201.891.1130 or through dtaylor@carsonwealth.com
For financial professional use only. Investment advisory services offered through CWM, LLC, an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Carson Group Partners, a division of CWM, LLC, is a nationwide partnership of advisors. None of the information contained herein is intended as tax or legal advice. Tax laws are complex and subject to change. Please consult the appropriate professional to see how the laws apply to your situation. Converting from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA is a taxable event. Copyright 2026, Debra Taylor.
