Discover how the new RCReports + FileForms partnership helps tax pros turn compliance into profit. Eric Green, Paul Hamann, and Frank Tumminello reveal how to streamline workflows, save clients’ money, and unlock recurring advisory revenue, all while bulletproofing returns. Plus, join Eric, Frank, and Paul for a free webinar on September 17th and discover how you can monetize the partnership to save your clients thousands every year and create an entirely new revenue stream for yourself! Register here now: https://taxrepllc.com/20250917-compliance/

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Turning Compliance Into Profit: How RCReports & FileForms Streamline Advisory Services With Paul Hamann And Frank Tumminello

We have back with us two familiar faces, Paul Hamann from RCReports and Frank Tumminello from FileForms. Now, I’ve had them both on individually but there’s a partnership that’s rolled out and I won. I think it just makes sense. This is going to be interesting, especially for the attorneys and accountants who read this because there’s an opportunity here. With that setting the stage, I can do this. Paul, you and I have done a bunch on the channel and webinars together. What RCReports does is run reasonable comp reports, theoretically, mostly for S-Corp bonus.

Forging A Partnership Between RCReports & FileForms

If you have a 990 or a nonprofit or a C-Corp, you should have written documents. This was the case and the Red saying. You need to have written documentation on how you determine what reasonable compensation is. That’s what RCReports does. It does amazingly well. FileForms which has become my go-to for filing or setting up new entities and the annual filings. It tracks in the dashboard all the deadlines. It’s a terrific resource. With that background for folks who maybe haven’t heard or talked to you guys. Why does this partnership make sense?

I could lead us off, Paul, and then maybe you chime in thereafter. In FileForms, we’ve been working with hundreds of different professional services providers in helping them get into automated workflows around state compliance, specifically around everything from forming entities and then subsequently because it isn’t good seeing as those businesses operate, expand in new states, etc. It’s a great opportunity for folks serving various clients who either operate in one or multiple states to create a nice recurring revenue stream that’s very passive, very scalable and very automated.

Given the nature of these annual filings, it’s a great opportunity to provide that value-added service to clients. Alongside LLCs converting to C-Corps or S-Corps or even just S-Corps forming naturally. I’ll kick it over to Paul to chime in on how RCReports can provide an incremental revenue stream as well with the service his platform provides.

Thank you, Frank. It’s good to see you again. Eric, thank you as well for having me on and for the overview. With reasonable compensation from a strictly compliance standpoint, a lot of times it’s just standalone but what we’ve been finding from practitioners is that they strongly want this as part of a workflow so that they can hit it as they’re going through whatever workflow that might be.

 

 

If we start at the beginning when you’re becoming an S-Corp. Knowing what your reasonable comp is and having that documented as your forming your S-Corps makes perfect sense. Which flows right through the FileForms flow when you’re creating that S-Corps. You have that documented from day one and have that in place.

You add that into your flow each year with all the other compliance and documentation required for your 1120-S. This does a couple of things for you as the practitioner. It gives you everything in one nice place to keep track of it. It also gives you that annual annuity. Every time you run through these, the different compliance pieces for the S-Corp, you’re billing your client and that just builds into your annual practice revenue.

Let me interpret to the audience because in my view, I’m in the middle. We have the client that comes to us. They are a single member LLC. How do I save money? We can look at it and say, “Let’s run a reasonable comp report because doing some quick math, you would have significant savings as an S-Corp. I’m going to go to RCReports. We’re going to run this and maybe we’re going to elect the S status for them.”

Meanwhile, we’re also looking at, have you filed your annual reports? We end up dealing a lot with the IRS. It’s a problem when the person who thinks they’re an S-Corp suddenly realizes there is C-Corp or worse, they don’t even have an entity because it was dissolved statutorily because they fail to file the annual reports. Now, we’re trying to get reinstated. They’re going to spend a lot of money trying to fix this oversight.

I have found that I end up working with both systems. I’m in FileForms in terms of annual reporting or setting up the entity, resident agent or statutory agent, if we need one. I’m running the reports out of RCReports. What this does for an accountant and yes, I’m speaking to the CPAs, the EAs and the tax preparers. You can help your client with all of the corporate formation. If you’re saying, “I don’t practice law.” You don’t have to. FileForms has an option where they will do it for you. They have attorneys. They have folks in every state. They do this.

As a partner, you can make money by getting your clients into FileForms, having it done professionally and all of that then you can only go and say, “I got to go to RCReports.” Now, we can run the report and maybe we’re going to convert you to an S. The fact that you can now have both in one workflow and on an annual basis. I’m going to say something because we’ve gotten comments on YouTube. Paul, you and I get this comment all the time on the webinars. Frank, what we’ll get is Eric. I can’t sell my client the report. They’re not going to want to pay for it.

RCReports and FileForms’ partnership is a nice revenue generator while helping their clients save. It is a win-win for all parties involved. Share on X

I’m just going to address this. You, imbeciles, but seriously. To me, in my mind, it’s the old saying, “Nobody buys a drill because they want to drill. They buy the drill because they want the hole.” You don’t sell them the report. Nobody wants to pay for the report. No matter how much you’re going to save them. You sell them the benefit. You made $170,000 in 2024 for a single member LLC. What if I could get to $10,000 a year in tax savings?

I’ve yet to meet the client who would say to me, “Eric, donate it to the government. They need it more than I do.” We probably do but, anyway. That aside, they’re going to be like, “How do I do that?” Say, “We have to write a reasonable comp report. It’s going to cost you $750 or whatever.” I’m betting or I’m just guessing. The truth is, I’ve already run it in RCReports so I already know, hopefully, what it’s going to show. It’s going to probably come in around $70,000.

I’m looking at $90,000 times 15.3% that I can save you. There’s 13.5 but you have to pay for the report every year. You’re now an S-Corp. You’re not going to save 13.5. You’ll probably save about $10, but I rather you take that $10,000. Put it in your profit sharing plan with an 8% return. In ten years, you’ll be looking at $135,000 or $140,000. Does that sound good? You don’t sell them a report. Nobody wants to pay for the report. What they want is, “I can get an extra $140,000 roughly, depending on the market, in ten years? Sign me up for that.”

That’s the approach here. By the way, if you’re smart, now you’re going to start going through it all. You get RCReports. You run all your LLCs through it and now you start contacting each one of them. You’re going to turn them from a $750 whatever you’re charging for the single member LLC Schedule C-1040 to a $3,500 S-Corp.

How The Partnership Translates Into Practice

They’re going to be paying for the report, so the $1,800 or whatever I spend on RCReports now becomes a $20,000 or $30,000 revenue stream every single year because they got to run this every December. You’re saving the client money and, by the way, you’ve bulletproof this issue for an audit. That would be a win-win-win in my book. You don’t sell them the report. You sell them the benefit. The partnership clearly makes sense, but can you walk us to how this is going to work in practice? Do I go into FileForms or RCReports? Does it matter? Walk us through how this works.

Paul, do you want to start this one?

Yes, but it’ll be a quick pass off to Frank. What we’ve done is we’ve gotten together with FileForms and we’ve put the flow together within FileForms. As you’re going through this, you will be prompted or taken to RCReports to get that piece of it done then put back in the flow to finish up the rest of your compliance and you’ll have these reminders coming up each and every year.

 

 

Our RN, you can go through your current list and determine who has an LLC or who has an S-Corp and even book a time with either of our teams to go through that process and seek to present the opportunity that Eric just presented there to the LLC folks, who could benefit from those tax savings. We can help them with the selection and the reasonable comp report. The best part is going forward, we’re going to be able to service the annual report filing.

We’re going to be able to operate as a registered agent in all the states the companies are operating in, for and qualify them in new states and elected registered agents as they grow state to state, perhaps hiring remote employees. Going forward, it’s going to create a meaningful annuity type income stream when you encompass the registered agent, the annual report and the reasonable comp report each year across all those clients that you do have in your network. It ends up being a nice revenue generator all while providing your clients with savings. It’s a win-win for all parties involved, which is hard to beat.

For the audience, we’re going to be doing a webinar on this on September 17th. It’s a free webinar to walk you through this. One of the things that those of us who do a lot of speaking, they’re all banging the drum with Joe Woodard, me, Dominique Molina and Adam Lean at CFO Project. You name it, about getting into advisory This is the essence of advisory to be. If you think about it, again I can see the hang up. Folks would be like, “I’m trying to sell something.” No, you’re going to the client saying, “This is the stuff you need to take care of. We can take care of this for you.”

Basically, it’s a holistic approach. We’re not just knocking out a tax return or your bookkeeping. Later on, if you have a problem, come to us and say, “We only did your bookkeeping. We don’t do that. I hope you have a lawyer doing that.” No, the accounting or tax pro can now flow the entire thing, even if you end up not only going to do the return. We can make sure the annual files are done. We can make sure your RC report or your reasonable comp report is done and all of your tax filing. All of that stuff. That is the holistic advisory approach. That’s how you take that $2,500 tax client into a $10,000 a year relationship pricing client.

We’re going to have a relationship. We’re your pro and we can have means. Thank you, FileForms, RCReports and everybody else. Let’s see how grant works the rest, to literally automate this. We are checking all the boxes all the time. You don’t need to lose sleep about whether or not that report got there. Your annual reports are up to date. It’s all taken care of. I’m just going to tell you, and I’ve done shows with Don Roland.

That approach is very attractive, especially to business clients. In fact, when Don took this out to them, people’s prices jumped fourfold. It went to $750 a month, not $2,500 in tax season. Every client said the same thing. They said, “You’re going to take care of everything. I can call you whenever I need to and I’m not going to get a separate bill?” No, this is it. This is everything. Every single person signed up. Why? It’s because now it’s like a relief knowing that this is all being taken care of.

Take a walk through your client list and see who makes sense to convert. Share on X

For those folks reading, if you haven’t gone down this, first of all, go check out FileForms. They have amazing free stuff on their site. Lots of content and educational material. I know I’ve pointed people to it but you can sign up as a partner. It doesn’t cost anything. Again, you’re doing the right thing by the client with RCReports now in that flow. You’re going to be able to easily maintain your S-Corp folks properly and convert those LLCs and C-Corps to an S-Corp when the time is right. Again, do right by the client, bulletproof the return in case of an audit or for reasonable comp. All the rest of it.

Also, if you do 990s nonprofits, there is a question on the return. Do you have written documentation to support the compensation taken by directors? I bet your software is defaulting to yes. How many of your clients have that? I bet none. This is also an opportunity for you to sleep better at night knowing you got the client to take care of this stuff. There’s so many places I want to go with this.

How The Process Leads To Simplification

You already touched on this, but the benefits of the partnership of both sounds like simplification because it’s part of one workflow. Also, Paul, did you say that they’re going to get prompted about this or was it Frank? Let’s say I’m using FileForms and I have this S Corp. I’m going to get prompted now in November or December to run the reasonable comp for say 2026. Is that part of the flow?

The annual report file filing will be prompted 100 days before any filing. That should be a huge lift for folks who might have historically avoided doing that type of work or just didn’t want to track it on their own. I can attest our technology will track that for you so it does create a current revenue stream that’s quite passive and no overhead for you as the provider. To your point, it creates a great annual engagement point with the client.

It’s a great touch to check in, provide them with a reasonable comp report and get to know any updates in their business. Not just communicating with clients over tax season, but building that advisory service over time is becoming more prevalent in the CPA, EA and accounting community. Paul, any additional comments on that side?

For those that log into RCReports directly, you can run that at any time. In the FileForms flow, it would make the most sense when you’re doing your other filings, depending on what state and what jurisdiction. When they come up, are they going to come up on the day you started? Are they going to come up at the end of the year? It depends on those. I would just include this in that.

 

 

As long as you’re doing this once a year, you’re covered and you’ve got your update and your complaint. If there’s some reason to do it again at the end of the year, you can certainly jump directly into RCReports. Clone that report very quickly and get a new update. Maybe something changes with your client, where you want to do an update outside of when that annual filing comes up.

I was going to ask about the value add but it sounds like it’s the bundling. Anything else that I might miss?

The time-savings. Typically, forming a C-Corp or S-Corp, filing an annual report on average probably 30 minutes per state per entity. If you have a handful of entities, it can quickly turn into hours or days of work. If you’re servicing a full firm’s worth of entities, it could be hundreds, if not several hundreds. We’ve certainly turned weeks of work into a few hours of work for folks, which is huge operational leverage and cost efficiency.

As private equity is consuming CPA firms and investing in different accounting firms, they’re looking for more passive recurring revenue. They’re looking for more automated workflows and more AI within the four walls of the firm. This is leaning into those trends which are going to ultimately create more profit for you prior to potential exit and then more enterprise value created at that point of exit. That’s a big trend going on, too, that most folks can speak to.

Very true. Eric, when you were talking about a couple of things. One is a piece of mind for the client, knowing that everything has been filed and taken care of. They don’t need to think about it. You’ve shown them the value and the text save, then you move on to the tax preparer, CPA or EA that is taking care of this. They are also looking for that same piece of mind in a flow or something that’s going to remind them.

They don’t have to go out and spend a half hour doing each annual filing. You don’t need to then pop into RCReports and run that report and then put it all together in one place and check off their manual checklist or whatever it might be to make sure they’ve hit all of those things. It’s just all listed there. They can check through it and get it all done. That’s their piece of mind as well then it builds in that additional cashflow. As you said, when you’re building value for your practice, if you are building that practice for exit, anything that’s in the client advisory services section is a huge bump.

To summarize the unique value, the ease of doing this because when I first started my law practice, do you know how many corporations and then the S-Corp filings and then you have to make sure that the government got it because they seemed to lose half of them? The client didn’t want to do the minutes and the annual things. The client would go off and I’d hear about something going wrong. I wasn’t retained to do annual whatever follow up. When I merge, I have all these stock books in storage. I don’t even know where these people are anymore. There’s the ease. It’s just taking care of.

Some people have turned a single LLC relationship and several thousand dollars just by doing state filing in a value-add manner while mitigating liability. Share on X

Again, for those of you not signed up with FileForms because I use FileForms. You log in, dashboard and here all my entities. I know that I’ve either filed or I’m an agent or whatever. They’re all there. It has deadlines there. I get flagged. I get updated when there’s a filing deadline. It’s all right there. The fact that this is all now part of a flow, so as you said, Paul. The accountants who want a workflow for this, especially with all the software and everything. Everything lends itself to a workflow. Not being disjointed with a bunch of things you need to do.

You’ve got the ease of it, I would call that and frankly, the retention. As I pitched, that reasonable comp, if I run it for someone and the reasonable comp comes in and there are no savings are. Maybe it’s a one-off but I’ve not found that. Generally speaking, they are saving for folks and we’re running that report every single year. You can do these two ways. You either charge separately for the report or what you’re going to do is you’re not going to charge $2,500 for an S-Corp return. I’m charging $3,500 because the report is built. You have to do it as part of this.

The client doesn’t even realize they’re paying a thousand dollars for that report. I think Don said she’s got like 32. That’s $32,000 a year. My law partner is like, “If you can’t point to the ROI on something, we don’t want it.” That’s the ROI on this. Plus, the peace of mind, everything’s taken care of, bulletproofing the audit, etc. We don’t get into the horror story about Bob, who was a CPA, who tried to get his clients to do this. They wouldn’t do it, kept filing the returns anyway, and the government would have to.

Why You Should Try This Out

Frank, you missed out. It’s a great story. Thrilling and exciting at all the right moments. You can sit on it some other time, Paul. I do it every single year. For the folks reading, I have my thoughts. When you read this, get in front of your computer. Go out to FileForms and sign up as a partner. That should be automatic for everybody. Do you have some other thoughts, Frank and Paul? What would you suggest to people who have read this and are like, “Okay, Eric. I see this. I get it?”

My recommendation would be, take a little exercise through your client list. Reflect on what you learned today and click through the names of your clients and see who might be a good candidate. If it’s a long relationship or even a new one, reaching out to them and having a conversation about this topic. Prove to yourself that this is an opportunity. Don’t just take it from us.

We have great client testimonials on our site and amazing supporters like Eric and his entire network. There’s a real opportunity and it’s just taking action. This is a great time of year, prior to the busy season and prior to the year-end rush to qualify those clients. When you’re in tax extension season in a few months, maybe this is a good time. Comps are naturally happening in your normal workflows.

 

 

I was just going to mention the same advice, take a walk through your client list and see who it makes sense to convert. In addition to that, you also have your S-Corps you are currently working with. You may not be doing their state filings and other compliance work for them. Also, looking at them and bringing them into that same flow. For a reasonable compensation standpoint, that report is in one or maybe multiple flows that your client is counting on, but it’s priced out in more of a package form.

If you’re including it in your relationship pricing, it’s already there. If you’re putting it in your S-Corp or 1120-S package, it’s already built in there. If you’re putting it into your compliance flow and FileForms, it’s already built in there. You’re protecting both yourself and your client. You’re getting that report done to each and every year.

Get In Touch With Paul And Frank

You’ve got your existing S-Corps, C-Corps, nonprofit and 990s in terms of getting that report done. You’ve got every single entity, single member LLC or Corp and who’s taking care of the annual filing. All of that. I hope no one has this, but if you have any sole proprietors, get them set up as an LLC. That’s just stupid at this point. I see it every now and then. It’s a little nuts but we do see it. It’s a great opportunity. The partnership is very exciting.

In terms of getting in touch with you guys, go check out both FileForms as well as RCReports if you haven’t already. Also, we’re going to be doing a webinar in September. It’s free of charge, so get continuing education credits to learn a little bit more about this. We go more in-depth and I hope what you see is a tremendous business opportunity. Yes, do things right by the client. You’re going to make money but there’s a real good chance to build out an entire workflow from an advisory perspective and just bring more value to the client, make more money doing it and get everyone to sleep better at night.

It’s great advice, Eric. We’ve seen folks turn a single LLC relationship into several thousands of dollars just doing state filings in a value-add manner while helping clients mitigate liability and stay active with the states they operate it. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a win-win for you, your clients and all stakeholders.

I couldn’t agree more. Frank and Paul, thank you for taking the time. It’s great having you, as always. On September 17th, we’ll see everybody on the webinar. Thanks for reading. See you in the next episode.

 

 

Important Links

• Frank Tumminello on LinkedIn
• Paul Hamann on LinkedIn
• RCReports
• FileForms
• Joe Woodard on LinkedIn
• Dominique Molina on LinkedIn
• CFO Project
• Join Eric, Frank and Paul for a free webinar on September 17th

 

About Frank Tumminello

Frank Tumminello comes from a decade-long background of working in the financial services and technology industry. Prior to FileForms, he was an investor, acquirer, and value-creation resource in several financial services, insurance, and healthcare businesses throughout his private equity, corporate development, and investment banking career.

Frank began his career at Raymond James, followed by Oppenheimer & Co. and Century Equity Partners. Most recently, he led a pre-tax healthcare benefits third-party administrator through eight successful acquisitions and a majority recapitalization with a multi-billion-dollar private equity firm. Frank holds his Bachelor of Science in Physics from Bates College, where he minored in Mathematics and wrote a year-long thesis in Computer Science.

 

About Paul Hamann

Paul is an expert on determining Reasonable Compensation for closely-held business owners. He’s educated more than 100,000 financial professionals on the topic and has been published in numerous national and state journals. When he isn’t in the office, he enjoys spending time with his wife and chocolate lab, hiking Colorado’s back country or paddling its scenic lakes and rivers.