## Cedarwood CPA Collective
Two CPAs, eight clients, one shared vision: a firm that punching invoices on time and reconciliations done right.
Cedarwood's model was lean by necessity. James and Priya did everything—tax prep, payroll, bookkeeping, advisory. The bookkeeping part was honest work, but it ate hours.
"We'd block Saturdays for reconciliation," James told us. "Four hours per client, minimum. Eight clients, 32 hours. We were working half our weekends."
### Why Traditional Tools Didn't Cut It
Cedarwood had tried automated reconciliation in their existing platform. It worked for clean feeds—regular payroll direct deposits, rent checks, predictable utility charges. But their clients' feeds were messy.
Cash-basis clients with irregular income. Rental properties with deposits that sometimes posted as two line items and sometimes as one. A retail client who took returns and exchanges in-person but processed refunds on a separate terminal.
The automated rules caught maybe 60% of what needed catching. The rest fell to manual scanning.
### The Change
James ran Cedarwood's three most problematic clients through ReconAuditIQ AI for a month and tracked what the tool found versus what their manual process caught.
The tool found 11 items the manual process missed. Six were exact duplicates. Three were refund-adjacent duplicates—the kind where a charge reversed and a new charge hit simultaneously, creating a net-zero pair in the feed that looked like two separate events. Two were behavioral outliers: one-time vendor charges at unusual amounts that warranted a client check.
"We stopped scanning feeds on Saturday," James said. "We run the tool Friday night. We review flags Saturday morning in 45 minutes. The rest of the weekend is ours."
Cedarwood onboarded two new clients last quarter—one from a referral from a client they'd saved $2,100 in duplicate charges the month before.