How Accountants Can Start Offering 2026 Tax Planning Without Doing It Themselves

Tax season is over. Your clients filed their returns, saw what they owed, and most of them had the same reaction they have every year…frustration. Maybe they asked you if there was anything that could have been done differently. Maybe they didn't, but they were thinking it.

Here's the thing: post-tax season and into the summer is actually one of the best times to do something about it.

Most Accountants assume tax planning is something that happens in the fall, right before year-end. But the Advisors and Accountants who get the best results for their clients start the conversation in May, June, and July, when there's still enough time to model strategies, make elections, and actually implement. By November, half the options are already off the table.

The question most Accountants face isn't whether to offer proactive tax planning. It's how.

You Don't Have to Become a Tax Planning Expert

There's a misconception that expanding into tax planning means adding staff, investing in new software, or spending months learning strategies you've never used before. For most Accounting firms, that's not realistic, and it's not necessary.

The more useful question is: who has already done this, and how do you collaborate with them?

Through the Virtual Family Office model, Accountants can offer clients access to a full team of planning specialists without building the infrastructure themselves. The VFO does the heavy lifting. Your role is to identify which clients could benefit and make the introduction. From there, the specialists take over: designing the plan, explaining the strategy, and handling implementation.

You still serve your client. You just have a team behind you.

What's Actually Available

The strategies available through a well-built VFO go well beyond what most Accounting firms have the capacity to offer on their own. A partial list of what's currently in the VFO through ERT.

• Cash Balance Plans
• Charitable Gift Financing
• Charitable Lead Annuity Trusts (CLATs)
• Cost Segregation
• Discounted Charitable Donations
• Energy Asset Tax Mitigation Strategies
• IRA Bailout Plans
• Leveraged Deductions
• LEOS
• Oil & Gas Drilling Funds
• Pre-Tax Wealth Creation
• R&D Tax Credits
• Solar Tax Credits
• Structured Ownership Programs
• Tax Resolution and Planning
• Transformative Intangibles

That's a wide range. And this isn’t even the full list of what’s available to Accountants. Not every strategy fits every client, but for business owners, high-income earners, and clients facing a significant liquidity event, there's almost always something on that list worth exploring.

Why Post-Tax Season and Summer Is the Right Window

When a client sees a large tax bill in April, they're receptive. That frustration fades over the summer if no one follows up. The Accountants who reach out proactively, even just to say "let's look at what 2026 could look like differently", are the ones who deepen those relationships and retain clients long-term.

A summer planning conversation doesn't have to be complicated. It can start with a simple, “I want to walk you through a few things I noticed. There are strategies we haven't explored that could put you in a meaningfully different position next April.”

The "Who Not How" Approach

The phrase comes up often in advisory circles: don't spend time figuring out how to do something yourself when someone has already figured it out. Apply that here. You don't need to learn cost segregation to offer it to a client. You need to know who handles it, trust that they're competent, and be comfortable making the introduction.

That's exactly what the VFO is built around. ERT's team, including an advanced tax planner and supporting staff, works alongside you and your client. You stay involved. You stay informed. You don't have to become a different kind of Accountant to deliver a meaningfully better outcome.

Here's the additional content to append to the end — picking up right after "Summer is when the best planning actually starts."

What VFO Tax Planning Actually Looks Like in Practice

Picture a husband and wife, both working, one with a W2 around $210,000 and business income on top of that in the $400,000–$500,000 range. Long-time clients. They've been frustrated with their tax bill for years but haven't said much about it. No estate plan in place, no real asset protection, and sitting on a future tax liability north of $2 million tied to the eventual sale of their business.

Their Accountant knew all of this. It was all right there in the return.

Through the VFO, a tax planning specialist came in and worked alongside the Accountant on the plan, addressing the current-year tax bill, putting asset protection in place, and beginning to work through the estate planning piece. The client walked away with over $400,000 in tax savings and a clear plan for reducing what would have been a significant tax hit on the business sale.

The Accountant didn't design the strategies. They made the introduction, stayed involved, and served as the client's trusted point of contact throughout the process. That's the role. And it's enough.

What Tax Clients Are Actually Looking For

An Advisor said, “clients don't need the smartest Accountant or the most sophisticated tax planner in the country. They want their problems solved. They want someone who can see around the corner and make sure they're in the best possible position, both in their business and their personal lives.”

Most clients with any real complexity such as business owners, high-income earners, or people approaching a liquidity event, already sense they're leaving something on the table. They just don't know what, and they don't know who to ask.

When their Accountant shows up in May or June with a plan rather than waiting for the next tax season, that's the moment the relationship changes. They stop seeing you as the person who files their return and start seeing you as someone who's actually looking out for them.

That shift is worth more than any individual tax strategy.

The Difference Between Compliance and Planning

The traditional Accounting firm is built around compliance. Get the return done, hit the deadline, move to the next one. That model can work at scale, but it doesn't justify higher fees.

Planning is different. It's forward-looking by definition. It requires understanding where a client is headed, not just where they've been. And that's exactly why the summer window matters: it's one of the few times in the year where there's actual runway to do something meaningful before December closes out the options.

The Accountants who are building the most valuable practices right now aren't necessarily abandoning compliance. They're running compliance efficiently and layering planning on top of it, using the VFO to do the heavy lifting, and treating their best clients like the advisory relationships they should be.

That's the model. And the window to start those conversations for 2026 is right now.