How Howard, Howard and Hodges consolidated a fragmented tech stack and gained firm-wide visibility with Qount

Company Profile

Howard Howard Hodges has been serving small to medium-sized business owners in Florida since 1961. What started as a single-location firm has grown across three offices and roughly 45 employees, with managing partner Vincent Howard at the helm since the late 1980s. As the firm scaled, so did the operational complexity and the tech stack built to manage it.

The Challenge: Visibility Lost Across Too Many Systems

Before Qount, Howard Howard Hodges ran on six, seven, sometimes eight separate software tools; each handling a piece of the firm’s operations with no connection to the others. Workflow lived in one platform. Client communication happened in another. Billing was somewhere else entirely.

The result was a firm operating in silos. Leadership had no single place to view where work stood, who had reviewed what, or where a deliverable was sitting. Handoffs required manual follow-up and admin tasks that should have taken minutes stretched across days.

Key operational pain points included:

• No unified view of firm-wide workflow status across three locations
• Engagement letters required days of manual preparation per cycle
• Billing, client communication, and document management ran in separate and disconnected tools
• Clients had to log into multiple platforms to pay invoices, sign documents, and access returns
• Staff time was consumed coordinating between systems rather than serving clients

As Vincent describes it: “You end up with silos. You’d have to go to this one for workflow, this other one for client communication — nothing communicated with each other.”

The firm had also been burned before. In 2018, they spent three months on a competitor’s platform; a trial that left them with no visibility into where the firm stood and a list of promised integrations that never materialized. By the time they evaluated six or seven vendors before landing on Qount, Vincent’s team knew exactly what to look for: a company that would actually listen. Qount’s willingness to adapt the platform to fit how the firm worked, rather than the other way around, was what closed it.

Why Howard, Howard Hodges Chose Qount

When Vincent and his team first encountered Qount, what differentiated it wasn’t the breadth of the platform alone, it was that the team behind it was willing to listen. After years of vendors that promised flexibility and delivered rigidity, that responsiveness was the deciding factor.

Howard, Howard and Hodges began implementation with billing and client communication. A focused starting point that let the team get comfortable with the platform before expanding. The scope grew from there.

The Solution: One Portal for the Entire Firm

With Qount in place, Howard, Howard and Hodges replaced its fragmented stack with a single operational environment. Clients now interact with the firm through one login: paying bills, completing organizers, submitting tax documents, signing returns, and sending messages—all in the same place.

Internally, workflow automation replaced the manual email chains that used to move work between team members. When a financial statement is ready for manager review, Qount routes it automatically. Follow-up emails and status checks are a thing of the past. The work moves on its own, and the team always knows where things stand. 

Engagement letters—once a multi-day exercise involving manual preparation across the team — are now auto-populated from prior year data and sent in minutes. Tax organizers ingest incoming documents and populate client folders automatically, eliminating the print-scan-upload cycle that had consumed admin hours each season.

The Results: Time Reclaimed, Visibility Restored

Howard Howard Hodges implemented Qount incrementally, starting with billing and expanding section by section from there. The benefits followed the same pattern; they built over time, amounting to a gradual but complete restructuring of how the firm operates. 

Consolidated Operations

Six to seven tools became one. Billing, workflow, client communication, document management, and engagement letters now run from a single platform. The administrative overhead of maintaining and bridging multiple systems is gone.

Engagement Letters: Days to Minutes

What previously took the admin team four to five days—preparing, formatting, and sending engagement letters manually—now happens automatically, drawing from prior year data. The process that once anchored January is no longer a bottleneck.

Admin Headcount Freed for Higher-Value Work

Billing no longer requires a dedicated team member. Engagement letters no longer consume an admin’s week. Tax organizer intake is automated. The result isn’t staff reduction, it’s staff redeployment. The firm’s people are doing work that matters, not managing process gaps.Full Visibility Across Three Locations

Leadership can see the entire firm from one view: where work stands, where it’s stalled, and what needs attention across all three locations simultaneously. The manual process of emailing status updates between offices is gone.

A Better Client Experience

Clients no longer juggle multiple platforms or wait on staff to track down links and documents. Everything lives in one place — and for a growing Gen Z and millennial client base, that modern interface is itself a differentiator.

“It does exactly what needs to be done every single time — no matter what we throw at it, no matter what we need it to do, it finds a way to make the product fit that particular project.” 

Looking Ahead

Howard, Howard and Hodges is actively planning for acquisition and expansion. For Vincent, Qount isn’t just the platform that solved today’s operational problems; it’s the infrastructure that makes growth possible.

He’s also watching Qount’s AI roadmap closely. The vision: financial statements analyzed automatically, trends surfaced before the human eye catches them, and client advisory conversations driven by data rather than gut instinct. As the compliance burden lifts, the team can move up the value stack.