Believe it or not, some people actually enjoy doing taxes.
Gabrielle Thomas, chief operating officer of the Accounting Aid Society, is one of those people. In addition to her other work stewarding the organization, she volunteers every Saturday to help individuals and businesses with their finances, something she describes as “so much fun.”
Although this isn’t the way most of us would describe tax preparation, Thomas is sincere. She tells a story about a man whom she recently assisted.
“I asked him what the best part of the day was, and he said, ‘I met Gabrielle today, and you did my taxes and helped me get $500 dollars. Now I can pay my rent,’” she recalls with a hint of pride.
This kind of community-focused work is exactly what Gabrielle Thomas was looking for when she went back to work after taking a break from her corporate career to raise a family. Previously she had helped Stroh’s and Frito-Lay streamline their processes and gain efficiencies, an approach she has brought to Accounting Aid.
“I like to see progress,” she says, “I like being able to do more with the funds we’re entrusted with.”
Serving Detroit since 1972, the Accounting Aid Society provides tax assistance services to businesses and individuals who otherwise might not be able to afford them. With 18 year-round employees, 20 seasonal ones, and around 600 volunteers, Accounting Aid works with 18,000 individual tax-payers each year and more than 100 businesses. This translated into $24 million pumped back into the local economy through tax returns in 2017. They also work with the city of Detroit to increase uptake of the Earned Income Tax Credit by 10 percent a year.
Accounting Aid is innovating on the business side of their operation as well. As a part of their “Do the Numbers” program for business owners, they are extending their services beyond tax preparation to assist businesses with record keeping in QuickBooks and learning about sales interfaces like Etsy and Square. This back-end support helps businesses secure the information they need to properly do their taxes—understanding their ownership equity, tracking expenses, dividing business from personal expenses, and so on. But it also enables them to, as Thomas puts it, “tell their story with numbers,” which can make it easier for them to court investors or secure loans.
The Accounting Aid Society has relied on partnerships with other nonprofits and governmental organizations to help drive their evolution. They work from 23 tax sites across a four-county area and use organizations like Southwest Solutions, Build Institute, Focus Hope and the New Economy Initiative to assist with outreach. Thomas calls out NEI specifically for having “intentionally brought people together… which has helped us focus on what we do best.”
This has allowed them find new tax-preparation sites like the one at Central Detroit Christian CDC.
These partnerships have led to the development of a “Drop and Go” tax service where clients can leave their taxes with neighborhood nonprofits to be picked up and processed by Accounting Aid and then returned to these convenient locations. This is part of their effort to extend their services and “build futures,” as their website puts it. It’s also an acknowledgement of the time-stress that many of their clients face.
As Thomas sees it, her project goes beyond tax preparation to fostering a sense of empowerment.
“We’re giving them points of success that they can see…we’re creating these reference points that they can build on,” she says. “Warren Buffett has all of his advisers that tell him what to do with his money. Everybody should have that.”