By Spencer Carroll
Filing season commands the profession’s attention, but a quieter pattern deserves notice. The third quarter has become one of the year’s most active windows for taxpayers who decide to change firms or engage a CPA for the first time, driven by a simple deadline logic: the planning that moves the numbers has to happen before the year closes.
At Gelt, we examined our own third-quarter intake across 2024 and 2025 to understand who is making those moves. Four types of clients accounted for nearly all of it. For firms considering where Q3 growth may originate from, these are the profiles worth knowing.
The Owner Who Outgrew the Software
Roughly 40% were entrepreneurs, most of them Schedule C business owners, who had filed through consumer tax software since launching their business. Their businesses matured, revenue climbed and the return grew heavier with the things that come with an S corporation: reasonable compensation, the qualified business income deduction, multistate exposure and retirement contributions. What began as a straightforward filing turned into a set of interlocking decisions, and the software that once fit the business no longer reflected how it actually operated.
The First-Time K-1 Investor
About 29% arrived holding a K-1, usually their first, from a real estate deal, syndication or partnership stake. These are often high earners who invested outside their day job and were not expecting the document that showed up in their inbox. A single K-1 rarely stays simple: it can carry the qualified business income deduction, net investment income tax, Medicare surtaxes and nexus in states they have no other connection to. The investment was passive, but the tax profile it created is anything but, and that gap between what they signed up for and what they now owe is what brings them in.
The Client Who Stopped Hearing from Their Preparer
Around 17% came from an established relationship that had gone dormant. They filed in April and then heard nothing: no midyear check-in, no note when the tax law shifted, no read on the liquidity event or the new rental property that reshaped their year. Many are successful people whose lives grew more complex while the service stayed transactional, one return a year, delivered and forgotten. They rarely leave over a mistake. They leave because a preparer who only surfaces at filing gives them no reason to believe next year will look different, and by Q3 they have decided to find someone who treats the relationship as year-round.
The Mid-Market Client Seeking a Leaner Arrangement
The last group came from larger, consolidated firms, often after those firms merged, were acquired or took on private equity investment. They had grown used to real technical depth, but somewhere in the scaling, their point of contact receded behind account managers, intake queues and rotating staff. These are sophisticated taxpayers who can tell the difference between a firm that knows their situation and one that reassigns them every season. They are not trading down on expertise. They want the same caliber of work with a direct line to the person doing it.
No single factor explains these moves. What unites them is a mismatch: each client’s situation had outgrown the arrangement built to handle it. In one case, the driver was a maturing business; in another, an unfamiliar investment; elsewhere, a preparer’s silence or a firm’s bureaucracy. The particulars differ, but the recognition is the same: the setup no longer fits the life it was meant to serve.
The third quarter is when that recognition tends to surface. At Gelt, the pattern is consistent enough that we have come to treat Q3 as its own season, and the clients who arrive in it share a trait worth naming: they are not shopping on price. They are looking for attention that matches the complexity they have grown into, and they tend to stay with the firm that finally provides it.
About the Author
Spencer Carroll is a CPA with experience spanning public accounting, tech startup sales and academia as an accounting professor. He is also an entrepreneur who owns and manages a small real estate business. This blend of accounting and entrepreneurial experience informs his work at Gelt, where he leads the sales team. Spencer helps clients identify opportunities to optimize their taxes, combining industry knowledge with a hands-on understanding of business challenges.
