“I majored in finance and accounting at University of Montana. And the summer before I started the Master’s of Accounting program I got an internship at KPMG that was in internal audit, and then also IT advisory,” Keli Dennehy explains. “I always knew that I didn’t want to stray that far away from technology of tax and accounting, because even in the 2010s, it was clear that tech was definitely going to be part of our future of tax and accounting.”
So, fresh out of school and dropped into one of the Big 4 firms, Keli started to get a taste of the different arms at KPMG. She was drawn to Speciality Tax for a funny reason: “The office was really nice, in a high rise in Portland, Oregon with awesome views of Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens.”
However, soon at that home base and in her Master’s program, Keli found that she was more drawn to tax than audit. So, she began to dive into the intricacies of tax law, and moved to a tax consulting group at KPMG. Her dreams of spending time at the home base quickly were supplemented by the fun of these unique field visits to company sites to better understand their R&D projects. In the Pacific Northwest, that meant software companies, but also cardboard making plants and lumber mills.
Keli was enjoying her time at KPMG, mixing site visits with deep work at the office with the view. But then a LinkedIn posting changed everything. In 2023, she saw that a company called Neo.Tax was hiring someone with her expertise. “I looked into the company and was like, ‘Oh my God, they would have saved me so many hours and days of and months of my life as an associate at KPMG, doing all this manual, repetitive work,’” she remembers thinking. “‘If they can do what they’re claiming, this is a game changer.’”
She applied and was shown what the product did then and what they were planning during the interview process. She was floored by the intelligence on the team, but also by the impact their product would have on the industry. “I was like, ‘This would be really really cool to be a part of.’ It’s a paradigm shift for, especially someone coming from public accounting,” she says. “It’s a complete reimagining of how the tax and accounting industry that I was a part of would operate in the future.”
In July 2023, Keli started at Neo.Tax. As she watches Neo.Tax’s system get better and better at clustering, with the ability to efficiently sort through hundreds of thousands of Jira tickets at the enterprise level, she can’t help but think back to her recent past at KPMG.
“I still remember getting Jira tickets to look at that were supposed to provide documentation, and it was just like, ‘What am I looking at here?’ I’m doing my best, but no human can digest that much information.”
Keli is still amazed that Neo.Tax has automated the process.
“If I was still at an accounting firm, I would be explaining to the team that the best information our client can give us as we prepare their tax returns is an R&D tax credit study prepared by Neo.Tax,” she says. “Our AI is about as sophisticated as you can get when evaluating software development activities in accordance with the IRS rules and regulations.”
Keli laughs as she explains that the “anal accountant OCD” still remains in her psyche. But having a Keli in the machine is part of what makes Neo.Tax different than a standard AI solution,
Throughout the process, Keli works closely with customers, double-checking every project and figure in the R&D credit filing, and identifying any missing R&D work.
“You can’t take the accountant out of me. I check everything in Microsoft Excel before finalizing,” Keli says, starting to laugh. “My role is doing that project evaluation but also from the quantitative side once we start getting payroll information in, and cloud hosting costs, and any contractor information, I will double check all of that as well, and double check the credit calculation, and make sure the the credit calculation that’s selected for the customer is most advantageous to them.”
At KPMG, most of her time was spent consolidating all this payroll information and getting it in the right format, and cleansing and organizing huge data dumps from clients. “You’d spend so much time doing that that you would lose the forest through the trees,” she says.
With Neo.Tax, all of that legwork happens automatically. That clears the space for the high-touch, expert work of maximizing a credit.
“You can hover above it while it’s doing all of those manual calculations, and you can check them when it’s done,” Keli explains. “It really does just let you rise above the forest and have a bird’s eye view. And that perspective is where the value really lies for a customer.”