How Gordon J. Maier & Company ran a full US tax season on Uku, weeks after going live

Gordon J. Maier & Company, LLP has been doing accounting work in Wisconsin since 1935. Today the firm runs four offices — Racine, Brookfield, Kenosha and Paddock Lake — with 43 people handling tax, audit, payroll, bookkeeping and advisory work for businesses, individuals, nonprofits and governmental organizations, plus remote team members working from other states.

Firms like this are the hardest kind to move onto new software. There is no single office where everyone sits. There are partners with their own books of business, service areas with their own processes, and one immovable deadline in the calendar: tax season, which starts in mid-January and does not care what system you are in the middle of implementing.

GJM did it anyway.

The question every US firm asks first

The conversation started in the fall of 2025 with a demo and a healthy amount of skepticism.

“Since this was a completely new system for us, we had many questions about whether it would meet the needs of a U.S.-based accounting firm with multiple offices, partners, service areas, and a busy tax season.”

That is the right question to ask. Practice management is not a tool you try out on the side — it becomes the place the whole firm works. Uku’s answer was not a feature list, it was a commitment.

“From the very beginning, the Uku team assured us that they would support us through every step of the onboarding process and would work with us to adapt the system to our firm’s needs. Looking back, we can confidently say that those promises were kept.”

Going live weeks before tax season

The timeline was not comfortable, and Snizhana Bykova, a senior accountant at the firm, is direct about it.

“We began implementing Uku shortly before the start of tax season in the United States, which begins in mid-January. This was an aggressive transition timeline, especially because Uku was a completely new platform for all of our employees.”

A rollout that tight only works if someone is genuinely available when things go wrong. At GJM, onboarding was not a handoff — it was a person.

“Throughout the implementation process, the Uku team was extremely responsive to our questions, requests, corrections, and feature suggestions. Our main contact became an everyday resource for our team and was always willing to explain, assist, schedule calls, and provide training.”

The firm also chose a training model that scales in a 43-person practice: Uku trained the key team members and service area leaders, and those leaders trained the rest of the staff internally. That kept the product knowledge inside the firm rather than in a vendor’s inbox.

There were rough edges, and they were the ones you would expect when a European product meets an American firm — time format, workweek structure, some terminology.

“There were also small adjustments for our U.S. team, such as differences in time format, workweek structure, and certain terminology. However, because the Uku team was so supportive and responsive, we were able to work through these differences successfully.”

What GJM ran on Uku in its first tax season

Not a pilot. The whole season.

“During our first tax season using Uku, we used the system for timekeeping, client database management, project tracking, tax return workflow, and service area organization. We entered our client database, multiple offices, partners, and service areas into the system.”

Once the structure was in, the firm found the part that matters most day to day in a multi-office practice: being able to slice the work.

“Uku proved to be very user-friendly for filtering information and organizing client work.”

From there the firm built out project-level tracking across its service lines — tax returns, audits, financial statement reviews and other accounting services each got their own projects.

“This allowed us to track preparation, review, and finalization time for each engagement.”

That is the difference between knowing a firm’s total hours and knowing where an engagement actually goes over. And when something did not work, the fix did not sit in a queue.

“When we encountered issues or needed adjustments, the Uku team responded quickly and worked with us to address them.”

A product that adapted to the American market

Uku’s customer base has been European for most of its history and the United States is now its primary market. Firms like GJM are the reason the product changes.

“One of the things we appreciated most was Uku’s willingness to adapt to the needs of the American accounting market. The team helped create separate templates, adjust address formats, improve invoice presentation, and make changes that better supported our firm’s processes.”

Templates, address formats, invoice presentation. None of that shows up in a comparison table. All of it decides whether a firm can actually send an invoice on Monday.

What came out the other side

A firm that has been through a full tax season on a new system has an answer no demo can give.

“Now that we have completed a tax season using Uku, we can say that we successfully made it through a major transition period.”

Uku is now where the work lives.

“Uku has become the central platform our team uses every day across all of our offices, while also keeping our remote team members in other states connected and working together efficiently.”

Adoption was not uniform, and the firm is honest about that too.

“What we really like about Uku is that it is modern, user-friendly, and innovative. Many of our younger employees adapted to it quickly, while employees who were used to other systems benefited from additional training and support. Overall, the system has helped us move toward a more organized and technology-driven workflow.”

The firm is still expanding what it uses — budgeting, invoicing and reporting are next.

“We are still learning and discovering additional features… We are excited to continue using more of Uku’s features in the future as our team becomes more experienced with the system.”

What GJM would tell another firm

Their recommendation is specific about who it is for.

“We would recommend Uku to other small and medium-sized accounting firms, especially those looking for a modern practice management system that can support timekeeping, project management, workflow organization, invoicing, and reporting. Uku is a young, innovative platform with a responsive and supportive team behind it.”

Run your firm like GJM

If your firm has multiple offices, partners with different ways of working, and a season that decides your year, the question is not whether the software has the features. It is whether anyone will be there when you are two weeks from January 15th and something needs to change.

Most firms are up and running in two to six weeks, with free migration help and personal onboarding. See Uku pricing or book a demo, and we will map it to how your firm actually works.