Register your firm
RESO is licensed to tax firms — enrolled agents, CPAs, attorneys, and resolution teams — not to taxpayers. Registration creates a firm tenant: go to the register page, enter your name, email, and firm name, and you land in your own workspace. Everything you do afterward — cases, documents, billing, team invites — is scoped to that firm. There is no per-seat pricing, so you can invite your whole team from day one.
To run metered case intelligence (Discovery, Strategy, and Work Verification analysis), subscribe to RESO Professional in Settings. A card is required when you subscribe; usage during your first 30 days is tracked and invoiced at $0, and the platform fee starts on day 31.
Your day starts on the dashboard
Signing in lands you on My Day — your work queue for the day: deadlines and work-plan steps assigned to you (overdue, due today, next seven days), your cases that need attention with the reason named, your open tasks, and the firm pipeline. The Cases tab holds the full case list with saved views and filters; the Calendar holds every dated commitment.
Create your first case
From the dashboard or the case list, create a case with the client’s basic details. Each case is a single governed record that carries the entire engagement: the client story from intake, the IRS evidence from transcripts, the financial profile, every generated report, the billing trail, and the activity timeline. When staff changes or a partner reviews the file months later, the record — not anyone’s memory — answers what happened.
The five-phase ribbon
At the top of every case, the CaseRail ribbon shows where the engagement stands across five commercial phases. Under the hood, a ten-stage gate engine tracks finer-grained progress; the ribbon is the management view of those gates.
- Qualification — consultation intake and paid Discovery authorization.
- Discovery — IRS transcript review and the Discovery Report.
- Strategy — the 433 financial profile and case strategy.
- Implementation — commercial close and delivery verification.
- Work Verification — work completed, fee worksheet, and retention defense.
Each phase shows a status — Not started, In progress, Needs review, or Complete — derived from the same gate blockers that govern report generation. The ribbon is advisory: it tells you what is missing, and it never silently blocks you from looking at any part of the case.
The workspace tabs
Day-to-day work happens in seven tabs inside the case workspace:
- Profile — the parties, contact details, and case setup.
- Questionnaires — consultation intake, circumstance and objectives statements, and the 433 financial intake.
- Reports — Discovery Report, Taxpayer Summary, Strategy Report, and Work Verification, plus transcript upload.
- Resolution — program work plans, attested implementation steps, and transcript confirmation once the engagement is sold.
- Billing — case billing, Scope of Work, and commercial close.
- Documents — transcripts, notices, returns, agreements, and uploads.
- Activity — the case timeline: who did what, and when.
Where Discovery and Strategy fit
RESO treats the advisory phase as two deliverables rather than a free sales expense — most firms sell them; firms that don’t sell exploratories use the same Discovery to close implementation on findings. After consultation, the client authorizes Discovery — that authorization is a hard gate before transcript work begins. Transcripts come in, RESO parses them, and you generate a co-branded Discovery Report documenting IRS posture, urgency, and program fit. With the 433 financial intake complete, you then generate a Strategy Report: program viability and sequencing grounded in the IRS ledger and the client’s ability to pay. Implementation is quoted from that evidence, and Work Verification closes the loop with a defensible record of the work performed.
A sensible first hour
- Register your firm and set your firm name and logo in Settings — they appear on every co-branded report.
- Create a case and complete the Initial Intake questionnaire (Guided Call Mode gives you the talk track).
- Record Discovery authorization, then upload transcripts in the Reports tab.
- Generate a Discovery Report and review it the way you would present it to the client.
If you want to see the destination before starting, walk through the demo case — it shows a complete engagement, including the work product you would hand the client.