The Challenge: Technical training that depended on senior managers
At Baker Tilly, new hires—especially early-career talent—often arrive without experience in the tax software stack firms rely on to do real client work.
Traditionally, the solution was hands-on coaching: a case-study approach where a senior manager or manager would sit with a new hire and walk them through how to complete a workpaper inside tools like CaseWare, Axcess, and GoSystem.
That approach worked, but it didn’t scale.
The firm is international, and workflows vary by team and region. Training also isn’t homogeneous across the organization, which made it hard to standardize how people learned core procedural tasks.
“Most new hires… have never seen these programs before.”
Ryland had seen this movie before.
In a prior role at a HubSpot partner, he’d watched teams burn time manually screenshotting, highlighting, and building knowledge base articles—then repeating the process every time a customer asked a similar question.
“We needed a way to easily create knowledge bases… it was taking so much time to manually screenshot, highlight everything.”
The Shift: From one-off walkthroughs to a reusable, interactive library
When Ryland joined Baker Tilly and heard the firm was looking for a solution for technical tax software training, the answer was immediate.
“As soon as they were telling me what they needed, I was like, that’s iorad.”
He became the internal super-user—training creators, allocating licenses, and expanding seats as needed.
The big move was building a centralized resource: an internal web page that hosts a library of iorad tutorials.
Instead of a single manager-led walkthrough, learners can self-serve in the mode they prefer and practice end-to-end tasks.
“Now we have a live page that basically has 40 iorads that go through these.”
This model also solved an operational reality: Baker Tilly uses multiple tax tools, multiple workpaper types, and multiple approaches depending on the team.
“We are international… being able to easily create tutorials for so many different softwares and… categories has been extremely helpful.
The Outcome: Faster onboarding, less repeat support, and fewer ‘how do I…’ loops
From the learner side, feedback was simple: the tutorials were easy to follow.
Ryland noted a couple of small onboarding friction points (some learners didn’t realize they could skip steps; some weren’t sure what to do next when finishing a tutorial), but overall the response was positive.
“The learners so far have had no issues… everybody’s been fine.”
On the delivery side, the library format also prevented the “repeat email” problem.
When a workflow needed explaining across a large group, Ryland used iorad instead of sending multiple rounds of instructions.
“We had a whole… and I was like, okay, I’m making an iorad. I’m not going to send 300 emails about this.”
Why it worked: Practice-based learning for complex tools
The core value wasn’t just documentation.
It was practice.
For highly technical processes—like completing workpapers inside unfamiliar tax systems—being able to click through, replay, and self-serve reduced friction and made onboarding more repeatable.
The model also helped unify training across teams that weren’t using the same exact tax toolchain in the same way.
“You can practice going through every single workpaper, every single software.”
Looking ahead: Better reporting + better organization (Help Centers + SSO)
Ryland’s main product feedback centered on two needs that show up when training scales:
- Reporting without forcing learner accounts
He wanted more visibility into who starts and finishes tutorials without requiring every learner to create an iorad account.
“It seems unrealistic to get everyone to sign up for iorad accounts… it’s just another thing during onboarding.”
A potential path forward: SSO—so employees can be tracked with minimal friction.
“That seems easy… that will be what I bring forward.”
- Searchability inside long tutorials
Some tutorials are 100+ steps, and learners want a way to search within the experience.
His workaround was pushing people toward PDF downloads or the step list view—but he called that out as a workaround.
“Some kind of search functionality… to take them to the step… that’s a workaround, right?”
Ryland also explored Help Centers as a way to reduce load times (instead of embedding dozens of tutorials on a single page) and to make content more searchable and modular.
“I think help centers would be great… they’re just confused as to how it works.”