The CAS Coordination Tax Audit
Free Tool
The CAS Coordination Tax Audit.
Every briefing, every status check, every "where are we with the Smith file?" costs your practice money. This structured prompt walks you through your actual work week and calculates the dollar cost of coordination overhead — the invisible tax you're paying every day.
Find Your Invisible Tax
You're paying a tax you can't see.
Before every coaching call, I check with my bookkeeping team. Where are the books? What's open? Anything I need to know? That's five to ten minutes — and it feels like preparation. But it's not. It's the cost of moving context from one person's head into mine. That's the coordination tax.
CAS practices pay this tax dozens of times a day — and it compounds in ways that a single-product company never faces. Conservatively, my firm spends 10 to 15 hours per week on it. A quarter of our productive capacity, gone to friction.
This audit helps you find your number. Copy the prompt below, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, and answer the questions it asks. You'll get the total hours, the dollar cost, and the single biggest coordination event to target first.
How It Works
Four phases. One dollar number.
The audit identifies every coordination event in your week — every handoff, every context transfer, every time someone stops doing client work to get someone else current.
Phase 1: Context
Your role, firm size, effective hourly rate, and a detailed walk-through of your typical work week — from Monday morning startup to Friday wrap-up.
Phase 2: Identify coordination events
Every activity gets examined for coordination overhead. Briefings, status checks, context reconstruction, handoff notes, information chasing — separated from the actual client work they're attached to.
Phase 3: The Reveal
Total coordination hours. Your coordination tax rate as a percentage of your week. The weekly and annualized dollar cost. The team multiplier. And the single biggest tax to target first.
Phase 4: The Path Forward
Three concrete actions: target the biggest tax, run the Monday morning test, and share the audit with your team to surface the coordination events you can't see from your seat.
Companion Visual
The Handoff Chain.
A visual map of how context moves through a typical CAS engagement — from client intake to advisory delivery. Download it and use it with your team to trace coordination events in your own practice.
The Audit Prompt
Subscribe to get the Coordination Tax Audit.
The Coordination Tax Audit prompt is available free to newsletter subscribers. Subscribe below and you'll also get weekly AI analysis written specifically for CAS practitioners.
After You Run It
What to do with your number.
If your coordination tax came back higher than expected — you're not alone. Most practitioners discover they're spending 15 to 25 percent of their week on coordination, and firm-wide the number is often worse.
Start with the biggest single tax
Whatever coordination event topped your list — the pre-meeting check-in, the Monday morning reconstruction, the status update loop — that's your first automation candidate. Ask whether the context being transferred could be captured once and accessed by anyone who needs it.
Share the audit with your team
The coordination tax is distributed — you only see your slice. When your team runs this independently, you'll surface events you didn't know were happening.
Map it to your client workflow
Pick one client — your most complex one — and trace every coordination event in a typical month. That's the map that tells you where AI has the highest leverage.
Your Move
Find out what coordination is costing you.
Budget 15 to 20 minutes. Paste the prompt into Claude or ChatGPT. Answer the questions honestly. You'll walk away with a dollar number, a percentage, and the single highest-leverage coordination event to eliminate first.