Let's talk about a sacred cow in the accounting industry — tax season. Every year, CPAs kill themselves for two months gathering documents, responding to "urgent" client questions, and rushing through mountains of tax returns to beat the April 15 deadline. Does it really have to be this way?
Instead of the usual hair-on-fire, burnout-driving tax crunch, suppose we could be proactive rather than reactive? Suppose we could schedule our tax clients evenly over the course of the year? Impossible you say? Hear me out.
Most of your nonbusiness clients only file taxes once a year. Why are you and your team killing yourselves to get a year's worth of work done between February and April 15? That's only 45 to 60 days. Your clients' 1099s and K-1s are always late. Many of their other documents and statements are either incomplete or missing. Why are you and your team pushed to the brink of burnout, shoehorning so much work into such a tight window?
Your team is in a rush and clients are sending the dreaded "Just checking to see when it will be ready" emails. It's a hot mess every single year. And there's no reason it should be.
A different option — the "scheduled" tax season
In reality, you have until Oct. 15 every year to get your clients' personal returns done.
Filing extensions for clients is quick and simple. If you gave yourself an extra six months to complete all your tax prep work, you'd have far less burnout and turnover among your staff and far more efficiency within your workflow. When you can schedule work on your terms, you're not just waiting for things to come in and racing around putting out fires all day long. When you're in control, you're not only calmer, but you can batch process client work at certain times that you decide — not your clients or the IRS. That means you're minimizing overtime, reducing the likelihood of staff burnout and departures — and saving your sanity.
Even better, your client service will improve dramatically by moving to a proactive, carefully scheduled tax season. When you have more breathing room, you can give your clients the attention they deserve. For clients you're trying to upgrade, you can start delivering more value now that you have time to speak with them in depth. You can start taking unscheduled calls from your better clients whenever they have an issue.
Isn't that better than ignoring everybody for two months every spring? Isn't that better than putting your head down trying to get a mountain of work done to meet an arbitrary deadline?
By extending the tax season throughout the year, you balance your workload, increase efficiency, improve accuracy, and have better conversations with your clients.
I know many of you think your job is done when you file your client's return and tell them how much they owe (or will get back). But that's not good enough anymore. Just filing the return is a commodity service. The return is just the beginning of your conversation (and value chain) with the client as you help them make better financial decisions in all aspects of their lives.
By scheduling tax season throughout the year, you can enhance your role as the client's trusted advisor because you are not at the mercy of an IRS deadline. You no longer have to crush your staff and badger your clients to give you what you need to meet an unrealistic April 15 deadline. This new approach to busy season improves client expectations and makes you look more professional.
Benefits for your team
When the tax season workload is spread out over a more reasonable timeframe, your team's stress level will decrease. That means fewer sick days and PTO days for your firm. Your team will also have more time to focus and review their work. That means fewer mistakes and more accurate returns for clients. Your team will also have more time to work directly with clients. That means they'll have the bandwidth to guide clients through difficult situations and function as professionals who deliver advice, not as assembly line workers who crank out tax returns. Finally, the number of "When will my return be ready?" calls and emails will go down significantly — and your team members will be able to give a more accurate ETA for completion. "We'll be there in X minutes" is one of the reasons why Uber is so successful. See
Benefits for your clients
Remember, your team members are the ones interacting with your clients. If they're happy, clients will pick up on those good vibes, which will translate into a better experience for clients.
When tax season is not so compressed, your team can be more responsive to clients' questions, and clients will have more quality time to spend with their most trusted advisor. Clients will also feel less pressure to get all their documents ahead of your firm's other clients to ensure their returns are on time. And they won't have to keep bugging your staff to see when their returns will be ready.
CPAs keep telling me how little capacity they have. Well, if we're spreading out the tax season throughout the year, you have more capacity to bring in more of the right kinds of clients and service them properly. Also, when word gets around that tax season is not miserable at your firm, more and more talented young people will want to work for (and stay at) your firm.
No one wants to hate their job for eight to 10 straight weeks every year. Nothing is more diametrically opposed to work-life balance than how we've always done tax season. In my next article, I'll explain how to set up a year-round tax season that your team and clients will love.
What do you think about a scheduled tax season? I'd
