Does tax season feel like a never-ending game of “Beat the Clock” for you and your team? With looming deadlines, late document submissions by clients, and lags in workflow caused by unexpected delays due to other unexpected issues, it may feel like you never have enough hours in the day.
The following list will help you identify some “easy wins” based on the three key pain points that many firms face during this hectic time of year. Use
these strategies to eliminate time-wasting activities and replace them with tools and tactics that will expand the hours you have available to increase your firm’s productivity, or more importantly, allow you to have better work-life balance this tax season:
Easy wins for workflow efficiency:
- Create and use standard checklists to help your staff and clients keep track of the documents necessary for each return type.
- Integrate your accounting software with your tax software to the maximum degree possible. One of the critical elements of creating efficiency in your workflow during tax season is integrating and leveraging technology. Significant time savings can be found when you integrate your accounting system seamlessly into your tax system. This move can save you literally hundreds of hours of work over the course of the next few months. One example: Xero’s trial balance into CCH Axcess Financial Prep, this eliminates the need to manually export, import, and enter data.
- Ensure every client is using an online portal to upload documents, if you are not already doing so. You may also want to record and share a brief video on how to do this for your clients which can head off questions, saving you time in the process.
- If your team must meet with clients in order to complete returns, try to consolidate meeting availability on one or two half days per week using an electronic calendaring system such as Calendly. In addition, using a cloud-based accounting software will allow for collaboration with clients outside of these meetings, too.
Easy wins for your client experience:
- Use Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for your tax services, so that you’re not having to answer the same questions over and over again and your clients have an easy reference.
- Send your clients consolidated emails so you can streamline communications. Also when clients send in their items, try batch processing messages back so you aren’t constantly distracted to the point where you cannot get your work done.
Easy wins for extra personal time:
- Are you always making trips to the grocery store? Spending time getting gas three times a week? There are services to help reduce the time you spend doing these errands, so use them! Hire a mobile car maintenance service to get your gas for you and a food delivery service to get groceries delivered to your house weekly.
- Ask for help from family or friends. Sometimes it's easy to forget that you don’t have to do everything yourself. Make a list of items to delegate from cooking dinner to car maintenance, then complete the delegation. This will ease your load and free up your time.
- Identify things that are “nice to do” but not essential, such as doing your laundry every day or every other day. If you feel like you have to keep up all of your social activities and professional networking events, consider dropping some from your calendar to give yourself more time at least just for tax season.
- Do you belong to many memberships and rewards programs for which you cannot remember usernames and passwords? Try the Keyring app which saves the information for online and offline memberships and rewards cards in one place so you don’t have to carry or remember multiple cards or recall details.
Given that no one has more than 24 hours in a day and that it is rarely possible to eliminate all delays during tax season, the only way to increase the amount of time you have each day is to do some timeshifting. This means trading out minutes devoted to low value tasks that don’t promote progress toward your highest priorities with those that do.
The list above is a great place to start streamlining tax season with these “easy wins” so you can start to immediately squeeze more meaningful minutes out of each day.