Prepare for Your Next Tax Season

The best preparation starts with evidence from work your firm just completed. Where did returns wait? Which requests required repeated follow-up? Which decisions could only the owner make? Use those answers to choose improvements before adding another tool.

Preparing Your Business for the Next Tax Season with Automation

Start with a small operational baseline: work in progress by stage, age of outstanding client requests, review rework, and capacity by role. Separate missing information from actual preparation time. A bottleneck caused by unclear ownership needs a different intervention from one caused by repeated data entry.

Automation can bring efficiencies to parts of your accounting firm, such as client onboarding, data collection, data manipulation, and client communications. Even better, there are many types of automation tools available that can be tailored to unique business needs and goals. Each company and team has different needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

To help kick start your journey into the realm of automation, we've compiled a few of the best accounting automation tips:

• Onboarding and collection: standardize engagement acceptance, questionnaires, document checklists and request ownership. Use the firm's approved secure collection workflow for sensitive client information.
• Recurring bookkeeping and close: identify repeatable steps, exception handling and reviewer sign-off before introducing automation. Keep professional judgment and accountability with the team.
• Scope and service cadence: clarify deliverables, client responsibilities and work outside the agreement. Recurring pricing can suit some services, but it is not a requirement for every engagement.

At first, automation can seem overwhelming. But we believe technology can be used to get your team out of tedious day-to-day tasks and instead focus on ensuring your customer is set up for success.

Implement Automation Technology and Train Your Team

Implementing new technology in the workplace is a process that requires careful planning and training. We recommend the following steps to help:

1. Select a small pilot group representing preparation, review and coordination.
2. Create a technology SOP that provides detailed onboarding of new users into technology and training videos
3. Set a target rollout window, acceptance criteria and a fallback plan. Expand when the workflow is ready, not just because a calendar date arrived.
4. Meet in person or remotely with the person receiving the new technology to make sure they are properly trained in the technology
5. Using the new automation technology, send a detailed onboarding email with links to the right resources and feedback on areas to improve

Genwise helps accounting firms identify, implement, and train their teams to effectively utilize cloud-based accounting software and other technologies in the workplace.

Genwise acts as a blended COO and CTO, connecting workflow design with configuration, adoption and optimization. An Efficiency Assessment identifies the changes your firm's data supports. The next step may be better templates and ownership in an existing platform, not a replacement system.

Check readiness before expanding

Pilot a routine engagement and an exception: incomplete documents, a reassigned team member or a failed automation. Verify that the next owner receives the correct work, client messages are accurate, and the reviewer can see what changed. Document how to pause or recover the workflow.

Compare request age, rework and handoff delays against your baseline after rollout. Include staff feedback so an improvement in one stage does not quietly move the burden elsewhere. See our implementation method, Canopy implementation and Karbon implementation resources.

Book Your Efficiency Assessment to prioritize your next operational improvements.