Streamlining Ops for Tax Season
Tax season fresh on your mind? See how to cut time and stress for next year, whether you're managing high return volume or complex client portfolios.
With tax season fresh on our minds, how much time and stress could you have saved this year? Whether you're managing a high volume of clients, strict tax deadlines, navigating complex tax laws, or outdated systems – there are many factors that make this period overwhelming.
To make tax season smoother and less stressful, we've seen success with firms that streamline their accounting operations and automate their internal systems. Gathering feedback, documenting workflow processes, and leveraging online systems can help make your accounting firm more efficient and profitable.
The aim is to reduce avoidable work and make capacity visible—not promise that automation removes the need to hire. Measure the result in your firm's actual workflow before accepting more work.
1. Gather Feedback
The first step in streamlining your accounting operations is to gather feedback from both your team and your clients. It's important to regularly gather data through surveys or feedback sessions, rather than make assumptions.
Talk to your team
Talking to your team and gathering feedback about their experience can help you adjust your internal systems to better suit their needs. Staff members have first-hand insights into the day-to-day processes of your accounting firm. They are familiar with what works and what doesn't.
By helping your staff members work more efficiently, they can handle more workload and are more satisfied in their roles. Encouraging open communication about challenges and inefficiencies is crucial in identifying areas for improvement.
Start by asking your team 3 to 5 simple questions about their roles and responsibilities. It's best to mainly use a 1 to 10 scale to standardize their responses and compare future trends. For example: "How stressful was the last month/quarter/tax season?" We also prefer to end each survey with an open ended question (the magic wand question). "If you had a magic wand and could change anything about your job, what would you change?"
Talk to your clients
Similarly, talking to your clients and gathering feedback about their experience can help you identify pain points and areas for improvement. Offering a feedback form at the end of each project can help provide insight into opportunities for growth.
Asking your clients about their experience gives your firm a chance to rectify any errors, and shows your clients that you're committed to their success. Again, we've seen success with accounting firms who use simple questions and a 1 to 10 scale to standardize responses. Typeform is a great online software for building simple branded surveys and collecting results.
2. Process
Once you've gathered feedback and identified your staff and customer pain points, the next step is to analyze and document your processes. It's important to create as many standardized processes as possible. We like to start by setting up an automated new client onboarding process and a clear, efficient process for handling tax returns.
New Client Onboarding
This refers to all the steps taken when initiating a new client relationship. Onboarding sets expectations and helps develop trust. Automation can reduce repeated entry and follow-up, but a person must still review missing, incorrect or unexpected information.
When a new client is onboarded, they get to know your accounting firm very quickly. You want to make sure that the process is as smooth and easy as possible, to help build a solid relationship with the new client.
If there is any friction or stress in the onboarding process, the client may get frustrated and look to hire another firm. It's also time-consuming if your staff have to repeatedly follow up new clients for information. This is where online software and automated systems can help.
Here's an example of an automated client onboarding process:
- Signed contract: use the firm's approved e-signature workflow and confirm acceptance before starting contracted work.
- Welcome package: automatically send out information via email once the client has signed their contract.
- Collect client information: an automated software like Soraban allows your clients to upload documents to a secure online portal.
- Automated emails: detailing the next steps in the accounting process.
Tax Preparation
When documenting your tax preparation process, we recommend analyzing the path that at least 70% of your clients go through. Using templates like Miro can help in creating standardized processes that are clear, easy to understand, and effective.
Having a documented tax preparation process makes your staff more efficient, reduces errors, and ensures consistency across all clients. It also highlights areas where staff spend too much time, which could be utilized for other activities and continuous process improvements. This is especially important during tax season when staff work long hours, late nights, and manage strict deadlines.
3. Systems
There are two key areas to consider when it comes to streamlining accounting systems: communication and tax organizers.
Communication
Communication during tax season is crucial to ensure that clients are informed and engaged throughout the entire process.
- Diagrams: Using Miro to create diagrams to illustrate processes and systems easily can help streamline your client and staff workflow processes. Diagrams detail to staff and clients when things need to happen in a simple and clear way.
- Email sequence: implementing a targeted email sequence (a series of emails) can be a powerful tool to keep clients engaged. You can set up autoresponder sequences for welcome emails and onboarding, and also send regular tax updates each month.
Tax Organizers
Tax Organizers are online tools that collect client tax data and streamline accounting operations. Each of these tools have various features so it's important to choose the one that best suits your firm.
Evaluate collection tools against the actual handoff: what clients must provide, who checks completeness, how exceptions are assigned, and where accepted information goes next. Product names alone do not establish that a workflow is supported or appropriately secured.
If your firm uses Canopy, review our Canopy implementation guidance. For a separate collection workflow alongside practice management, see Karbon and Soraban. Confirm the required subscription, supported integration and data flow with each vendor before purchasing.
Keep tax documents in the firm's approved secure collection system. General surveys can gather service feedback without collecting taxpayer records. See the Typeform and Make guide for plan limitations and pre-rollout checks.
4. Acceptance and adoption
Test a complete engagement and an incomplete one. Include a staff handoff, a missed client request and a failed integration. Confirm the task arrives with the correct owner and deadline, not merely that the source form says success.
Record a baseline for request age, rework and time waiting for review. Revisit it after a small pilot. Update the SOP and designate a template owner so the team has one current process to follow. Genwise's implementation method connects this configuration work with training and ongoing refinement.
Conclusion
Tax season can be stressful as an accounting firm owner, but it doesn't have to be. You can make your firm more efficient and profitable by gathering feedback, documenting processes, using online software, and streamlining your accounting operations.
Our goal at Genwise is to help firms improve how people, processes and technology work together. Start with the operational problem, implement a measurable change, and support the team as it adopts the new workflow.