At least once a year, I take a moment to review how our tax season went. There are 3 main things I look at – our process, technology, and average delivery time.
After reviewing the 2023 tax year season, I realized there was some work that needed to be done. The data revealed some realities that I did not like, and some lessons emerged from this internal discussion.
Lesson 1: Communication is the biggest driver of positive client experience.
I make it my point to speak to every potential new tax client to ensure they are a good fit and explain our processes. But I realized that after that initial call, I wasn’t following up with additional communication and/or resources that reinforced what was communicated on that initial call. This led to clients asking questions that the team and I believed they should’ve known the answers to and us feeling a bit snippy about them asking. Can you say frustrating?
I did a course correct mid-season that seemed to help with this by creating an interactive one page website welcome guide that walked them through the process and contained a bunch of FAQs to help them find quick answers to the questions they were asking mid-season.
I plan on going back through our communication and seeing if there are additional questions that should be added for this upcoming year and building some follow up email campaigns that are general in nature that could be beneficial to all our tax clients.
Lesson 2: The process that worked for a 1 person team does not work for a 3 person team.
My team grew from 1 tax professional and an admin in the prior year to a 3 person tax pro team (and we kept the admin) this year.
Growth has its own set of challenges and I learned here that the process that was in place for 1 person doesn’t work when 2 other people share in the process and workload. There was a breakdown of who was doing what and when it needed to be done by.
In my firm, we strive to get tax returns out of production within 21 days and that didn’t happen for most of our clients this year and it was a direct result of a process that hadn’t been crafted with the new team structure in mind.
So we are going back to the drawing board, to reestablish a process that allows us to communicate better with each other and to do a better job of meeting our deadlines.
Lesson 3: Our tech choices helped us make fewer errors this year.
In evaluating our tech, there was one core app that allowed us to achieve minimal errors on our returns and that’s the QuickBooks Online Prep for Taxes feature. This tool was the one tool that the team and I agreed was staying in our workflow because it was so easy to use. And as a leader who started moving away from data entry and solely into review last year, I can honestly say it truly helped us avoid lots of mistakes through manual data entry.
So how did we use it?
Every client that had a business (including Schedule C’s) that we worked with, we asked if they used QuickBooks online. If they said yes, we requested accountant access. Of course, this was easy for our monthly accounting clients, but for our tax only clients, we had to coach them through sending us the correct accountant access.
Once we got access, we would get to work mapping the COA to the tax form line items for our tax software ProSeries. We started at this step because it was a quick win (don’t judge us lol).
Next we would go through Reviewing and Adjust to ensure that all book to tax adjustments were made in the financial statements. Then we would head on over to the Grouping tab in case there were any accounts that needed to be consolidated for our final reporting. Then download the excel package and the final and easiest step of them all was importing the data directly into ProSeries, which took less than 5 minutes.
There are a few features I should highlight about this tool that make it a winner in my book:
- You can add notes. I love being able to add quick little insights that both the team and myself can reference.
- You can attach documents. Wanna add that receipt for the new asset purchase? Well, you can!
- You can lock the books. This is standard practice in my firm but I love that I have another handy place to do it.
- And my favorite, you will also be able to see at a glance if there were any changes made to the books after you’ve made all your adjustments. Not only will you see them at a glance, it will give you an option to review the details of the changes and ask you to accept and approve them
Prep for taxes has direct import capability with all 3 of Intuit tax software – ProConnect, ProSeries and Lacerte. But if you don’t use any of these tax software, you can download the reports you created to excel in a handy tax ready workbook that you or your team can use for data entry.
Taking a moment to reflect on our tax season is a ritual of mine. It ensures that we aren’t staying stuck in the same ole bad habits and that we are putting our clients first. I hope you are inspired to look at your processes and evaluate what worked (or didn’t work) for you and your firm. And let me know if you start using Prep for taxes because I want to hear how much time it saves you this tax season.
* This post is a paid partnership with Intuit.
