Tax season was brutal this year, and extension season wasn’t much better. It’s in the rearview mirror now which presents an opportunity for us to plan for improvements in 2020. A brand new, fresh decade is upon us and just in time for the accounting industry to receive a face lift.
The past decade was spent developing technology, accepting it into our industry and introducing it into our processes. Now, finding ourselves at 2020’s doorstep, we must realize that leveraging technology to maximize our efficiency is our next move. This will naturally advance the profession (and our firms) into offering new services that go beyond traditional compliance.
So as you take a breather from 10/15, are you reflecting on where you’re leading your firm? If so, ask yourself if it’s okay to approach this next tax season the same way you have in the past?
Does this sound familiar?
You and your partners go to lunch or happy hour and talk about what went wrong this year with the software you use and the talent you still need to find. You talk about how many late nights you spent in the office, golf games you missed, and Saturdays in front of a computer screen reviewing returns that should have been a lot farther along before they got to you.
Maybe you schedule a meeting with your team, or maybe you don’t. Maybe the firm administrator (or you) carve out time to review your processes and tighten up that checklist for next tax season in hopes that it won’t be as bad as this one was. You might even decide to implement a new process or an AI (artificial intelligence) solution that reduces the time you spend on the compliance work (yeah, that’s out there now!). Or, maybe you just prefer status quo…So you take a deep breath and resign yourself to the mindset that “this is how it is in public accounting and I won’t be able to work less hours until I hire more help.”
If this latter scenario sounds like you, then you should be asking yourself: is this because you are afraid of change or just uncomfortable with the idea of trying something new?
You are missing a HUGE opportunity.
As a millennial, I don’t want to work 80 hours a week during tax season! And I certainly don’t want my staff to either! It just increases the chance they will reach the burn out zone as well as be more prone to making mistakes—both of which increase the likelihood of them leaving.
So what do you do when the talent that’s out there is getting harder to find? I’m faced with the same talent shortage as you are, but my team and I have still managed to organically quadruple the size of our firm as well as grow our revenue 6 times in just six years. And what’s more exciting is that in those six years, we’ve yet to receive a tax notice for an internally generated error!
When I started Roberts Accounting, CPAs, I needed a way to get inexperienced staff to a.) quickly develop an understanding of the tax code and b.) evolve rapidly to become good reviewers and trusted advisors. I needed them to be part of my vision for the firm.
This is ultimately what led to the creation of TaxExact. But the ‘why’ behind it is what’s really important and not just for my firm! Shouldn’t your firm also be in a position to focus on higher value advisory services if independent firms like ours are to survive and compete?
Our competition isn’t just human anymore.
We have a wide open opportunity to be proactive and advance our clients’ businesses and financial positions! Our value is in what machines cannot do, so we need to leverage them for what they can do in order to re-purpose our time to consult proactively.
You’re familiar with the old adage, ‘work smarter, not harder.’ CPA firms today aren’t just competing with other firms—we are competing with technology that can perform some of the services that have been the traditional backbones of our profession. We must embrace technology, use it to create more opportunity, and move past the “checklist mentality.”
At the end of the day, ask yourself…
As we approach 2020, are you looking at the upcoming tax season as an opportunity or as a checklist? And more importantly, can you afford the “status quo” when standing still in our industry actually means falling behind?
