The Reviewer Bottleneck We All Face During Tax and Extension Season

I know you’ve been there. It’s 11:30 pm, and you’re still at the office with a stack of returns to review. You’re exhausted and ready for tax season to be over. You grab a stress ball that a vendor dropped off and throw it at the wall. You’re wondering how to train your preparers better so they produce a tax return that isn’t full of errors and time consuming to review. You’re so busy. It would be nice to spend Saturdays with the family instead of in the office every February through April and again in September and October. 

Life is too short not to enjoy it! 

No one has taught me more about that than my two little daughters who have both defied medical odds to be alive today. I started my firm to make a difference in peoples’ businesses, not to be behind a desk double checking the input of a tax return late at night or on a weekend when my (and your) family deserves to come first.

According to an article in Accounting Today, many of the small businesses we covet as clients and prospective clients don’t necessarily understand the value we can bring to their table. That’s on us. We owe it to our clients to proactively show them- in layman’s terms, not CPA terms- how to be as profitable as possible. I believe that if we communicate with them and show them the impact we can have on their business, we’ll have profitable clients for life. But, we can’t do that at 11:30 at night after a full day. Tired. Working for our businesses not on our businesses.

Cracking the code.

Preparing tax returns is a commodity. We need to be focused on what is IN the return that will lead to valuable conversations with clients. Conversations that save them money, increase their profitability, and build their retirement nest eggs. This is what creates trusted advisors, and this is what will generate more profitable consulting and advisory service engagements.

Where to start: Practice improvement and cost savings

How much time are you spending reviewing returns? What if you could spend less time reviewing (say you had it down to an average of 15 minutes per return) and more time looking for areas to up-sell or cross-sell? What if you weren’t too exhausted to find overlooked Schedule C deductions that could save your client thousands of dollars? What if, instead of double checking inputs, your brain was focused on pointing out Roth IRA contributions to optimize cash flow…or how your client could extend their return and increase tax savings while adding to retirement savings by contributing to a SEP IRA? 

What sort of process improvement do you need to make in your practice that will give you time back to focus on what’s inside your clients’ returns vs double checking the inputs for accuracy? And, while we’re at it, where can you look in your practice to drive avoidable costs out of the business?

But I hate change!

Of course you do. We’re accountants. It’s in our DNA. But, let me share a simple and easy best practice that my firm implemented and that has resulted in both exponential profit growth and cost reduction. We added a safety net to our practice that reduced my reviewer time to an average of 15 minutes per return, trained inexperienced staff to become accurate preparers and tax advisors, and saved us thousands in error-related tax notices. How did we do it? We used an AI tool called Tax Exact that can be implemented at the preparer or the reviewer level, and it will be available to you also in 2020. Sign up for updates as we move closer to our 2020 launch by clicking here. 
Friends, who isn’t ready for a simple improvement that will help you reduce cost and improve profits in your firm?