Evaluate This Past Busy Season

If you feel as if you were overwhelmed during tax time, now is the time to evaluate your workflows to make your next tax season easier. If you are a Pennsylvania CPA or tax accountant, take time to evaluate your communications, staff, and procedures, along with your use of technology, to find ways to improve your efficiency and profit while freeing up time for family, friends, and much-needed downtime for you and your whole staff.

It’s important to frequently reach out to clients to maintain your relationship and ensure that you are receiving accurate and timely content from them. Regular reminders about which documents they should remit to you will help prevent last-minute document dumps or lost documents. Provide them with a client portal such as Verifyle Pro, which PSTAP offers for free to members. Verifyle Pro provides a secure, encrypted way to upload documents, e-sign, and engage in secure communications.

Regular communications throughout the year can be automated using a customer relationship management tool (CRM). With this tool, you can track your prospects through their customer journey, onboard them efficiently, and schedule automated communications with them so that you are always in touch. Emails can include a link to schedule an appointment to talk personally with you or your staff, because maintaining human contact is critical for maintaining customer satisfaction.

Your staff needs a strong communication system and a project management system to ensure that anyone working on the same project knows what everyone is doing and how their work impacts the whole. A project management tool will also have a strong internal communication component so your staff can communicate in the same space about each project, and all internal communications can be easily referenced.

Evaluate the strengths of your staff members to determine if you are using them to their true potential. Your staff members also need that human touch. To retain your best and brightest, make sure they know they are seen, their work is appreciated, and they have the opportunity for upward mobility.

Delegate aggressively so that you are not overwhelmed. Distribute work fairly among your staff members.

Consider seasonal help, either part-time or full-time. There are many high-quality accountants who prefer to work as contractors. If you need temp help, get it.

Set client deadlines and stick to them. It will be absolutely necessary for you to communicate these deadlines clearly to your clients, using your communications technology as well as personal check-ins. Be ready with extension plans for those clients who will need extensions, but these should be carefully scheduled so that you and your staff are not overwhelmed.

Have standardized procedures for workflow and other aspects of your practice and train your staff in them. Invest in technology that can automate some tedious jobs such as data entry and generating basic reports that can be carefully reviewed by you or a staff member.

Applying these steps will help your next tax season run more smoothly and profitably, increase customer satisfaction and staff retention, and make “the busy season” just a little less busy.