Tax Season - Post Game Show

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#1
CP Hay  
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226
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3-Apr-2019 5:24pm
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NEW YORK (NY)
I look at each tax season as an opportunity to learn and grow and it's always nice to hear what other practitioners are doing in a safe space like Tax Pro Talk. I think this is especially true for those of us on the newer side of things. What have you discovered or learned this tax season that you could do differently in the coming year? Also, for those of you who have been doing taxes for many years, do things change from year to year?
 

#2
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3694
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21-Apr-2014 11:24am
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North Carolina
I’ve been in public accounting for over thirty years but only opened my practice in the summer of 2019. This year, I have learned the value of admin work. I have also learned that my current systems are not quite good enough. So I have to find a way to make them work or find a different system.

I found a deficiency in one of the spreadsheets I do for every client as a review and found a way to make the other quicker to prepare.
 

#3
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394
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13-Sep-2014 1:26pm
Location:
New York
I've learned that having less and less in person meetings has resulted in better use of my time, increased available working hours, resulted in being more proficient and allowed me to take on more new clients. I'm generally not a fan of technology causing less human interaction however for our line of work where we have a small window of opportunity every year, it's been very beneficial. The one day a week I set aside for in person meetings i find it only drains me physically, results in valuable lost hours and derails me from my routine and these meetings are more social events for clients than anything tax related.
 

#4
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I have two appointment days per week. Appointments are thirty minutes with a fifteen minute break between for admin and sanitizing. If I do not have a full diary on an appointment day, I create dummy appointments with alarm reminders. When “Beside the Sea” goes off in my windowless, interior office, clients know they need to be somewhere else.
 

#5
TheGrog  
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377
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2-Feb-2022 8:43am
Location:
Virginia
If you are behind, you need to start doing extensions earlier, not later.

Tuesday was an absolute disaster because we had to calc and process a huge quantity of extensions on top of the usual last minute rush of efile forms from people who can't be bothered to sign & return before the last day and people rushed to get out on the last day.

If we had started preping extensions on Friday and worked on them all weekend then we would have avoided a lot of problems. If we had started that Monday maybe we would have had to work a 70 hour week.
 

#6
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24-Apr-2014 7:54am
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Wisconsin
All-in-one practice management systems: The best money I spent last year, even as a one-man band. I had a significant amount of client growth and having an all-in-one system made things less stressful. I have some homework to do as I need to tweak some settings (which is pretty normal) and I found myself using the system a little different than I had anticipated. But most practitioners, even small ones, will probably benefit from a system like Firm360 or TaxDome, and if anything, I would suggest trying to implement a system like it one year before you think you will need it.

RightSignature: It was great until the last two days of tax season, when it struggled mightily. Multiple clients had issues with the spinning wheel of doom, because they waited until the last minute to try to sign their tax documents.

Loom: Loom worked great on the client side but wasn't ideal on my side. I review returns a few days after I do the initial prep, and if there are no changes or additional documents needed after the review, I upload a draft of the return and make a Loom recording for my virtual clients. However, what I found is that by doing the Loom at the review stage, I often had to restart because I had forgotten a critical detail of the return which I had noted during the initial prep (i.e. the credit for excess social security taxes). So I might need to look into recording review videos at the prep stage, when I am much more into the details of the return, even though that I will have to redo some recordings later if I caught something on the review side. Not sure yet where to go. Basically, Loom was great, but I wasn't.

Client Document Bags: I purchased a bunch of zippered vinyl bags to store tax return documents in for documents that were dropped off. The risk of accidentally combining two clients' documents together was much reduced and it was a load off of my mind.

-----
Thoughts for next year: I have some ideas for changes to make, but one that I am definitely expecting is to get rid of my Amazon Prime account when the renewal date approaches. Does anyone here have a Costco membership? How helpful is that in your practice?
 

#7
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The Office
My biggest change this year: all first-year compliance clients go on extension. After the first year, we'll attempt to meet the original deadline if their docs have been uploaded by my internal deadline. I've already touched on my reasons for doing this on this forum, but to recap it's primarily to be able to dedicate more meaningful time to a first-year client and start on a solid foundation. Secretly, it's also to de-sensitize a client who has perhaps never filed an extension to extensions and it's a good proxy test for their willingness to comply with my advice, even when they may be averse to the idea of that specific advice.

Maybe I wouldn't be able to get away with that if it was a "client's market" so to speak, but with the lack of qualified tax advisors out there and the situation unlikely to get any better in the short-term, I don't see much risk here. I think it's about how you sell it.

I've started time tracking through QB Time (formerly T Sheets), which has lead to a material increase in billings on the informal consulting side. Previously I had trouble capturing that.

I plan to investigate some new software and practice management platforms over the next 2ish months which might lead to broader change in my practice.
 

#8
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The Office
missingdonut wrote:I have some ideas for changes to make, but one that I am definitely expecting is to get rid of my Amazon Prime account when the renewal date approaches.


For my business Amazon account I try to plan purchases so the dollar amount gets me in the free shipping category. I don't really care if the shipment takes a week to arrive, nothing I order through Amazon is needed asap.

missingdonut wrote:Does anyone here have a Costco membership? How helpful is that in your practice?


I have a personal membership but don't really utilize it for business. I've heard that their business check prices are fair. What else would you use it for? Printer paper? Envelopes?
 

#9
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24-Apr-2014 7:54am
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Wisconsin
ManVsTax wrote:For my business Amazon account I try to plan purchases so the dollar amount gets me in the free shipping category. I don't really care if the shipment takes a week to arrive, nothing I order through Amazon is needed asap.

I have a personal [Costco] membership but don't really utilize it for business. I've heard that their business check prices are fair. What else would you use it for? Printer paper? Envelopes?


That makes sense; I don't think I can ever fully escape Amazon but I've been recently frustrated by them and am looking for an alternative. My current Amazon Prime subscription has been useful both personal and business so my expectation is that Costco might be the same, and that Costco would be a good fit for all the general office supplies such as paper and envelopes as well as basic technology products like new monitors. If that's not their thing, that's fine... I'm just curious.
 

#10
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100
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14-May-2019 3:57pm
Location:
Idaho
Our firm began using CCH Axcess and Autoflow. Autoflow worked better recognizing numbers and boxes on IRS forms than I expected it would. I was pleasantly surprised on the accuracy. Seems to be far superiors to Thompson Reuters autoflow attempts. Next year hopefully everything will be more efficient since this year was a learning curve for everyone on all the new software.
 

#11
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728
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28-May-2014 12:04pm
Location:
Arkansas
TheAnswerMan wrote:Our firm began using CCH Axcess and Autoflow. Autoflow worked better recognizing numbers and boxes on IRS forms than I expected it would. I was pleasantly surprised on the accuracy. Seems to be far superiors to Thompson Reuters autoflow attempts. Next year hopefully everything will be more efficient since this year was a learning curve for everyone on all the new software.


I’ll second this. And it was year 1.5 for us in AutoFlow. So for the 100 or so clients that this was the 2nd year of AutoFlow it was pretty amazing. We Autoflowed 600 this year so I am excited about next year.
 

#12
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2887
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21-May-2018 7:50am
Location:
Northern MI and Coastal SC
I always modify something each year, sometimes in the course of the year instead of leading up to the subsequent year. For 2023, I created largely uniform tax engagement letters that are far simpler to update. For 2024, I will enable auto-fill in questionnaire for certain questions that are unlikely to have changed.

I'm now also requiring all clients to initial next to bank account information and SSNs on eFile forms. Sometimes they give me incorrect information or I may have a typo; I want the client to be the final check on it.

I need to identify a simpler way to handle long-term accounting contracts and proposals. They take too much time. I want to be able to produce a PDF proposal, modify as we agree (if any changes are needed), and immediately convert it to contract. Instead, I am doing a proposal and then a separate contract once proposal is accepted. This is absolutely one area where TaxDome is not ideal. If anyone has input on proposal software that can then convert to a contract, it would still save a lot of time if I can just export as PDF and then utilize TaxDome for eSigs. I do not want to introduce clients to another system.
 

#13
Posts:
365
Joined:
7-May-2014 1:13pm
Location:
DC Metro
I was forced to rely on my team more and have less control. This is because I was overwhelmed earlier this tax season. Our team did great, and relieved a lot of stress for me. I need to continue to trust and increase delegation.

As of automatically creating contracts, I suggest zapier. It can take data from an excel or Google sheet and put it into a Word, Google doc and eventually to a pdf. It may be able to go directly into tax dome. https://zapier.com/apps/taxdome/integrations
 


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