How to Have a More Productive Tax Season in 2023
Tax season is a CPA’s busiest time of year. As you sift through articles about how to make your workflow more efficient and how to survive the overwhelming onslaught of work, you’ll likely see tips about staving off burnout, how to integrate a best-of-breed tech stack, and how to collaborate with clients during a time of year when their stress levels are high, too.
Rarely, though, do these articles address how you can actually be more productive with the small tasks that are so crucial to getting your tax work done, including exchanging documents with clients, sharing information with your team, responding to client emails, collaborating well with clients and team members alike, and growing your business.
Why is Being Disorganized Such a Big Deal?
If you’re not an organized tax professional, you’re going to have a rough busy season. Why? Well, you and your team will lose a lot of time to looking for documents you can’t find, wasting time tracking down information instead of doing work, overlooking information – a time-killer that also leads to mistakes and forces accounting professionals to do the same task twice.
A lot of firms specifically struggle to find the information they need because it’s all over the place. Thanks to the enormous variety of apps accounting firms use and due to the fact that each person’s organization system is different, for many practices, everything is stored in different places. You’re communicating with your clients and your team in different apps – maybe you email the former, while the latter chats via Slack. Nobody can find the work they need. Client information is saved in random word documents and in the wrong spots, or on sticky notes in somebody’s office or, worse still, just inside their head. Siloing information off makes it tough to find and access.
This probably sounds familiar: Each week, you need a document that’s either stored electronically on somebody’s computer that you can’t access or in a random physical folder somewhere in the office. You’re tracking projects on different spreadsheets or trying to do this by emailing team members asking for updates.
While taking care of these little problems may take five to ten minutes on their own (which doesn’t seem like a lot), when you add it up, you’re wasting hours each week doing things that affect the output and performance of your firm.
During Tax Time, It’s Still Crucial to Focus on the Keys to Firm Growth
Productivity, collaborating effectively with team members, and communicating efficiently with clients are all keys to increasing output. They can even help with the common issue of struggling to find and retain talents, a perennial problem for accounting firms that are struggling to take on new clients because they’ve hit their ceiling with their current resources. By unlocking and boosting productivity, you free up the time and space to increase your client capacity and your profits. You don’t have to keep hiring; you’ve already got the team, time, and space you need.
How an Integrated Tech Stack Helps Accounting Firms Combat Disorganization
Organizing your firm boils down to this: You need to create a single source of truth. Standardizing your workflow and document management systems will make your accounting practice a lot more productive. And, the right tech stack can help you do this.
The best choice for many firms is an integrated tech stack, despite the fact that all-in-one options are available. Why? Well, the latter’s attention and focus is spread thin. Even though they can do everything, the results are only okay. They also don’t scale well, are missing workflow features, or don’t have the document management solutions you need to keep your firm organized.
An integrated tech stack, however, will overcome these problems. Take Financial Cents and SmartVault, for instance. The former is a workflow and practice management tool, while the latter is a client portal and document management tool. These two software solutions complement each other incredibly well. Financial Cents provides the visibility accounting firms need to be productive with an easy-to-use workflow tool. And SmartVault offers an easy way to manage documents and share information with clients and teams in a standardized way.
Having everything in one place during tax time is key. It’ll boost your firm’s productivity, enhance collaboration, and increase client satisfaction and your bottom line. :earn more about this powerful integration and schedule a demo with SmartVault to get started.
Blog by: Carrie Stemke
