Why Tax Client Intake Is Broken (And What to Do About It)

Ask any accountant or tax pro why they got into this profession, and you’ll hear things like:

• Helping families plan for their futures
• Guiding businesses to stay compliant and profitable
• Turning uncertainty into strategy and moving clients closer to their goals

But, what if you ask them about their day-to-day? The answer is often: “A lot of client intake.” Gathering documents, chasing missing files, sending reminders, and juggling spreadsheets.

It’s part of the job. After all, you can’t provide tax, strategy, or advisory work if you don’t get the right information from the right people at the right time. Unfortunately, that’s where things often fall apart.

Whether you’re a solo practitioner or part of a larger firm, client intake often eats up more time than it should, and it becomes the bottleneck that slows everything else down.

Let’s take a closer look at why tax intake is broken and what firms can do to fix it.

The Symptoms of a Broken Intake Process

Tax season prep starts with chaos for most firms. The signs are familiar:

• Clients don’t know what to send (or when to send it)
• You spend hours chasing missing documents
• Files arrive in every format (if that’s the case at your firm, check out SmartScan)
• You copy/paste request lists from last year
• Your team wastes time organizing instead of preparing returns
• There’s no visibility into who’s submitted what
• You still use mail to send out your organizers — they don’t get completed, plus it costs you in postage and time

Why Intake Friction Hurts More Than You Think

Your entire workflow slows down when document intake stalls. But it’s more than just a scheduling issue:

• Lost billable hours as staff spends time reminding, organizing, and searching
• Lower client satisfaction as clients get frustrated or confused
• Burnout, especially for small teams juggling volume and urgency
• Missed growth when your bandwidth is eaten up by admin tasks

The Band-Aid Solutions That Don’t Work

Most firms recognize the problem and try to fix it. They implement stricter deadlines, send more reminder emails, or create better Excel trackers. Some invest in separate intake solutions or try to ‘make something work’ with generic tools.

These band-aid solutions miss the real issue: you’re fighting against disconnected tools instead of working with an integrated system. More importantly, they treat intake like a one-off task instead of what it really is — a critical workflow.

When firms see intake as a repeatable, automatable process, everything changes. When you build intake into the tools you already use and automate the repetitive parts, the entire tax process becomes more efficient, more predictable, and less stressful for everyone.

What a Better Intake Process Looks Like

Imagine this instead:

• An AI tool scans last year’s tax return, creating a personalized questionnaire for each client (this can be done individually or in bulk)
• The questionnaire takes the client step-by-step, making it crystal clear what documents they need to share with you
• They upload their documents through a modern, mobile-friendly portal (if they’re the client who takes photos of documents on their phone, don’t stress — those photos will automatically turn into professional, clean PDFs with SmartScan)
• You see who’s submitted and what’s still pending
• Documents arrive formatted, secure, and ready for prep
• You get an organized workpaper, collecting all tax prep information in one place for easy tax prep

On top of all that, you don’t have to stress about security, as all client data stays within one secure, compliant platform.

This isn’t just wishful thinking. We’ve spent 15+ years helping accounting firms streamline their document workflows, and this fall, we’re making this vision a reality with SmartRequestAI^™, a secure, AI-powered feature inside SmartVault that delivers exactly this experience.

Finally: A Solution Built for How You Actually Work

SmartRequestAI uses private AI that never trains on your customer data, delivers >99% accuracy when analyzing returns, and keeps everything within our secure, compliant platform. SmartRequestAI is how you make tax prep simpler from the start.

SmartRequestAI – Coming Fall 2025: Join the waitlist here →