The stress of accountants during the tax season is a known affair. But what is it that contributes to the enormous madness? For most firms, it is data collection. Accounting firms constantly struggle to acquire data from clients, fearing missed deadlines. Tax professionals have to endlessly organize essential documents and financial data, and cross-check them to ensure they have everything in order. While they are at it, they also have to prepare the year-end statements, schedule planning for the upcoming year and constantly budge clients.
While it is easy for accountants to get mad at clients, here is something you need to understand from the client’s perspective. They are busy too. And if your firm is sending complicated, overwhelming emails, forms, etc to gather the data, the chances are that the clients would take too long to respond, sometimes leading to missed deadlines.
For an accounting firm, it is important to treat the client’s business with high importance. The key is DO NOT rush through the tax season. That is how you can ensure there are no errors or missing data.
In this article, Finsmart Accounting – globally trusted for outsourced accounting services – will share tips to make tax stress less stressful. Let’s start!
How to tackle the tax season stress?
CPAs, accounting firms, and team members need to understand a simple fact – you are not alone. Every accounting professional who is in the industry and is responsible for filing taxes goes through this phase during the busy season. But that doesn’t mean tax season should be synonymous with stress and burnout. Being prepared can go a long way in ensuring that it is all under control.
Here are a few tips and ideas along with some tax season stress relievers:
– Prepare Early:
During tax season, clients are equally perplexed. They expect accountants and CPAs to be available round the clock to finish their filing. They don’t understand how long their filing can take, experts like you, do. Also, it is always important to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Sometimes, it can take days and weeks to analyze the documents and complete the paperwork. It is best to stay ahead of time:
1. Gather documents from your clients in advance by sending constant reminders. Collecting documents on a monthly or quarterly basis is also a good practice.
2. Keep your clients aware of how important it is to send everything in advance, allowing enough time to arrange missing paperwork.
3. Organize all documents efficiently to ensure important documents are not misplaced.
– Use technology to your advantage:
As technology made the lives of accountants easier, many accounting firms rely heavily on automation software for their tax fillings. Choose a tool that can best accommodate your firm’s needs. Your tools must be able to:
1. Manage customer and financial details, and documents in digital format
2. Manage customer accounts and provide accounting services
3. Prepare tax and aid in bulk filing
4. Reconcile accounts
5. Analyze business and cost
6. Generate reports
Recommended reading: Cash flow management reporting tips and ideas for CPAs
Not being able to automate 100% of your business is okay. You, anyway, need skilled and experienced accounting experts to validate the data you receive. These tools will come in handy to ensure faster and more efficient accounting jobs, error-free reporting, and easier client management. In short, it will relieve tax season stressors!
– Set your processes right:
It is not always possible to have everything at your disposal. However, a well-defined process can help things move fast, especially when you are running on a tight deadline. Well-defined and well-documented processes help keep things on track and streamline in a manner that helps make tax preparation and filing easy and efficient. Both accountants and customers benefit from this. When you have a set process and designated people for each task in the tax funnel, it prevents the need to explain and verify things during and at the end of the tax season.
– Be ready for challenges:
Challenges, especially if you are handling more than one client, are almost inevitable during the tax season. To prevent stress due to certain complexities in tax files, it is important to keep an eye on their financial situation, payment patterns, expenses, and savings around the year. This will help you anticipate any last-moment challenges that you might face. Clients with complicated tax histories should be given more attention during this phase. It is wise to put an expert on the job to tackle the situation before it gets out of hand. A great tip to manage tax season stress indeed!
– Make a backup of your data:
Protecting your client’s data lies at the heart of ensuring there are no misses during the critical hour. Misplacing data not only makes tax tasks long and tedious but also leads to unnecessary back and forth with the client. Keep a copy of your backup. This will ensure that the information is available and accessible if anything happens to the original files.
– Learn all about tax laws:
Filing taxes becomes easy when you know the laws. Follow publications and social media pages where you get information on tax code changes. Make sure to advise your clients on what they can do to save more and not come under the radar of the IRS. Also, it is important to make them aware of the tips to avoid extra deductions and avail credits they are eligible for.
Now that you have some idea of what to do to tackle tax season stress, let’s learn about the top strategies to handle stress head-on.
Strategies to handle stress heads-on
While the above are technical tips that help you with the enormous workload during the busy tax season, it is more than that. It is the approach you take while working to ensure that your team isn’t overburdened or feels lost. Here are some things that your firm can do to manage the seasonal stress:
1. Think of stress as an individual and firm-wide issue: No matter how much external factors work, managing mental, emotional, and physical health is one’s responsibility, of course with some help. For firm leaders, it is important to acknowledge that stress is, indeed, a significant issue affecting the firm. And on a broad level, it contributes to a stressful culture.
As a leader, it is essential to create an environment that helps optimize performance, keeping in mind the well-being of the employees. Integrate conversations to understand what causes operational stress and make amends accordingly. Address unhealthy team dynamics and be clear about the expectations. Use the language of empathy to address stress, and overwhelming feelings and ensure a seamless tax season.
2. Create work blocks for everyone: One of the major reasons why employees and leaders end up working longer hours and on weekends is because of the frequent interruptions. The unnecessary long hours lead to a high risk of burnout. Interruptions not only hamper productivity but also impact mental health. This becomes worse for accountants when they have to constantly absorb task-intensive jobs.
Place a system that ensures everyone has time to focus on their jobs. While leaders might think that it is their responsibility to constantly answer questions for juniors, all you need is a process that does not hamper your work block hours. Think about what can work for you. For example, rotational shifts for leaders can serve all purposes.
3. Don’t expect Less Work: The “perfect amount of work” is a myth – it does not exist. It is all about how leaders balance the revenue needs as well as the mental and physical health of the showrunners. The strategy you take to fix the stress of your employees needs to be realistic. Instead of expecting someone to work for long hours, encourage them to split the work by setting timers of shorter span. This allows employees to take the breaks they need. Over time, this helps increase productivity. Without proper, dedicated time to recharge, employees will lose their focus and productivity. Anyway, sitting for long hours is neither great for physical or mental health.
Handling work is also about proper distribution of the workload, without which the teams can’t keep their minds straight and well-working. This is crucial tip if you want to reduce tax season stress.
Recommended: Learn about the cost of outsourcing accounting services in India!
4. Optimize productivity to have proper systems in place: Effective tracking systems should not be limited to merely the client files. Having a strong CRM isn’t a complete solution. It is more than that. It is the “where to start” question where accountants lose a lot of time, especially when they have too many things to take care of. Set an effective method to optimize productivity. For example, seek a collaboration tool like Monday.com, Asana, Trello, Financial Cents, etc, where employees can include all their tasks on the tracker. These tools allow all parties, including the client, to keep track of what is the status of each job. Regular update meetings and sessions where accountants can clear their doubts are also a great way to ensure productivity.
Making tax season less stressful: Summary
Tax season is one of the busiest times of the year for CPAs and accounting firms. The professionals of the fraternity prepare year-round to ensure that they deliver each tax file on time while helping their clients to the maximum capacity. For leaders, it is important to take steps that help their teams tackle the stress the right way and not feel anxious and burnt out for days and weeks at a stretch. It is the lack of time, preparation, and resources that often add to the stress, making this a difficult time.
Finding the help you need to maintain your stress balance is not as hard as it seems. Outsource with Finsmart Accounting and find resources who can take your workload, without spending a lot on new hires. Understand the benefits of outsourcing this tax season by writing to us at connect@finsmartaccounting.com.
Also, don’t forget to check out:
India Entry Consulting services
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Director Growth Strategy & Alliance
Maanoj Shah is a finance and outsourcing expert with strong Business Strategy and Scaling-up experience. Over the last 20 years, he has incubated multiple businesses and helped build global enterprises in verticals as diversified as hospitality, technology, and healthcare.
