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BUSY SEASON MANAGEMENT

Advanced Tax Preparers Need Managing, Too

Four best practices.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

Managing advanced-level preparers sounds easier than it is. These preparers will all have blind spots that appear at inconvenient times. Some won’t be able to adapt to your internal procedures, because they worked at firms without well-defined procedures.

We had one person who insisted on printing out the prior year tax returns and workpapers before beginning a return. She said she just needed the paper in her hands. That didn’t work for us.

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She asked to be paid on a salaried basis. When we agreed, she then demanded to be paid on an hourly basis. We agreed to that as well. Then she wanted to go back to a salary. She believed that whatever we agreed to would be bad for her.
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BUSY SEASON MANAGEMENT

Four Challenges of Managing New Tax Preparers

… and three tips to make it easier.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

How do you train up newly hired tax preparers?

Hint: Don’t start with taxes.

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Having standardized processes is key. Teaching processes is much easier than teaching tax return preparation. Learning your processes teaches tax return preparation if your processes are well defined. Much of tax preparation is data entry-oriented. Then you teach the variations.
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BUSY SEASON MANAGEMENT

Ask Tax Clients the Right Questions

hourglass on paper charts

Don’t let them dictate your workflow.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

Who makes the errors in your firm? Staff obviously, but that’s half of the answer. Clients are a major source of tax return errors. Clients cause errors in three ways:

  1. Errors of omission
  2. Errors of commission
  3. Errors in attitude

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Every tax season, we finalize and deliver returns only to hear from the client, “I think I might have forgotten to tell you that we had a baby last year.” Does this happen to you? This is a client error of omission. Unintentionally, clients withhold important information.
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ADVISORY & CONSULTING

The Shift to Advisory from a Firm Perspective

man and woman high-fiving each other in office

It might take longer than you expect, but it’s so worthwhile.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

Articles about shifting to advisory are mostly written by consultants. They are smart, well-meaning people. They have lots of advice, some good, some bad, but it’s like hiring a vegan chef to grill your steak. They aren’t living with the consequences.

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My firm made the shift and learned a lot of lessons from grilling our own steak. We mostly survived with just a mild case of food poisoning.

Let’s kindly ask our vegan chefs to leave the room and just speak firm to firm. Let’s wait a second longer to make certain they’re off grilling tofu.

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BUSY SEASON MANAGEMENT

Make ‘Done But’ Tax Returns a Thing of the Past

six people around work table

Eliminate bottlenecks by asking better questions.

By Frank Stitely
The Relentless CPA

A project hung up in process is one where there is a disagreement between people involved in a project as to the status. For example, a client thinks he has answered your tax return questions, while you believe he has not. Another example is when a tax return preparer believes a return is ready for review while the reviewer does not believe it’s ready.

MORE: Use Humor to Get Tax Documents in Early
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The result of a hung-up project is a dead project – one that’s not moving to completion.

If a tax return gets hung up, eventually your client calls you, and you get to waste time determining why the project stopped moving. This increases work in progress (WIP), which increases turnaround time.
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