Why tax season exposes how your firm really runs

As you’re knee-deep in tax season, you may already be wondering how to make the process smoother for next year. Jeanne Hardy is a CAS firm owner and the founder of a practice management software for accountants. Here she shares how to avoid firm heroics that rely too heavily on a few star employees, plus the questions to ask in your post-tax season debrief. 

—Interview by Lauren Ward, edited by Bianca Prieto

You’ve seen how accounting firms actually operate behind the scenes. What does tax season reveal about a firm’s systems that owners might miss during the rest of the year? 

Tax season reveals the difference between a firm that is organized and a firm that is actually operable at scale.

For example, in slower months, an owner may feel like the firm has a good process because everyone knows what to do and clients are generally being served well. But tax season is where you find out whether work moves because the system is clear or because two or three experienced people are quietly holding everything together with memory, judgment and follow-up. 

It also shows you where the firm is still built around “heroics.” You see it in very specific ways: the senior manager who knows which clients always upload the wrong PDF, the reviewer who can decipher a preparer’s work because they’ve worked together for years, the admin who catches missing e-signatures before filing because she knows exactly where things tend to go sideways. You realize the process was never fully carrying the load.

Another thing tax season reveals is whether your deadlines are real or ceremonial. Many firms say they want source documents by a certain date, but internally, everyone knows the real work does not have to start until later because clients dribble things in, too many exceptions get made and the team has adapted around that. 

The one that I think is more common than people realize is whether the review is functioning as quality control or as reconstruction. That is a huge distinction. In a healthy process, review is confirming judgment and catching true issues. In a strained system, review becomes the place where messy inputs, inconsistent prep, unclear notes and client errors all get sorted out at the most expensive stage possible. 

What’s the simplest way for a firm owner to know, at any given moment, whether the work is on track without micromanaging? 

The most reliable way is to know where work is aging unnaturally. It often shows up like a capacity issue when, upon a closer look, the patterns for pileups are clear. But without consistent visibility across all the stages of each workflow, it’s really hard to see. The best way to solve this is to have the right practice management tool (shameless plug—like my product Levvy).  

Practice management is where you can capture and use available data and enhanced visibility to look for risk across your organization. That gives owners a real management lens without requiring them to ask staff for live updates all day. Look at the aging time for each stage of work and get ahead of it before it's too late. 

After April 15, what specific questions should firm owners ask their team to improve next year’s workflow? 

Here are the questions I’d ask:

• Where did work feel orderly and clear, and then suddenly get messy?
  In many firms, intake feels fine, and prep feels manageable, but review becomes the point where everything tolerated upstream shows up all at once.
• Which returns looked simple on paper but consumed disproportionate time? Why? They often expose client behavior issues or scope creep hiding inside routine work.
• At what point in the season did we start making exceptions we would not normally make? Most workflow problems begin when the team starts bending the rules to keep things moving. These exceptions can create big pileups down the line.
• What did reviewers spend time fixing that preparers should never have had to guess at? This seems to be the most common issue: prep delivers a very rough draft that raises more questions than answers and leads to rework that should never have happened. 

How can firm owners use tax season data, like turnaround times or task bottlenecks, to redesign their workflow for 2027?

I would recommend using the time data and a deeper role review to find the bottlenecks. I would also break turnaround time into components to better pinpoint the bottlenecks:

• Days from client submission to first touch
• Days in prep
• Days waiting for review
• Days in review
• Days in client follow-up
• Days waiting on signature or final release

When firms do this, they often discover that their problem is not that returns take too long overall. Their problem is that the clock probably starts too early, work enters the pipeline before it is truly ready or the review stage has become the collection point for every unresolved issue.

This data is especially useful when paired with role design. If the same reviewer becomes the bottleneck every March, the answer may not be more staff, but clearer prep standards, narrower review scope, earlier issue escalation or a different review assignment model. I have seen firms add headcount and still feel overwhelmed because they added capacity in the wrong stage.

The Net Gains is your one-stop shop for fresh, FREE accounting insights. You can reach the newsletter team at thenetgains@mynewsletter.co. We enjoy hearing from you.

Interested in advertising? Email us at newslettersales@mvfglobal.com

 If you've been enjoying the newsletter, don't keep it a secret. Share it with an industry colleague. (Copy the link here.)

The Net Gains is curated and written by Lauren Ward and edited by Bianca Prieto.