Some regard this as ordinary. It has happened before, after all. The cycle repeats, but repetition can disguise the opportunity inside it. Tax preparation becomes a chore when treated as nothing more than compliance, and that interpretation leaves little room for improvement.
But another view exists. One that begins earlier, looks wider, and considers the long-term benefit of how and why things are done, not just that they need to be done. This view requires structure, not speed. It values awareness more than urgency.
Clarity does not arrive by accident: it must be prepared, arranged, and made visible. When that happens, year-end is no longer just a deadline. It becomes a point of leverage. Accuracy becomes easier to achieve, and value becomes easier to prove.
The year’s final quarter does not recommend order; it demands it. Schedules buckle under delay. Spreadsheets do not forgive duplication. Submissions collide. One misnamed folder multiplies confusion across three departments before anyone notices.
Inside firms, younger staff often build the first bridge to the client. That bridge is usually a prepared-by-client list. Sometimes it is clear; often it is not. A vague list ricochets back in the form of half-correct uploads, missing attachments, or phone calls that begin with, “What exactly did you need?”
This is not inefficiency. It is entropy, and it expands when no one checks the list before it leaves the inbox.
Corporate teams face a stranger variation. Their bottlenecks tend to masquerade as compliance. One department holds a journal entry. Another rewrites the template. A third uploads a file from last year without blinking. The problem is not volume. It is velocity misaligned with attention.
Portals do not solve this. Templates do not solve this. People do, but only when structure is introduced before urgency poisons clarity. Folders must be named like someone will search them with no foreknowledge. Files must be dated like mistakes cost money – because they do.
Speed alone does not create throughput. Accountants know this. The ones who don’t learn quickly. The ones who do usually stop chasing shortcuts and start isolating drag.
Drag hides well. It inserts itself between reconciliations. It nests inside rework. It accumulates when tasks collapse onto each other without rhythm or respect for sequence. Once drag appears, speed becomes irrelevant. Without structure, the work resists completion.
A checklist will not fix this, nor will effort. Only timing and configuration matter. Teams that separate collection from review, and review from reporting, tend to avoid procedural collision. Those who don’t often loop back through their own steps twice – sometimes three times – with diminishing returns.
Firm accountants have access to tools that automate the obvious:
These are not magic. They are brakes on redundancy. When used correctly, they prevent spreadsheets from becoming an archaeological site by mid-month.
Corporate teams may operate differently but they suffer the same physics. They do not compete with deadlines; they compete with internal drift. Entries left unwatched pile into bottlenecks. Category reconciliations left until Friday dissolve into approximations.
The fix is not elegant. It is honest sequencing:
Mistakes at year-end do not wait for complex scenarios. They surface early and often, inside the things no one double-checked. A number copied twice. A note left untranslated. A final journal entry made by memory and not record.
Reconciliations lead the list. Not because they are difficult, but because they are timed poorly. Too early, and values shift beneath them. Too late, and there’s no room to recover. What looks like an accounting error often began as a calendar error.
Communication falters too. A client replies with a document but misses the attachment. A department submits totals but no breakdown. The emails arrive. The work halts. No one has time to notice that the delay already cost two hours.
Some entries vanish entirely. Deferred tax items. Quarterly accruals. Anything outside the month’s mainline activity tends to go quiet unless someone builds a system loud enough to catch it. The problem is not always omission; sometimes it is the silence that follows it.
Complexity is not the enemy here. None of this is complex. Familiarity is the enemy. What goes wrong is usually the thing everyone assumed would not.
Some tasks begin quietly. They do not announce their relevance; they do not ask for a review. They enter the spreadsheet, wait in column G, and influence nothing until someone decides they might matter. By then, they often don't.
At firms, the overlooked tends to live in the ordinary:
These do not need a senior to catch them. They need a junior who notices early and speaks up without ceremony.
When someone notices quietly and speaks without spectacle, the work becomes service instead of checklist compliance. It also separates tax prep from what it could be: something less reactive, more shaped.
Internal teams meet this differently. The ledgers sit closer. Trends appear earlier. A sudden shift in revenue by region or product line does not arrive as a surprise. It waits in the trial balance, visible to anyone who chooses to look beyond the column total.
Planning is not a calendar event, but rather an awareness posture. Accountants who treat tax preparation as something that feeds future models will always find more in it than those who treat it as closure.
Some problems arrive as silence. The spreadsheet looks fine. The portal shows uploads. But nothing moves. Deadlines drift sideways. Eyes glance upward. No one is sure who to nudge.
The missing link is not a tool, but a check-in.
At firms, client emails often land with a tone that feels cautious, even apologetic. The document is late. The answers are partial. Still, the work continues because someone followed up without condescension. That call made it possible to stay on schedule.
This is not about emotional intelligence. It is about velocity control.
Inside companies, failures tend to form inside repetition. A report is shared without version history. A totals column is sent without source. By the time finance notices, the team who sent it has already moved on. No one was careless, but nobody stopped to coordinate either.
Software will not fix this. Systems do not clarify silence. Only people can do that, but only if someone starts the conversation before confusion begins to form.
A sentence sent 10 days late takes 40 minutes to fix. The same sentence, sent two days early, takes four. This is not theory. It is math.
There is a moment late in December when file names all start to blur. The folders look familiar, but the numbers inside them have shifted. Nothing seems broken, but nothing feels certain either. This is when most people default to velocity.
Instinct carries you right up to the moment it fails. Work gets done but not tracked. Deadlines get met but not remembered. The task list empties, but no one can explain how it happened.
Year-end is not the climax of a project. It is a test of the system it revealed. If the process bends but doesn’t fall, it was strong enough. If it snaps, it never fit.
Accountants do not need inspiration in these moments. They need to know which piece moved last, and whether it moved for the right reason.
Clarity is the value. The reporting is just how it gets delivered.
Anthony J. Borrelli is a staff accountant at Maillie LLP in West Chester, Pa. He holds a B.S. in Accounting from the University of Pittsburgh and is committed to maintaining compliance and upholding the integrity of accounting processes.
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Statements of fact and opinion are the author’s responsibility alone and do not imply an opinion on the part of the PICPA's officers or members. The information contained herein does not constitute accounting, legal, or professional advice. For actionable advice, you must engage or consult with a qualified professional.