As you prepare for the busy tax season does your team have the capacity to handle the volume of work coming its way? This checklist can help you transform tax season from a stressful sprint into a managed and profitable marathon.
It’s December and the starting gun for tax season is about to fire. As you get set in the starting block, the question isn’t whether you are ready for the workload, but whether your team’s capacity can handle the volume of tax work without burning out. Last-minute hiring is a gamble, and overworking your staff is a sure path to errors and turnover.
Tax season shouldn’t be about working harder; it should be about working smarter. This pre-tax-season checklist can help you secure your capacity and safeguard your firm’s profitability and reputation.
Diagnose Your True Capacity Gap
- Action: Don't guess at your manpower needs. Review last year's tax season. How many 1040s, 1065s, and 1120s did you file? How many extensions did you file out of necessity versus planning?
- Solution: By analyzing this data, you can build a capacity gap score that identifies exactly how many hours of support are needed and in which specialty areas (e.g., high-net-worth individual returns, complex partnership K-1s). A partner such as Caramel Advisors can help you with this step and other solutions in this checklist.
Lock in Your Extended Team Now
- Action: The best external talent must be booked in December. If you wait until January that means you are hiring from the leftover pool.
- Solution: A partner like Caramel can be your strategic capacity insurance. Onboarding external talent now allows time for training on your firm’s specific software and processes before the first W-2s arrive, ensuring your added talent are a seamless, productive extension of your team from Day 1 of tax season.
Streamline Your Client Intake & Onboarding
- Action: Review your client intake process. Are you using a digital portal? Are organizers being sent automatically? Bottlenecks that occur in February start with a clunky process developed in December.
- Solution: An outsourcing partner such as Caramel can help optimize the flow by managing the initial data collection and organization for you, ensuring your in-house team only touches prepared, compliant client files.
Differentiate Your Service Tiers
- Action: Categorize your clients into A, B, and C tiers. Decide now, in December, which clients get full-service planning and which ones are better suited to a streamlined compliance-only approach. This focuses your high-value resources where they matter most.
- Solution: A partner such as Caramel can be the dedicated team for your B and C clients. This division of labor still gives these clients excellent, timely service, but it also frees your staff to provide strategic advisory to the A clients. This is how you move up the value chain.
Plan for the Advisory Upsell
- Action: Tax compliance is a service that can open doors to even more opportunity. So, prepare one or two key advisory questions to ask every client during their tax review (e.g., “Have you considered a qualified small business stock exclusion for your startup shares?” or “How is the new R&D capitalization rule impacting your cash flow?”).
- Solution: By handling the core compliance workload, a capacity partner opens up your mental bandwidth and provides you with more time to have these high-value conversations, potentially increasing your firm’s revenue per client.
Conclusion
Completing this checklist in December is the single most effective step you can take to transform tax season from a stressful sprint into a managed, profitable marathon. The goal is not just to survive but to thrive. The first step – aligning with a capacity partner now – is the most critical.
Schedule a 15-minute capacity gap assessment with Caramel Advisors. We'll review your last season's data and provide a no-obligation plan to ensure your firm enters January confident, prepared, and fully resourced.
Deep Parmar is the Founding Partner at Caramel Advisors. He can be reached at Deep.Parmar@CaramelAdvisors.com.
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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.
