Improving Work-Life Balance Firm-Wide During Busy Season

Traditionally, busy season in the accounting industry has been a time to cancel all personal plans, batten down the hatches, and grind through overtime until your family barely recognizes you, but with the right technology, guardrails, and strategic planning, it doesn’t have to be.

At Accountability Services, we pride ourselves on being a great place to work all year long—even during busy season. Here’s how we do it.

Set Firm but Fair Boundaries with Clients

Delivering excellent customer service doesn’t mean your team should be on the hook to work through the night because clients uploaded documents at the last minute. We believe any successful professional partnership requires participation on both sides, and for clients, this means meeting reasonable tax-ready deadlines.

To make this work:

• Educate clients year-round on using the portal to remove friction during tax season.
• Communicate tax-ready expectations and deadlines well in advance.
• Encourage clients to be tax-ready early and reward those who take advantage with prompt service.
• As deadlines approach, inform clients that those who are not tax-ready before the cutoff will automatically be extended.
• Stick to your guns and do not make exceptions.

This policy not only eliminates last-minute chaos, but it also improves the quality of our work and prevents returns from being pushed through with errors.

Implementing (and enforcing) hard deadlines can be challenging the first year if you have been too flexible in the past, but once the new expectations are set, your clients adjust quickly.

Lean on Canopy for Automation

The more you put into Canopy, the more you’re going to get out of it—especially when we’re talking about setting up templates for automation. We have invested significant time and energy in helping our operations team become Canopy template wizards, and the results have been phenomenal.

Automation isn’t just about reducing the time spent on menial tasks. It’s also how we keep our clients and the team members who service their engagements 100% informed of their next steps to maintain optimal workflows.

Stay Proactive with Workload Management

It’s no secret that planning for enough capacity is key to having a stress-free busy season. What is still a secret is how easy Canopy Insights makes it to run the numbers and staff your firm appropriately.

Using Insights, we have ample time to adjust before the season hits, whether that be additional outsourcing, hiring a contractor, or engaging a third-party service provider.

Leverage Daily Reports for Impactful Huddles

Integrating Canopy reports into our tax team daily huddles has been a boon for production, efficiency, and improving follow-up.

The more we take the guesswork out of which return is where in the process and who is responsible for pushing it through to the next stage, the less we find busy season to be the hectic mess it used to be.

Limit Scope Creep

Outlining what is and isn’t included in client engagements is important year-round, but during busy season it becomes mandatory. This is particularly true for non-CAS clients who want you to pull their financials from QBO.

The time for clients to ask for a more hands-on approach is before engagement letters are signed so this service can be worked into the scope of your agreement.

This goes back to communicating tax-ready expectations and deadlines ahead of time. Remind and clarify non-CAS clients of their responsibilities before tax season arrives so it won’t be a surprise if your team is unwilling to work out of scope to accommodate a special request.

Have Fun and Take Care of Your Team

We are incredibly proud of how we transformed busy season from something the whole team dreads to (mostly) just another time of year. But that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the extra focus and workload required to get the job done.

To take care of our team, we automatically schedule office closures for recovery days following major deadlines. To make up for limited PTO during tax season, we offer generous and flexible time off during non-busy seasons to ensure that everyone is well-rested.

We’re also big fans of gamifying progress to motivate and incentivize our team while taking a lighthearted approach to the challenge ahead. Right now, our theme is the Tax Olympics, complete with graphical tracking systems and leaderboards.

Rethinking Tax Time Traditions

The first step toward improving work-life balance during busy season is for leadership to make the conscious choice that your team deserves better. As our industry rapidly changes, one of the things that needs to go goodbye is this idea that CPAs have three months every year where they’re not allowed to have a life outside of work.