Streamline Tax Season: An Accountant’s Tips for Integration, Efficiency, and Consistency

Accounting professionals are constantly looking for ways to make tax season easier and more efficient. And what better source to get top tips from than another accountant? In her recent webinar with SmartVault, “Transform Your Firm with Integrated Document and Practice Management Solutions,” Dawn Brolin, Founder of Team Brolin, Designated Motivator, offered up the best practices she and her team implemented during 2023 to make the busy season less, well, busy and more productive.

Below, you’ll find her three most actionable tips for transforming your accounting firm ahead of tax season.

1. Integration is key.
   The major change Dawn made this year was getting a workflow management tool–Financial Cents—that integrated with her document management tool—SmartVault. SmartVault also integrates with a number of other commonly used apps, including QuickBooks and Lacerte, so that means Dawn’s workflow, document storage and management, and her tax tools are now all interlinked.

   “I had a different workflow product about eight months ago,” she says. But, with that product, “we had to do workarounds to connect SmartVault with our workflow/project management tool. And doing workarounds meant we had to do far more manual processes. We switched to Financial Cents because of the connection with SmartVault.” By making this switch, Dawn and her team can now manage everything with SmartVault, and they’re leveraging a system that’s already integrated.

   “At the end of the day having automatic integration is the key we are striving for. We know tax season is already stressful—it doesn’t matter what aspect you’re handling. Tax season is still a busy season, or as I call it, a productive season. When you have the integration, you’ll take your workflow to the next level.”

2. Focus on administrative tasks, not tax tasks.
   One major, recurring (and completely justified) gripe many accounting and finance professionals have about tax season is how much time all the work takes to complete. The busy season takes up a whopping four months out of the year that see accountants working 80- to 100-hour weeks.

   By prioritizing tech integrations and focusing on reducing the amount of time she was spending on administrative tasks—particularly onboarding new clients—Dawn has managed to find something that was previously elusive: a work-life balance during tax season.

   “I want to make sure I have my tools integrated and my efficiency set so I can spend more time doing what I love. Anyone who knows me knows I’m passionate about college softball,” Dawn says. She focused on integrating tools that offer admin functionalities—for instance, the SmartVault-to-Lacerte integration means tax documents are now automatically printed into folders where clients can view them by simply logging into their portal. This one, seemingly small tweak has been a “game changer,” in Dawn’s words, for herself and other tax pros.

   “People can go to their kids’ baseball games because of the time they’ve saved with this integration alone,” she notes. I can actually volunteer to coach college softball during tax season. All of my systems integrate.”

3. Make your processes consistent, and focus on what works for you, not the client.
   One of the biggest struggles Dawn and her team used to face during tax season was consistency. “We used to make exceptions for people. I’d just step in and do things for people because I’m a people pleaser,” she recalls. “My team would go bananas. It wasn’t consistent.”

   By making her processes consistent, particularly her new client onboarding process, Dawn has gained back a significant amount of time she used to spend on the administrative tasks involved in bringing on a new client. “I used to be 65% admin time,” she says. “Can you believe that? Now, I took myself out of the way, we set up a process, and we don’t make exceptions.”

   She encourages accounting professionals to think about reverse engineering their workflow based on what they, the accountant, need, not what their client needs. Accountants need to adopt the mindset of “what’s the best way for them to work with me?” as opposed to thinking the other way around. “We’re setting the rules. We’re not allowing the client to dictate how the relationship will go.”

   She has a virtual administrative professional who now takes down all the new information about a client and sets them up in the accounting firm’s system. “Now, I don’t touch anything until I give a quote,” she says. Another small but effective change she made: Clients are now required to prepay for her firm to prepare their tax returns. “A lot of accountants have said they get burned on money at the end of tax season, and they’re worried about Accounts Receivable,” she notes. “We need to eliminate that problem. Make it mandatory for next tax season: People have to prepay for their tax return. We actually started doing this back in May. Some accountants worry, and they say, ‘Well, what if something changes?’ No problem. You can do a one-off bill in ignition. You can do a change order. Your contractors have change orders, why can’t you?

   If they understand what’s going to happen, people typically have zero questions at the end of the day. They can’t get into our stuff until they accept the quote and pay up front. Once they do, they’re now part of the Team Brolin family.”

Implement a Document Management System for Acccounting Firms

By leveraging integrated systems, engineering your workflow the way it works best for you, and focusing on reducing the amount of time you spend on administrative tasks, you can streamline processes, spend your time more effectively, avoid burnout, and better serve your clients–this tax season and beyond.

“I don’t call it tax season anymore. I call it softball season,” Brolin jokes.

To see how SmartVault can empower your firm, schedule a demo with us today.