Tax Season 2022 is Underway – Are You Ready?

Not to sound too presumptuous, but a post-mortem of Tax Season 2021 will tell you that your firm probably could have done more if you had more team members. More importantly, if you are honest about the dissection and the subsequent evaluation, you will understand that you should have scaled your firm’s tax preparation services way before the season kicked off in earnest.

Alright, not every firm would have faced a problem of scalability in the tax season gone by, but many do. And there is really just one solution if you want to scale quickly and build enough capacity for Tax Season 2022 – Outsource tax preparation.

Yes, that will get you ready to increase productivity, do enough to boost revenue, and at the end of it all, you can still get a good night’s sleep every day. It will help you plan and organize your firm better so that you leverage the full potential of the tax season. 

Sounds utopian, doesn’t it? A scenario straight out of a dream? Well, it isn’t. 

Getting Ready for the Tax Season

Plan for Numbers Accuracy

Plan for zero errors. As an experienced CPA, you know the importance of accuracy while filing taxes. COVID-19 and its impact resulted in plenty of credits that individuals can claim. While this is a good thing, it can result in plenty of headaches (as we found in tax season 2021). 

Take for example, the case of Child Tax Credit. If a person has been receiving Child Tax Credit payments throughout the year, this credit cannot be claimed twice. As a CPA, you need to be careful that the individual whose tax you are preparing hasn’t done so. This is just one tax credit; there are many more that you will need to keep in mind while crunching those numbers. 

Your numbers must match up, but you need to give tax preparation enough time for that to happen. This won’t happen if you and your tax preparers are hard-pressed to get taxes done. Tax preparation services for CPAs free up valuable time and at the same time help you focus on the quality so that your client doesn’t overclaim. When you outsource tax returns, you can send standard tax returns without any complications to an offshore team of tax preparers, and the in-house team can focus on the more complex returns.

Keep Focusing on Client Outreach

The process of client outreach includes reaching out to new prospects and exploring new synergies with existing clients. Say, you couldn’t take up all the tax preparation work that a particular client wanted to send your way in Tax Season 2021. A missed opportunity! But, if you want to grow your business in the tax season, you shouldn’t be shying away from adding to your clients’ list.

No, as a challenge, do not point to scalability and the inability to add tax preparers to your team. An answer exists in tax outsourcing. The whole idea behind sending tax preparation to an outsourcing provider is that you can access a team of highly qualified accountants quickly and affordably. These work as your extended team, and their expertise and experience mean you do not have to manage their work for them. 

This allows you plenty of leeways to do more work as you build capacity. And the biggest benefit of tax return preparation outsourcing is that you can scale as per your need. 

Organization and Client Communication

The weakest link in the chain is a lack of planning and organization. 

Have you started clearing space for 2022 for all those tax documents that are set to overwhelm you? Have you worked out the work delegation and asked your team to ready themselves with all the resources and information they need? 

These are just some of the questions you need to answer for getting organized for Tax Season 2022. 

Communication is the precursor for better organization. While you should communicate with your clients throughout the year, it is necessary to do so right before or at the start of the tax season. The idea is to start involving your clients in the tax preparation process from the get-go so that they can send all the information and the most accurate information your way and in good time. 

For this to happen, the organization kicks in. Have you created the right workflow? You will already have a standard workflow in place, but check whether this requires an update or revision to make it more efficient. 

But all this cannot take place if you scramble to get things done after you are well into the tax season. You still have time to plan for Tax Season 2022. Again, outsource tax preparation to scale and free up time for ‘organization’ and ‘client communication.

Prepare for Burnout

This is going to happen. Work will overwhelm you, and this is par for the course, every tax season. Sleepless nights are the norm, and the work-life balance goes for a toss. Even the families have adjusted and don’t really have much expectation of spending some family time with you. While you and your fellow CPAs might have accepted this as a natural outcome of how busy you typically are in a tax season, this is a recipe for disaster. Stress and resulting burnout are not good and shouldn’t be acceptable if there is a solution. 

If you have a team, you don’t suffer from burnout. If you have some awareness about the work coming your way, you can plan your team strength around this forecast. As we have said throughout this article, adding to your team is not that difficult if you use outsourced tax preparation services for CPAs. 

Start searching for the right outsourcing providers and partner with the ideal provider to scale your team and build capacity. Don’t wait to suffer the consequences of a small team. You need to start right now if you want to do more in the tax season!

Conclusion

The time to start getting ready for the tax season has begun, and any delay can find your firm wanting. You don’t want to do worse than your competitors, and you want to do better than the last tax season. 

If you are interested in outsourcing tax preparation, talk to us. For us, it is not just about providing services but charting a growth strategy that will stand you in good stead for the future.