Tax practice

The Tax Office of Tomorrow

Clients are focused on sales, delivering products and services, and growth, but many of them don’t understand how to consistently stay profitable. That’s where their accountant comes in.

I write a lot about a lot of things. On technical topics I never get negative feedback—unless I wrote something wrong, which fortunately has been very rare, and then it is a gentle nudge that perhaps I overlooked or misread something.

With April 18 in the past, tax practices should start assessing their performance.

Uber and Amazon may be the models for the tax preparation process of the future, according to Keith Alessi, the former Jackson Hewitt chairman and CEO who recently joined the board of upstart tax prep franchiser Happy Tax.

Many firms fire staff after tax season. The reason being that they feel they needed to get through tax season and those who are not good are let go as soon as practical. I did it differently.

The annual life cycle for accountants traditionally ends and begins with April 15 (or whatever the actual due date is). The early months of the year are involved or consumed with tax season. After tax season ends, normality begins.

I never liked counting down months, weeks or days. To me, it makes the time seem to go by too quickly and decreases my appreciation of today.

When I started my practice I tried to extend as many clients as I could. I figured this would ease tax season and spread the work out throughout the year.

Some suggestions of ways to relieve pressure as you rush toward the last-minute crunch deadline.

During busy times, healthy habits and extracurricular activities are some of the first things to fall off your plate.

It’s tax season and there will be some mistakes on returns you send to clients. Hopefully not many, but there will be some.

Lawyers and engineers are the most likely occupations to hire professional tax preparers, according to newly released statistics.

Very few preparers would consider changing any part of their system a month before busy season ends, so I won’t offer any of my sage advice. But I will make a suggestion.

With a host of new credentials, certificates, degrees and other ways of signaling their expertise now available, accountants and firms need to develop strategies to figure out which best suit their careers and their practices.

Here are some ways to save you and your tax practice some headaches this season.

It’s busy season again: a time when you can barely breathe as you hurry to complete returns for clients who often wait until the very last minute to submit tax preparation documents.

Every preparer wants to know what their clients think. The trick is how to find out.

There is no question there are different kinds of complexity for returns.

Tax season is a busy time and there is a temptation to take a shortcut on procedures, skip some extra training or sidestep an extra effort to be in touch with a client. Succumbing to these and other temptations is a shortsighted mistake that should be avoided.