2023 Tax Season After Action Review (AAR)
Hey!
Tax season is over, so I thought it would be helpful if some of us participated in an AAR (After Action Review). I'll put mine below while it's still fresh in my head. Hopefully we can all learn from each other's successes and failures.
What was supposed to happen?
We were going to have a nice tax season where our preparer in training/admin and the Intuit outsourcing company would handle a good chunk of the returns so I could focus on reviewing and engaging in client advising/relationships. Our pipeline, organizers, and improved processes would make tracking and communicating a breeze. I would also have nicely organized workpapers produced by Gruntworx for reviewing returns.
What actually happened.
Our admin was busy with a bunch of still and had a learning curve, so he didn't produce many returns. He still helped out a LOT though in many other ways, and I'm grateful for him. The outsourcing company did not gain access to our systems for a month. They ran into some issues and I think they were too busy with other clients to spend the time to get access. By the time they got access it it took five days for them to mark returns as received in their system when the turn around time was supposed to be five days (to be fair that does include the weekend). So I was hesitant to give too many returns because the ones outsourced would take a long time to complete and I would have to go gather any missing info or questions anyways. I liked the team leader - he has years of experience and a lot of knowledge, I just think they were too busy to give us much time. There were also some things that needed to be fixed. For instance, there was a prior year suspended passive loss on a new client that they put as an NOL on the return. Reviewing stuff took almost as much time as it would have taken for me to prepare it.
Sustains (things to keep doing)
I invested some time training our admin to help prepare returns, upload returns, send invoices, and a bunch of other stuff. This investment paid dividends. I was able to lean on him and other team members during rough times. I want to continue investing time in his development. I would also like to hire a full time preparer at one point.
I started using a Trial Balance template to make adjustments and import it to Lacerte. I haven't touched a Trial Balance since college over a decade ago, but I don't think I can go back to a PL and BS for business returns again. Creating the chart of accounts during the initial import was a hassle, but it's supposed to roll forward so future years should be much easier. I found a software called "Tallyfor" that's supposed to import from QBO and export to Lacerte, plus keep track of workpapers and adjustments. I'll be testing it out after tax season.
I got my business parter and admin/preparer to be active in TaxDome. I had a pretty good return pipeline with a lot of automations. This made things soooo much easier. We have an older CPA that does accounting (he doesn't really do tax - I was planning on him doing business returns, but I've learned he will ALWAYS be busy with accounting). The older CPA is set in his ways and didn't use TaxDome much, but he's got his own system for the clients he's been working with for years. Overall I couldn't imagine having a virtual workflow without TaxDome.
Improvements (thing to do better)
Our admin ran into an issue with Gruntworx on the first one or two clients. I could have probably figured it out so we could continue using it, but he ended up dropping that entire process, so I had to open a dozen or more tabs in TaxDome and keep Excel files on my desktop (TaxDome app doesn't support Mac). He was also supposed to be able to look at the prior year return or the printed organizer from Lacerte to ask for missing documents, but that didn't really happen (to be fair he's still learning. I'm going to check out SPBinder going forward to organize stuff. The binders are supposed to roll forward, so they can create a "blue print" for preparers to complete a return or identify missing info/ see where we found that info (logging into Gusto, email, upload, exc). I might give Gruntworx a firsthand try myself though to see which I prefer.
I will not be using an outsourced service again. I might enlist interns going forward though. I want to invest time in people to do things the way I need them done and take more stuff off my plate. People who are dedicated to your team trump someone not dedicated to you, even if the team member is less experienced.
I set up a submission deadline to clients of March 31st. We try to have a two week turn around time for returns, which makes April 15th hard with that timeline. I had a couple of angry clients because we got returns to them right before the deadline. I'm moving the submission deadline up a week, that way the last week of tax season can be focused on extensions and buffer time.
What lessons learned did you all have this tax season?