Top 3 things I learned from tax season

This year’s tax season will no doubt go down in history. Not only did you work with your clients to help them with business issues related to COVID-19, the tax deadline was extended to July 15, everyone was working remotely, and you had to put in extra effort to ensure your team was as efficient as possible.

Here’s what several Intuit® Tax Pro Center authors to find out their top learnings from this past season:

Caleb L. Jenkins, EA, CQP – RLJ Financial Services, Inc.

1. Keep everyone regularly informed throughout your team about the progress you are making in contrast to your goals and the prior year. With this communication, the full team can celebrate, continue striving for excellence, and finalize a strong volume of tax returns.
2. Pay attention to your team, and make sure that they have the support they need to complete their work. Try creating blocks of time each week to ensure they are on track.
3. Stay up to date with the news, but don’t let it paralyze you. The news can inform our decisions, and keep us updated with current happenings in our conversations with our clients. However, if we aren’t careful, we can get too glued to what is happening around us.

Jamie E. O’Kane, CPA – JE O’Kane CPA, LLC

1. Nothing is ever concrete.
2. Virtual work processes and systems are critical.
3. Tax planning is a critical service to helping businesses weather a storm.

Timothy L. Wingate Jr, EA – G+F Business & Financial Consulting LLC

1. Understand the importance of having an up-to-date customer relationship management system to send targeted information for specific tax needs out to clients and prospects. I believe this would have significantly cut down the phone calls and emails.
2. I see the need to have a virtual assistant to collect and send information out to my tax clients. Trying to send information, entering data into a tax software, and taking sales calls is not a good combination.
3. Having a 100 percent virtual tax and accounting firm was one of the best decisions I made when I started my company. COVID-19 proved this.

What did you learn this season? Share your comments below.