How I keep sane during the busy tax season and year round

How I keep sane during the busy tax season and year round

Running a growing accounting firm has the same challenges as any growing business.? But what is unique to accounting firms are the stresses that come along during the tax season.? The past several years have only exacerbated this issue as our industry faces enormous challenges around shortage of labor, the great resignation, an aging workforce, extending of the tax season, tax law complexities, and a record number of new business applications in American history.? The demand for accounting services is only growing while the supply of new accounting professionals decreases.? Here are some of the tools I use to run an efficient practice all year round:

• Book calendar meetings using Calendly

Stop wasting time sending emails back and forth to schedule time on your calendar.? Give your customers access to your calendar to book time with you at their convenience using Calendly.? I make sure to include a Calendly link in my email signature as well so that anyone that wants as little as 15 minutes of my time can book it on their own.? If you’re worried about random strangers filling up your calendar at odd times, you can control the parameters of when anyone is able to book time with you and how far out in advance they need to do so.? Calendly easily integrates with multiple calendar apps like Google Calendar as well as multiple video conferencing software platforms, so it easily integrates with most current work flows.? Calendly is also synced to multiple team members by department and service line so that more meeting options are provided to our customers.

• Automate proposals using Ignition

Decreasing the manual work that goes into creating a sales proposal will give you back time to focus on delivering the actual accounting work a customer pays you for.? Reconciled uses Ignition to streamline the proposal and payment process from start to finish.? Our customers receive an emailed proposal that they can read and sign on any device while also giving us the option to collect payment information.? No more dealing with Word or PDF documents that have to be printed or manually signed.? This creates a better experience for our customers while decreasing the time spent on collecting customer signatures and payment information for future billing.??

• Remove manual work and integrate apps using Zapier

Once a customer signs a proposal, Ignition sends an automated response message welcoming the customer to our firm and instructing them on how to schedule an onboarding call with our onboarding team using their Calendly link.? Ignition integrates directly with Quickbooks and auto creates both the customer information and the initial invoice (as well as any future invoices).? Ignition is also integrated with Zapier, which triggers the following automations:

• Customer and proposal record in Hubspot
• Message to our sales team via Slack that a new proposal has been signed
• Create a Slack Channel for our accounting services team
• Create a folder in Google Drive
• Create a task list in Karbon

Leveraging Zapier has been a game changer in removing the manual work we used to do and has allowed us to onboard customers at scale, saving us hundreds of hours.? We’ve even used Zapier to duplicate transactions between Quickbooks files when we need to keep separate track of information multiple Quickbook files.

• Reduce email using Slack

Accounting firms live and die on email, but inboxes can get out of hand quickly.? We were able to significantly reduce internal email communication by migrating to Slack.? Slack is a work collaboration tool that allows our team to message one another and leave email to external communication.? This allows for faster decision making and Slack integrates with many of the other apps at our company to make collaboration seamless.? No more endless email threads to make small decisions.? Slack has also introduced the ability to do both audio and video conversations, as well as connect to the Slack workspaces of your customers if they use Slack as well.

• Automate billing using Ignition and Quickbooks Online

Collecting payment up front for our services is a standard part of our proposal process in Ignition.? Ignition makes it easy to require customers input their payment information and allows you to auto-charge them on a recurring basis without having to collect payment each month.? We even collect deposits during tax season so that we know which customers are confirmed to work with us.? For hourly projects or milestone work, we use Ignition when possible, but also send invoices from Quickbooks.? Since Ignition and Quickbooks are integrated, Quickbooks makes it easy for us to send our customers a receipt of payment when requested or do a manual charge at any time.? Automating our billing process has saved us hundreds of hours and removed the pain of collections.

If you’re still having challenges with manual work like creating sales proposals, collecting payment information, onboarding customers, email overload, and getting paid, the tools and automations above can save you time and transform your practice.? Imagine saving yourself (and your firm) hundreds or thousands of hours so you can focus on what you do best - serving and making happy customers.??

**This post is a paid partnership with QuickBooks Online.