Any CPA will tell you that the typical workday is completely different during tax season compared to the rest of the year. Long hours and work on the weekend are inevitable. It’s a time to pause continuing education and get down to the nitty-gritty.
The time between January 1st and April 15th (also known as tax season) turns into a hullabaloo for accountants and civilians alike. Tax season for accountants is tough and stressful, but profitable if your firm can tackle a large volume of returns. You want to perform quality work to reduce IRS rejections/audits and increase customer satisfaction, but you also need to optimize your time so you’re not stuck doing busy work or getting delayed by inherent slowdowns in your process.
Looking back at your last sprint through tax season, what did you end up doing the most? Was it having client facetime or organizing and filing paperwork? Was it enacting new strategies to be more efficient or frantically dealing with the latest changes to the tax code? Overall, did you find your hours spent on busywork? Do you feel like they could be better spent to be more productive?
eFileCabinet aims to make your tax season much more efficient for accountants through the power of professional planning, intelligent organization, and automation.
Delegate to Tech
While recruiting more accountants to handle the busy work is a solution, it’s hardly a cost-effective one. Which is why delegating your work to intelligently designed technology is the best way to save your budget and your time. eFileCabinet is a document management solution that does so much more than store and organizes documents. It’s your key to eliminating manual data-entry from your list of daily tasks.
Any document, physical or digital, that is uploaded to eFileCabinet’s system is first processed with Zonal OCR that recognizes and records the information in fields, based on templates of standard forms. If you need to digitize the information from a client’s 1099 form for easy filing, eFileCabinet can instantly recognize what type of form it is once you scan it in, then create a folder location for it.
The great benefit of this system is that you can do a full-text search for the document later and instantly find it. The days of endless “CTRL F” searches to find a specific tax document are long gone when you turn to a document management system like eFileCabinet.Just typing in the client’s name and 1099 will instantly bring it up, along with any other qualifying information, regardless of what the file is named.
You can scan in a stack of documents, a year’s worth of a client’s finances, and eFileCabinet will organize it all into an interface that’s easy to navigate and search. Easy to file, easy to find. While eFileCabinet does this, you can concentrate on more important matters to make tax season more bearable.
Inefficient Processes Occupying Your Time?
The majority of your work on the tax project is finished, but do you still exert a lot of effort chasing down signatures, waiting on approvals and trying to track down who has essential documents before you can finalize everything? A haphazard process for reviews and approvals is bound to bog down the flow of work and turn the waiting game into a recurring part of your job. Automate this process to keep your projects moving and keep you in the loop.
eFileCabinet features workflows that automate business processes like review and approval. Once a document is entered into the workflow, it’s sent to the designated users who are notified to approve or reject. The workflow is designed to send it to the right person in either scenario, keeping the flow of work moving. Plus, you’ll know exactly what stage of the process the document is in at all times, allowing you to know who needs to pick up the pace with the project and perhaps give you an idea of where your accounting firm’s processes can improve.
For the next tax season, have a plan ready and waiting so that there aren’t hiccups when it comes to finding whatever it is you need. Being an accountant can become a bit easier during tax season when you turn to automation and document management systems.
After taking account of how you’ve spent your time during tax season, are these areas you think you and your firm can improve on and delegate to a new solution? To learn more about improving your business processes for the next tax season, download our eBook Take Back Your Life.
