Practical strategies to reduce tax season stress and boost efficiency—from smarter document collection to automated preparation.
Highlights
- Client collaboration tools designed with client convenience in mind expedite response times.
- Batch review systems and templates for client questions save time for management-level staff.
- Firms that make smart technology investments spend less time scrambling at the deadline.
You and your team know what’s just around the corner. The weather has cooled down, but the tempo is starting to heat up in tax practices across the country.
Skip the motivational posters and forget the pizza parties. These tax season quick wins address the top bottlenecks that turn February through April into a struggle. Here are some tips your practice can take to spend less time firefighting and more time tackling engagements like top tax teams.
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Tax season quick win #1: Streamline document gathering
Tax season quick win #2: Make AI your research assistant
Tax season quick win #3: Find opportunities for automation
Tax season quick win #4: Create a triage system for client questions
Tax season quick win #5: Batch your review process
Who is winning this tax season?
Tax season quick win #1: Streamline document gathering
Nothing kills momentum faster than chasing clients for late or missing documents. Every “Do you have that W-2?” email is time your team isn’t billing. Here’s food for thought: Maybe your unresponsive clients act that way because they struggle with the document submission process.
That’s why client portals like SafeSend are designed with client and professional convenience in mind. SafeSend guides clients through the gather phases and sends automated reminders to keep them accountable. Custom questionnaires and e-signatures are also managed in SafeSend and your firm is able to track client progress in real time.
The math is simple: Earlier signatures and document submissions gives you an earlier start on busy season.
Tax season quick win #2: Make AI your research assistant
The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to make 1040 tax preparation more complex in 2026. In order to navigate the new deductions, provisions, tax credits, and reporting thresholds, you’ll need fast answers from sources you can trust.
More and more firms are turning to AI to summarize lengthy documents and get answers to tax law questions. However, consumer-grade GenAI tools don’t always meet the authoritative standards that tax professionals need. To avoid hallucinations and inaccuracies, look for a professional-grade agentic AI tax tool trained on domain-specific content that provides thorough citations.
Gear up for tax season
News, insights, and case studies that you should read heading into busy season.
Explore articles ↗Tax season quick win #3: Find opportunities for automation
Your preparers are too talented to spend half of each workday inputting data and indexing workpapers. Modern automation solutions can reduce preparation time by as much as 39% with unprecedented OCR and organization capabilities.
Instead of onboarding seasonal staff each year or placing the onus of manual prep on full-time employees, see if your firm’s software integrates with a high-powered scan-and-populate technology. For example, SurePrep 1040SCAN automates significantly more data entry than the competition by recognizing 4-7x more document types.
“What SurePrep is saving us — it depends on the size of the return, but on the larger returns, it could easily be saving three to four hours on manual data entry. That is tremendous.”
Director of Technology, Friedman-Huey Associates
Tax season quick win #4: Create a triage system for client questions
Not every client question needs partner-level attention. Yet most firms route everything to whoever answered the phone. If this is a problem for your practice, try building a three-tier system:
Tier 1: Administrative staff handle status updates, document confirmations, and basic portal questions. Make sure they have the scripts and information to provide helpful answers.
Tier 2: Staff accountants handle standard tax questions, basic planning inquiries, and anything requiring reference to the client’s prior returns.
Tier 3: Partners and senior staff handle complex planning, unusual situations, and relationship management.
Be sure to document common questions and answers. When three clients ask about the same deduction, that’s a template waiting to happen.
Tax season quick win #5: Batch your review process
The typical workflow — prepare, review, revise, re-review — creates constant interruptions for management-level staff. Consider implementing a batch review system. Preparers submit completed returns by a certain time. Then reviewers tackle them in designated time blocks without interruption.
Workpaper management systems like SPbinder integrate with primary tax software to simplify the review process. Its workspace lets preparers make notes, annotations, and hyperlinked cross-references across all file types. Cloud-computing allows preparers and reviewers to collaborate in real time, even from remote locations. SPbinder even enables up to four sign-off levels for compliance and accountability.
Who is winning this tax season?
It won’t be the firm with the longest hours or the most elaborate office. Here’s who is winning this tax season: Firms that invest in time saving systems far ahead of busy season instead of scrambling at the deadline.
The firms still using 2019’s workflow will have to hire more staff, pay more overtime, and push hardworking employees to the brink of burnout. The ones who get a head start fixing broken processes will file the same number of returns with less chaos and better margins. Which path does your firm plan to take?
To learn more tax season quick wins that your team can implement, check out our in-depth white paper: Tax season success: 7 steps for a smoother workflow
