Tax season—that special time of year when caffeine consumption triples, restful sleep becomes a scavenger hunt, and your spouse and friends begin to question your sanity. If you’re deep in the trenches of tax filings, bookkeeping clean-ups, and client questions that could’ve-been-Google-searches, you know the struggle is real. But after 23 years, I feel like I’m finally finding my groove… and because I don’t want it to take you as long to figure out as it did me, I’m sharing tips and tricks that have been successful, and maybe this vision for the future will make today’s load a little lighter.
Tap Technology to Do More with Less
I’ll start with the lifesaver of modern accounting: technology. Yes, I recognize that it’s also the bane of our existence when “Mercury’s retrograde” (or whatever we want to blame for it), but as my software-developer-husband likes to remind me, that’s because I’ve built my life around my tech stack—and vice versa, have built it around my life. It’s what facilitates the lifestyle I’ve chosen for myself: a fully-remote CPA firm that allows me to live in Mexico during tax season and travel during conference season, while making an important difference in the lives of small business owners back home in Chicago.
For me, that means making sure my tech is portable, accessible by my whole team, easy for my clients to use, secure, and reliable.
QuickBooks Online has been my trusty sidekick on this journey for years. And I was such a hater when it was first released! I still laugh when I think about how negative I was about it; because at the time, it was a real frustration that it didn’t behave like or do what the Desktop version could. Thankfully those days are far behind us now. For the type of work we do, QBO has far surpassed its older cousin – it helps automate the tedious, repetitive tasks that used to eat up my team’s capacity (especially when combined with RightTool, my favorite QBO-loving Chrome extension). We lean hard into creating bank rules, automating recurring transactions and payments, and using third-party syncs with Point of Sale and Project Management systems. And because there’s functionality for ProAdvisors that allows us to easily review and recategorize (check out my MSN article on our favorites), it means I can feel confident about the quality of the end result… before it goes onto my clients’ tax returns.
A few QBO life-savers I wish I’d had in the Desktop Days: the audit log makes short work of the tedious task of figuring out why last year’s retained earnings might have changed (and who was responsible); the reconciliation review allows a junior accountant to make sure all accounts are reconciled before we start our review; and the “transactions without payees” report helps us make sure we don’t miss any 1099 vendors. As a firm runner, I also love that I can assign different team members to individual clients, and that I can control their level of access – this came in very handy recently when I had to have a contractor jump in mid-season due to multiple team members having personal setbacks. As I recently noted on LinkedIn, managing team capacity is hard enough without having technology get in the way.
I also rely on apps that help me make the most of our time outside of tax season. In my webinars on 1099 best practices, I illustrate that an hour during tax season is about 4 or 5 times as precious as one during the rest of the year. So the more I can do in the off-season, the less my team and I have to cram into the space right before deadlines. A great example is Keeper – we use them to create a year-round 1099 workflow, where we review for vendors and request W-9s as part of the month-end close. It also helps with practice management and client communication, as we’ve standardized our annual process and language for collecting information from clients, and I have transparency into where my team is getting stuck in closing out the books and handing them off to the tax team.
And lastly, I couldn’t do tax season without Ace Cloud Hosting. Talk about a sanity-saver. They simplify the setup and maintenance of cloud-hosted tax software while still giving us enough administrative control to implement changes when we need them. We used to live in fear of our server going down just before a deadline; in the case of a significant software problem, now we have a whole team to assist in rolling back and restoring any data. I can honestly say that I sleep better at night than I did before working with them.
These tools don’t just save time—they support my mental health. Automating the little things and not worrying about the big ones means I can focus on higher-value work (or take a five-minute dance break between Zoom meetings… see my next point).
Remember That Work-Life Balance Is a Thing (Really!)
Busy season has a way of making you forget that life exists outside of work—but here’s a secret: it’s okay to take a break. Seriously. In fact, it’s not only okay, it’s essential. And my clients will survive if I step away for a meal that doesn’t involve eating over the keyboard. My brain functions better when it’s not running on fumes, and my work is actually better and more efficient when I prioritize rest.
My husband and I have a tradition: every night we have what we call “sunset wine”. We climb a ladder to the roof and watch the sunset over an adult beverage. The birds are busy going back to their roosts, the sky changes colors, and my old friends the winter constellations start to draw their pictures up above. I picked this tradition during the pandemic, when I realized that I could not be relied upon to take a break. There was always another email that needed to be sent, another article to write, another emergency to address. But the sun doesn’t wait for “just one last thing”… it’s gonna set when it sets, and I have a date to keep. By creating an external trigger for my breaks, I was able to truly disconnect and decompress. And discovered in doing so that when I went back to work later that evening, I felt renewed focus.
It’s a similar phenomenon to when I started dancing, 12 years ago. I felt like I didn’t have enough time for physical exercise, because I was always so busy. But going to rehearsal three times a week only took about five hours—and it turns out the exercise led to higher-quality sleep, so that I went from needing nine hours per night to only seven-and-a-half. Net weekly gain: over five hours.
I use an accountability app to remind me to exercise, where my best friend can see that I’ve checked in each day, even if it’s just a quick stretch, breathing exercise, or a kitchen dance party while I’m making dinner. And once-a-week, a friend sets up a zoom session for one of our dance troupes, the Fabulous Ladies of Fitness. (In case you’d like to follow along at home, here I am at Chicago SummerDance leading 400 enthusiastic participants in a rousing routine to Laura Branigan’s Gloria.)
Lean on Your Professional Community
Accounting might be a numbers game, but I believe that it’s primarily about personal relationships. And especially during busy season, your community can be a lifeline. Whether it’s a QuickBooks ProAdvisor Facebook group, a local networking event, or a paid community like Bookkeeping Buds (I’ve been a participant for almost a decade) or my ‘Ask a CPA’ membership – having a place to vent, ask questions, and share wins is invaluable.
I can’t count the number of times a fellow ProAdvisor has shared a shortcut or app that’s saved me hours. And when things get overwhelming, just knowing that others are in the same boat is deeply comforting. It’s one of the main themes of my favorite conference, Bridging the Gap; last year I presented a panel there on “Vulnerability as a Strength,” about the importance of taking off our masks and sharing our challenges with each other; it absolutely builds trust and diffuses the isolation we often feel when times are hard. (Bonus tip: Last year’s BTG also reminded me how effective expressing gratitude and helping others can be in building resilience and improving mental health. Having a rough day? Lift someone else up who’s feeling low. Now two people feel better. This is one reason BTG’s Randy Crabtree and I both volunteer during tax season to assist AICPA as scholarship judges.)
I’m also a dedicated attendee of the bi-weekly AICPA Town Hall. Not only can I count on Lisa Simpson to offer the latest technical guidance, but I also get some “me time” that clients and team members simply aren’t allowed to interrupt. (Meeting hosts Lisa and Erik in-person and getting my moment on-stage with them at DPCA was a dream come true.)
Whether it’s the Town Hall, Unofficial QuickBooks Podcast, or The Accounting Podcast (honestly, whatever your favorite flavor of continuing education is), you can stack keeping up on industry guidance with community… and maybe even exercise (I love listening while I’m in the pool and I know many folks consume podcasts while on a walk). An easy three-fer.
So, don’t go it alone—tap into your community. It’s like group therapy… but with more bank feeds and spreadsheets.
Keep Perspective (And a Sense of Humor)
When a client “forgets” to mention a major business merger or a team member has to suddenly take a leave of absence, I sometimes let exasperation take over and decide I’m going to burn the whole thing to the ground. But laughter truly is the best stress relief—I’ve enjoyed quite a few accounting memes among WhatsApp groups and on LinkedIn that sometimes are just the ticket.
And of course:
Busy season is tough, but it’s temporary. And with the right tools, support, and mindset, we can get through it—and make a plan for each season to be better than the last.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a well-earned dance break to take.
Note! As my readers know, I am downright fanatical about transparency and full disclosure (often to my detriment, as you may have noticed that I have a wildly popular award-winning blog that is non-monetized). Though this particular post is a paid partnership with Intuit, I want you to know that a) I wanted to write an article on managing tax season stress anyway, but couldn’t find the time; getting paid allowed me the break from client work I needed to make it happen; and b) they didn’t delete a single thing when I presented it. In fact, they have been totally cool with all my Intuit-bashing since the first article I wrote for them… which impressed me quite a bit, to be honest. That’s four times now — I might just keep this win-win-win up.