Surviving Tax Season: Expert Advice From Accounting’s Top Voices
With tax season here again, accountants everywhere are feeling the pressure. Long hours, tight deadlines, and rising client expectations make this time of year challenging for even the most seasoned tax professionals.
At Blue J, we know just how, well, busy busy season can be. In fact, our generative AI solution for tax research saw a 140% increase in all tax questions asked from February to May of 2024.
Hear from the Experts
To help you make it through the hectic months ahead, we sat down with a few of accounting’s top voices to ask them for their advice on how to survive (and thrive) during tax season. Get expert advice from Jody Padar of The Radical CPA, Jason Blumer, CEO of Blumer CPAs, and Hitendra Patil, best-selling author on accounting technology, right here on the Blue J blog.
(Responses have been edited for clarity and length.)
1. What do you wish you had known about tax season before you started working in accounting?
Key Theme: Across the board, our panel of experts wished they’d known more about building balance into their busy season schedules.
Jody Padar: I grew up in a tax firm. My dad was a tax guy, and I’ve been around this stuff since I was little. He had a home office before that was even a thing. People would call, show up at our house, and I’d make appointments for him! Back then, we’d take handwritten data input sheets to CompuTax for them to process on their mainframes. Twice a week, we’d go for ice cream—that was how I saw my dad during tax season. As a pro, I wish I’d known this: Tax season doesn’t have to be working a ton of hours. You can plan ahead and make it work for you. Hours are a choice. Structure your life, price your work appropriately, and work smarter outside of tax season, and it won’t own you.
Jason Blumer: I wish I had known more about pacing my time, pacing my breaks, and the preparation I needed mentally to go through such seasons. All of us do hard things in our work, and some of us have prolonged difficult seasons like tax season. But there are ways to pace this work in a way that can be healthier for the professional. I wish I had been taught to get up earlier in the morning before work to settle my mind, work out, and prepare for a long day. This would have saved me tons of mental burnout!
Hitendra Patil: If I could travel back in a time machine, I would tell myself that tax season is not just about tax returns, software, and deadlines. It also involves balancing a lot of competing expectations, both from clients and from my team. I really wish I had understood that tax season is a tightrope walk that requires managing these expectations, as well as client relationships, deadlines, and all the emotional ups and downs along the way. To make things more stressful, a lot of tax season work isn’t even in-house stuff to be completed at your office. It is like a reality TV show; everyone is watching live!
Key Takeaway: Make time for the activities that matter. While tax season can easily take over your life, you don’t need to let it. Scheduling in time for a workout or a walk with family ensures you don’t lose that all-important work-life balance.
2. What do you consider to be the biggest pain point for practitioners during tax season and why?
Key Theme: From missing documents to endless emails, client interactions proved to be a common pain point.
Jody Padar: Getting documents from clients! It’s a nightmare. You tell them to use the portal, but they don’t. They do what’s easy for them, not you. You’re chasing documents, answering random questions, and trying to keep things moving. It’s frustrating. Managing that flow of information—that’s the real pain. In the old days, everything came in via mail or during an appointment. Now, it comes in 15 different ways and communication is all the time.
Jason Blumer: This probably has to be the compression of trying to fit so much work into a few short months. With the higher volume of client emails, it’s hard to be efficient and quick and still get the clients the answers and service they need. Many firms are beginning to try to schedule their appointments upfront with clients (if they can), get engagement letters and payment for the return done by the end of January, or even be more intentional about the extension plan with clients, in order to push some of the work out into the summer.
Hitendra Patil: There used to be a huge bottleneck in clients sending you the required information. You were ready to start work but had to keep chasing clients for the missing paperwork. With the cloud and with automation, that has undoubtedly reduced, but it is still a major pain point. One challenge that has not gotten any easier for tax practitioners is trying to ensure compliance with tax laws. A lot of accountants are doing inefficient, manual research, and the reality of fast-moving tax regulations means the sheer volume of work it takes to keep up this way can lead to burnout.
Key Takeaway: While you can’t control how clients act, you can control the systems you put in place for interacting with them. Making instructions as clear as possible, scheduling appointments in advance, and setting reasonable expectations around response times can help to keep both you and your clients happy.
3. What has been your worst (or most memorable) tax season experience, and what did it teach you?
Key Themes: Whether it’s an ongoing work project or a major life event, unexpected circumstances can upend even the best-laid plans for tax season.
Jody Padar: My son was born six weeks early. On March 31st. During tax season. Surprise! I’d been working nonstop, and then boom—baby time. He was fine after a 6 week NICU stay, thank God. I went back to work after leave and immediately got let go. It was a blessing in disguise. I stayed home that summer, regrouped, and started at a new firm the following January. Here’s what I learned: Treat your people well. Use tech to work smarter, not harder. That’s why I push tech and AI so much now—it lets you go home on time and eliminates the ‘crazy’ of busy season. It’s why I’m so passionate about changing this profession. Women shouldn’t have to choose between work and family. We can do better.
Jason Blumer: I worked in a firm that had multiple offices. So I had to get up early just to drive to the other office hours away, put in a full day, and then drive back at night. On top of that, I was managing some audits as well, so I had to keep that work moving during these difficult tax seasons. Like any difficult experiences in our careers, this teaches you just how much you can do during those hard times. And it teaches you how to do them better next time. Now I’m a very efficient producer of my work and it came from those hard times early in my career.
Hitendra Patil: Just before tax season, one of my larger clients decided to implement new tax software AND new accounting software—without telling us in advance. While changing software for tax season can help to boost efficiency across workflows, everyone should be on the same page. The main lesson we learned from this experience was that we needed one of our team members to be involved in regular discussions with clients throughout the year, so we would know about big changes like these before they happened.
Key Takeaway: Although it’s helpful to prepare for tax season in advance, you can’t plan for everything. A difficult commute, last-minute client changes, or even an early addition to your family—you never quite know what’s going to happen. When tax season takes an unexpected turn, be ready to improvise.
4. What’s your top tax season survival advice for people working in larger firms? What about for sole practitioners?
Key Themes: Time spent preparing in advance gives you time back during tax season.
Jody Padar: Embrace AI. Get excited about it! The world’s changing and this is our chance to do cooler, more creative work. Use tech to save time but make sure to price for it. Focus on what matters—your clients and your life. Don’t just survive tax season—own it.
Jason Blumer: I block my calendar in full each week for a full 6 days. I’ve been doing this for a decade and it has changed my life. The time I spend planning my week (either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning) is the most effective time I put into my work each week. At first, you feel like the planning is a waste of time. Then you realize that the planning is what allows you to be productive, allows you to plan for disruptions, and to have calendar blocks that guide your distracted mind in difficult seasons. When my calendar blocks get disrupted (and they always will), I take a few moments to update the plan, move my blocks around, and dive back in.
Hitendra Patil: If your firm has a tax prep factory, there is no substitute for standardization, intense training, playbooks, and as much tech as possible. Delegate through training, so you prepare your team in advance. Organize your processes and tech before tax season. Gather information from clients as early as possible and make it easier for them to send you the info. Then, when you have everything, execute. For sole practitioners, it boils down to energy management, not just time management. Take regular breaks. Set boundaries. Learn to say ‘no’ to last-minute stuff from clients.
Key Takeaway: Even as tax season ramps up, it isn’t too late to take a step back and reassess. While it’s easy to tell yourself you don’t have time for reflection right now, an hour or two spent checking in on your tech stack or time management techniques can save you days down the line.
5. Any final advice for surviving tax season?
Key Themes: Tax season isn’t just something that happens to you. You get to decide what this season means to you and what you want to get out of it.
Jody Padar: Tax season is what you make it. It’s opportunity season. This is when we get to do cool work. Complaining about tax season is like a gardener saying he doesn't like spring. Plan ahead, use tech, and stop letting it run your life. This is your chance to innovate and make things better. Don’t settle for the way it’s always been done.
Jason Blumer: I think we often complain about tax season as if we have no control over it. But we have more control over the season than we think. We started only accepting individual tax work that was tied to a business many years ago and it has greatly lowered the impact of a difficult tax season. We also work on building in times of rest for ourselves, so that we can maintain our energy during the season. Lastly, we don’t have to do everything a client tells us to do. We may hear the clients complain but we take our stand and make sure the relationship with the client doesn’t come at the expense of our health.
Hitendra Patil: AI can do a LOT for tax professionals, especially during tax season. I remember my very early career days when I would argue with the computer department, ‘Hey, if a computer can do it, why should I do it manually?’ ‘Why can’t you write software code to do this and do that?’ Even today, that thinking holds true: If AI can do it, why should I do it manually? On the more human side, it is important to remember that even though tax season is challenging, it is one of those rare opportunities to strengthen relations with your clients. So try to make the most of it!
Key Takeaway: You’re in control of your tax season experience, and part of taking control is deciding what tax season means to you. Sometimes, all it takes is an attitude shift to turn tax season from an obstacle into an opportunity.
Turning Advice into Action
Despite its reputation, tax season doesn’t need to be overwhelming. By preparing in advance, understanding what to expect, and implementing the right systems and strategies, you can go from surviving to thriving.
Interested in learning more from Jody, Jason, and Hitendra? Join us for a special panel webinar on February 13 at 1:00-1:45 PM ET, to hear accounting’s top voices speak live about their top advice for surviving tax season.
To discover how Blue J can transform your tax research—during tax season and beyond—explore our available plans or book a demo to speak with one of our experts.
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