Technology to Grow Your Accounting Services During Tax Season

The pace of work for most bookkeeping and accounting firms increases during tax season, but that doesn’t mean you should stop thinking about growth. As we’ve covered, growth doesn’t always have to mean taking on more clients and projects to earn more bottom-line revenue. A firm can grow in many different ways, from efficiency to customer service metrics to employee satisfaction. 

Because of the advancement of software for our industry, it’s much easier to maintain a growth-oriented mindset even when the day-to-day workload picks up. Here are a few of the best pieces of technology to have available to help your firm continue to improve key metrics no matter how much is on your plate:

Payroll management tool  

During tax season, your team’s typical workflows may change from how they’re ordinarily handled. For example, they may need extra hours to put together reports for clients who are expecting additional communication about performance toward goals. Maybe they have new expenses for specific tools used during tax season.  

It’s not efficient to ask your team to manually track these additional hours or expenses during the busiest time of year when they are probably already at or even above a comfortable workload. With the right kind of payroll management software, your team can do things like remotely log hours or expenses even if they are working somewhere outside their usual setting.  

Project management software   

There was a time when accounting and bookkeeping firms relied primarily on a highly organized set of physical documents kept in a filing cabinet or similar storage system. Today, accounting service providers use project management software tools to keep track of the relevant dates, parties, and deliverables required for every client engagement.  

Even if your project parameters remain the same during tax season, you probably have an increased number of them to deal with and may even face shorter deadlines. That makes it even more critical for your firm's project managers to keep everyone on track and informed about their responsibilities throughout the engagement.  

An email automation system  

Another big misconception we see—particularly among smaller, more traditional firms—is the belief that client acquisition requires a personal touch at every stage. Thanks to email automation, sometimes known as lead nurturing or “drip” sequences, your firm can communicate with prospective clients without any manual effort. An organization of any size can set up these sequences with relative ease, thanks to the wide availability of marketing platforms with this capability.  

This is especially important when things are busy and you don’t have a lot of time available for any kind of emails, let alone those that aren’t directly related to a client project. But that doesn’t mean you can afford to neglect the information that you’ll be sending out to people who submit a form on your website, for example. After all, these interested parties could become a paying client at some point in the future.  

An email automation tool can take a huge chunk of manual effort off your firm’s plate. While you may need someone to jump into an email chain to answer a specific question every once in a while, email sequences give you the chance to have ongoing communications with an audience during tax season without devoting your team’s scarce available time. 

Comprehensive analytics  

There’s so much going on during the busy season that many accountants and bookkeepers struggle with the concept of tracking their firm’s performance, sometimes known as metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs). While we’re not suggesting you should spend a significant amount of time reviewing and analyzing your analytics during tax season, at minimum, you should ensure systems are in place to allow you to track performance during the busy season. Some metrics are tracked by the individual systems they’re connected with, while others are part of a larger system.  

Once your firm’s workload gets closer to its usual pace, you can always go back and carve out some dedicated time to take a deep dive into your analytics and think about what worked well and what may have been inefficient. One of the best ways to compile several different kinds of metrics into a single narrative is to create an analytics dashboard that can give you at-a-glance information about your firm’s performance in several different categories, from customer service numbers to the amount of on-time project milestones.  

A final thought: don’t let technology overwhelm  

We’ve touched on the most important ways new digital tools can help your firm continue to improve its performance across several key areas, even when projects are moving quickly. One potential drawback of incorporating new technology in so many different areas is the extra work required to install, configure, and maintain various platforms. You might have one system for your CRM, one for your email marketing, one for payroll management, and so on.  

To ensure that you don’t become a victim of “tech fatigue,” it’s helpful to have a single platform through which you can handle multiple elements of your business. An all-inclusive accounting practice management software tool is the perfect solution to streamline all the different tactics you implement to ensure your bookkeeping firm continues to perform at a high level, even during the most hectic time of year. 

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