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So many firm owners work too hard during tax season with too little to show for by the end of it. You overwork between January and April, then you burnout and want to take time off in May. While many firms do make a large portion of their revenue during the spring, they could be doing much, much more. This blog will cover how firms can use accounting practice software to “hack” tax season for bigger profit.
You cannot change if you do the same thing every day. If you don’t change what you do this tax season, you’re not going to get a different result. So, if you’ve been dissatisfied with how previous tax seasons have gone–either too much stress and work or too little profit—then you must change how you do things or you’ll experience the same result year after year.
The fact is, successful firms do all three. If you want to change your firm, you’ll have to do some things differently compared to how you’ve worked in the past, and it all starts with an eye towards increasing client value through additional tax savings. In other words, tax planning.
You likely already use questionnaires to help get the data you need to complete tax returns. Some of the problems most firms have with data collection and sending and receiving files in general, include:
The important thing to remember is that tax planning questionnaires can actually be a key component of making a tax plan. This is because questionnaires allow you to obtain key pieces of data to produce a tax plan successfully. Sections a good tax preparation questionnaire will have include:
Tax preparation questions for businesses to obtain the key data you need to prepare a return AND complete a tax plan, include sections about:
Your firm can begin incorporation of tax planning questions within the tax preparation questionnaire. Our tax practice software has built-in questionnaires for this that you can use to begin collecting the information you need for tax planning while working on tax preparation. You can also scan tax returns to input data inside our tax practice software.
By simply using the right tax preparation questionnaires, you can have 70%+ of clients fill out a tax preparation questionnaire that is linked to the tax planning software. After April 15th, you’ll be ready to do tax planning for a large portion of your client base.
One thing that many firms do wrong is lumping together different services into one low price. To excel during tax season, make sure that cleanup is not included in tax preparation.
Don’t lump anything together! If you’re not sure where your pricing should be, consider using this pricing cheat sheet:
When you get your pricing right, you give yourself opportunities to upsell. You can get clients to go from tax preparation to tax planning, then to implementation, quarterlies, investments, insurance and more.
By presenting clients with a new opportunity such as tax planning, you will increase your revenue. There’s a consistent order to this, and it can be summarized as this:
Start the process by taking advantage of tax season. Use the right questionnaires so that much of the work of tax planning is already taken care of. This is a tax season hack very few firm owners take advantage of. Then, get your pricing right and begin upselling clients to more services!
On top of the extra revenue this will bring your firm, this method allows you to save clients more. With our accounting practice software, you can:
Stop doing things the old way, which is strictly preparing returns for compliance. Stop looking at last year only and start being proactive for your clients by looking at their future and what they could save. Stop doing just tax preparation during tax season and start using the right questionnaires so you can begin tax planning and leverage the work you’re already doing.
The new way is about reducing taxes with proactive planning and using tax practice software to calculate thousands of strategy combinations. Start getting clients to pay for planning, implementation and quarterlies, and use automation to enable staff to sell and fulfill tax plans without you. With accounting practice software, it’s possible, so schedule your demo today!
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