10 Time Management Tips for Tax Preparers During (Or After) Tax Season

Each day comes with a finite number of hours, and if you want to earn more money during your 24 hours, you’ll need to know how to maximize your time. Good time management as a tax preparer isn’t only about money though. If you’re able to take charge of your time you’ll feel happier, more focused and deliver better results to more of your clients along the way.

With that in mind, here are 10 ways to capitalize on your precious time during the busy tax season.

1. Put First Things First

Perhaps one of the greatest productivity and leadership books of all time is Stephen Covey’s 1989 bestseller 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

To write this, now infamous, best-seller, Covey studied 200 years of literature surrounding success and leadership and compounded his findings into seven concepts. Although a few of the concepts are somewhat contextual, one of the ideas that holds true for good time-management is step three: “Put First Things First”.

Put First Things First suggests that you should focus on the most important things first. If you’re wondering how exactly you can you identify what’s important, use these categories to guide you:

• Urgent and important tasks: do them now
• Important and not urgent tasks: schedule time to do these in future
• Urgent and unimportant tasks: delegate these to others where possible
• Not urgent and unimportant tasks: eliminate these, they’re a waste of time

Covey recommends that we should try to spend most of our time working on important tasks, more specifically, important and non-urgent tasks. Apparently, this is because urgent tasks often distract us from focusing on tasks that are intrinsic to our long-term goals and values.

2. Take Care of Yourself

Research has shown that you’re more effective, and more productive, when you’re happy. That’s great news for everyone, because who doesn’t want to be fulfilled?

While there are various factors at play that contribute to overall happiness, the major feel-good contributors are:

• Having strong, loving relationships
• Believing your work is meaningful
• Practicing gratitude
• Being fit and healthy
• Having fun regularly

Are you: eating well? Taking regular breaks? Celebrating your wins? Exercising regularly? Spending quality time with friends and family? And making time for fun and hobbies?

Any effort spent creating and building a tax preparation business will be wasted if you’re unable to bask in the benefits. Ergo, prioritizing your health and well-being is a must.

3. Use Time & Billing Apps

During tax season, the last thing you need is to be dwindling your time away on unnecessary administrative work. When time is of the essence, it’s crucial to know exactly where you’re spending it and why. To ensure that you’re staying on track of your hours, and your money, consider using time-tracking and billing apps like Harvest, FreshBooks, TimeCamp or QuickBooks.

The beauty of real-time tracking is that you’ll reduce time lost to administrative tasks and fixing invoicing errors. Plus, because you’re billing to one project at a time, you’ll be less likely to multitask (which is the enemy of productivity).

In addition to offering time-tracking and easy invoicing options, most time-tracking apps also provide other useful features like:

• Sales proposal templates
• Expense tracking
• Accounting reports

There is plenty of software out there so look around and choose one that best fits your business model.

4. Create a Client Questionnaire That Includes Financial Goals

It’s easier to “put first things first” for your clients when you know what they want. Each client that comes to you for tax preparation will have different short and long-term financial goals that you can work towards together.

To provide tax preparation with flair, create a financial goals questionnaire and send it to each of your new and existing clients. A few possible sections to include are:

• A checklist of assets and their estimated worth
• A checklist of liabilities and their estimated cost
• Amount spent on charitable donations, education costs, and healthcare, etc.
• Target retirement age
• Financial priorities in the short and long-term

Not only can you zero in on your client’s financial goals, but you can also identify patterns and behaviors related to their spending and saving habits. For example, are they following best practices when it comes to personal finance? Do their actions impact their credit? Can you step in with recommendations that might improve their relationship with money?

5. Consider Hired Help

As briefly mentioned in tip one (“Put First Things First”), think about delegating your urgent and unimportant tasks to others so that you’re free to spend time on more strategic matters.

Hired help doesn’t need to come in the form of full-time staff by the way. In fact, if you’re still in the early stages of your business, hiring full-time staff could be more of a liability at the moment. You could hire freelancers, virtual assistants, or demo software instead.

6. Provide an FAQ Page on Your Website

As you start to acquire more and more clients, you’ll likely notice the same questions arising day after day. Rather than acting as the only information source for all of these questions, curate an FAQ list and add it to your website.

You will likely always have people asking questions about your business, but if you have an FAQ ready and published, you’ll be able to:

• Help people take initiative and find answers for themselves
• Refer people to answers when you’re too busy to talk
• Copy pre-existing text into emails that you want to respond to directly

7. Use a CRM Software with Integrations

Another way to save time through streamlined processes is with a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that lightens the workload with clever integrations. Some