The Surviving “Busy Season Accounting” Guide

Busy season, in many ways, seems unavoidable.

But with the right approach, it can be much more manageable.

And in my experience, you can even get through it without working more than 40 hours per week at all.

In this post, I’ll lay out 11 simple tips your firm can implement to keep yourself sane while avoiding overtime hours during the busy accounting season.

Let’s get started!

Table of Contents

• Why Is There a Busy Season for Accountants?
• 11 Tips to Master the Busy Season
  • 1. Make Sure Your Clients Have Clear Deadlines 
  • 2. Implement Capacity Planning (At Least) Several Months in Advance
  • 3. Let Go of Unprofitable Clients
  • 4. Use 3-Tiered Pricing to Control Capacity
  • 5. Increase Your Pricing Across the Board
  • 6. Review Your Core Processes in Advance
  • 7. Delegate Tasks to Team Members
  • 8. Optimize Your Work Habits
  • 9. Automate As Much As Possible
  • 10. Replace Meetings With Loom
  • 11. Prioritize Your Self-Care

Why Is There a Busy Season for Accountants?

During tax season, many firms have their hands full with accounting tasks like preparing financial statements and meeting critical tax deadlines.

Typically, the tax and audit busy season runs from January to April for accounting professionals.

This season is the most dreaded in the entire fiscal year, and it’s often characterized by long hours, non-existent work-life balance, and time away from family.

However, all of this starts with one mistake: poor planning.

Think about it: everyone, including your clients, knows the key tax deadlines and deliverable dates well in advance…

So there’s really no excuse not to plan ahead for busy season.

To create a proactive plan, you need to identify:

• The resources you need to allocate
• The amount and types of projects you’re willing to take on
• How you can distribute workloads evenly among your team
• How much growth you’re ready for

Another big reason behind brutal busy seasons is falling to the “tax season” mindset.

This is when people in the accounting profession resign to overwork and personal sacrifices before it even begins.

Being busy during this season isn’t necessarily inevitable, though. It’s 100% possible to survive.

You can even thrive during it — just like one of our Future Firm Accelerate members did.

And with the right strategies, you can turn the accounting busy season into a regular couple of months. 🙂

11 Tips to Master the Busy Season

1. Make Sure Your Clients Have Clear Deadlines 

If you’ve ever experienced a problematic tax season, collecting client documents and tracking their information have likely been root causes.

Even though tax time is seasonal for clients, your firm doesn’t have to operate that way.

You can train clients to treat this as a year-round process — sending documents early, staying organized, and staying responsive. That way, you have everything you need to create financial statements and meet tax deadlines as early as possible.

It’s much easier to make that happen when your clients are as proactive as you are.

2. Implement Capacity Planning (At Least) Several Months in Advance

No amount of workflow improvements or automation tools can solve not having enough hours available to handle your firm’s workload.

Capacity planning provides a solution to this. This is when you look at:

• How many billable hours your team actually has available
• How many hours you’ll need to deliver on client work

From there, you can objectively assess whether you have enough capacity or if you need to make adjustments before it’s too late.

Without this clarity, most firms end up hiring reactively — only after they’re already over capacity.

The problem is at that point, you’re already in the thick of it: flooded with tax returns, chasing documents, and barely keeping up.

In turn, this creates a few serious risks:

• You don’t have the bandwidth to properly vet new hires
• You’re more likely to hire someone who’s not a great fit
• Even if they are a good fit, they’re walking straight into chaos and might not stick around

When you plan in advance, you know exactly when you’ll need extra help.

That gives you time to find the right person and onboard them properly, so they’re ready to hit the ground running when busy season arrives.

And like I shared in a LinkedIn post, capacity planning is key to preventing overtime hours and weekend work (even during tax season).

3. Let Go of Unprofitable Clients

The reality is that not all clients in accounting firms are good clients.

Some just end up being a complete pain to deal with and end up taking up a disproportionate amount of your time.

Make sure every client you have is profitable before the busy season hits. If this isn’t the case, you need to let them go or manage their service expectations.

Besides, having fewer clients allows you to maintain focus more easily.

This translates to better service and makes it easier to upsell later on, which you can perform with two kinds of calls.

If you want more tactics like this, you can join my 9,500+ Future Firm newsletter subscribers for free.

4. Use 3-Tiered Pricing to Control Capacity

Three-tiered packaging is a pricing strategy in which you divide your services into Bronze, Silver, and Gold plans.

Each plan is designed so that it’s easily repeatable across different clients, which simplifies capacity planning and delegating tasks evenly.

In three-tiered pricing, your desired profit margins are also built into each plan, which means every client translates into real profits instead of just more work without much to show for it.

You can get creative by delivering work in different ways (that make sense for your firm) so not every single client gets the “premium” offering (which drains your capacity) at suboptimal prices.

As an example, your Gold plan might include meetings to review the client’s tax return before filing it, whereas your Bronze plan might only include support for email questions.

Here’s an example of 3-tiered pricing from Pilot:

5. Increase Your Pricing Across the Board

I’m not done with pricing yet…

One of the biggest reasons work-life balance for accountants sounds so impossible is accountants need to work excessive hours just to make a profit.

But the solution is quite simple: charge more!

Increasing your pricing will have two outcomes.

1. You’ll increase the amount of revenue per client.
2. Price-sensitive (and usually capacity-heavy) clients will probably leave.

This is a win-win scenario for your firm since, as discussed above, bad clients make accountants’ work so much more exhausting than it needs to be.

Here is a price increase email template you can use. Feel free to customize as needed!

Still, it’s important to be fair to your clients. Make sure you communicate your price increase in advance.

This way, you give them enough time to consider their options and find another firm that might be a better fit for them.

6. Review Your Core Processes in Advance

Having a series of well-defined systems that deliver consistent results is one of the keys to running an efficient firm.

Put differently, if any of your core processes in your accounting workflow have a gap, they will bog you down when you are at your maximum capacity.

That’s why taking the time to analyze and measure how efficiently your core processes are running before busy season significantly impacts how the season will go.

7. Delegate Tasks to Team Members

Trying to do everything yourself is like going through two busy seasons in one.

Like I shared in this LinkedIn post, I struggled with perfectionism earlier in my career…

But here’s the truth: just because your team’s work isn’t “perfect” by your standards doesn’t mean it’s not good enough for your clients.

In fact, many of the things some firm owners obsess over don’t actually move the needle when it comes to client satisfaction.

Clients want accuracy, responsiveness, and results. They’re not worried about whether your team grouped the line items exactly the way you would have in their financial records or quarterly reporting.

The longer you hold onto everything, the longer you stay buried in work that someone else could handle just as well (or better). You’ll be surprised at how much weight lifts when you stop striving for perfection and start trusting the people you hired.

Because here’s the bigger picture: when you’re stuck in the weeds, you’re working in the business.

But if you want to grow, lead, and ultimately free up your time, you need to work on the business.

8. Optimize Your Work Habits

Hopefully, you’re doing this year-round, but the busiest time of the year gives you the opportunity to evaluate how you work.

Take some time to evaluate how your personal work habits are serving you.

Do you try to multi-task too much? Do you feel the need to immediately respond to e-mail or Slack? Do you start the day without a clear list of priorities?

Work on eliminating waste, and being present as much as possible when you get into your workday. Then, hopefully, you can relay this expectation to your team and create an organizational sense of calm and focus.

Here are a few tactics you can implement right away:

• Write down your plan for the day: Look at the big things on your plate and write them down. This will give you a focused start to the day. Here’s how I do it (it’s not fancy, but it works):

• Group similar tasks: Batch related activities (like client follow-ups or reviewing financials) to reduce context switching and improve flow.
• Learn to say “no”: Protect your time by setting boundaries around last-minute requests or low-priority tasks that don’t move the needle. You can listen to me talk in better detail about this topic as a guest on The Lifestyle Accountant Show. Here are a few scenarios I would say “no” to that I shared on LinkedIn:

9. Automate As Much As Possible

If the future of accounting had a face, it would be automation.

The key is to use it to your advantage without getting overwhelmed (I mean, there are over a hundred apps you could be implementing!)

So where to start?

• First: You need to document your processes. By getting granular about the specific tasks you and your team are doing on a day-to-day basis, you can identify the most repetitive tasks.
• Second: Try to subtract rather than add. If the goal is to simplify the busy season, look for areas to apply automation (ex: using robotic process automation in public accounting) that free up time. This sounds obvious, but sometimes there’s a temptation to add a new tool or any accounting software that is purely an additional “nice-to-have.”

You can automate repetitive tasks like several compliance and data entry work. This gives your people more time to focus on communication and other accounting services. Start there.

10. Replace Meetings With Loom

During busy seasons, you should avoid meetings like the plague.

They are time-consuming and get in the way of you and your team getting work done. The problem is that sometimes you may need to convey an amount of information that isn’t practical via email.

This is where Loom comes in.

Loom is a screen and video recording software that makes it easy to record quick explanation videos. This way, you make sure everyone knows precisely what you are talking about, and avoid a meeting. Also, Loom has a free version to start.

11. Prioritize Your Self-Care

You are the most valuable asset your firm has. So if you don’t deal with accounting stress right and run yourself to the ground, the whole firm suffers.

As much as many accountants justify (and even expect) unsustainable work paces, prioritizing your self-care is actually one of the best things you can do to protect your firm’s stability and growth.

So, make sure that whatever healthy habits you have established in your life, you continue to practice them, even during the hectic tax filing season.

Make Yourself Less Busy This Tax Season

That’s a wrap.

I hope this article helped you figure out how you can make the accounting busy season a lot less stressful.

I know many firm owners who work no overtime hours during tax season — and if they can do it, you can too. 🙂

Do you approach your work differently when tax season comes around? Is there anything that I missed?

Let me know in the comments below!

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