Tax Season on Autopilot: The Workflow That Replaced Our 70-Hour Weeks

Before I describe the after, you need to understand the before.

March 2023. A fourteen-person accounting firm in Adelaide. Tax season had technically started in July, but the real crush began in September and by March, the firm was in survival mode. I had been brought in to consult on “operational efficiency,” which is the polite way of saying the managing partner’s wife had told him that if he worked another hundred-hour week, she was changing the locks.

Here is what a typical Monday looked like during peak season:

The office manager arrived at 7:00 AM to print the weekly status report. This was a spreadsheet. It had 340 rows — one for each active tax return — and fifteen columns tracking stage, assigned preparer, reviewer, documents received, documents outstanding, client contacted, date contacted, response received, preparation started, preparation complete, review assigned, review complete, client notified, return signed, and lodgement date. She would spend forty-five minutes updating the spreadsheet from notes people had left on her desk over the weekend.

By 8:30 AM, the three partners were in a meeting reviewing the status report. This meeting ran sixty to ninety minutes. Not because the partners were inefficient, but because the spreadsheet was always wrong. “It says Henderson’s return is in review, but I finished that Friday.” “Wait, did anyone hear back from the Morrison trust about their distribution statements?” “Who assigned me the Baker return? I have no capacity this week.”

After the meeting, each partner would spend thirty minutes sending status update emails to clients who had called over the weekend asking where their return was. Then they would start their actual work — the reviewing, the complex return preparation, the technical analysis they were trained to do — at roughly 10:00 AM, having already spent two and a half hours on administration.

The preparers, meanwhile, were working from a combination of the spreadsheet, email threads, and verbal instructions. Half of them did not know what to work on next until they checked with the office manager. Returns sat idle between preparation and review because no one had flagged them as ready. Reviewed returns sat in the partner’s outbox because no one had generated the client delivery email.

This is not a dysfunctional firm. This was, by every external measure, a well-run practice. Fourteen competent people who genuinely cared about their work. But their tax season workflow was held together by a spreadsheet, an office manager’s memory, and the collective willingness of the entire team to work until they broke.

The Numbers Behind the Burnout

These numbers paint a profession that is working itself to death while leaving the most obvious efficiency gains on the table. Seventy-one percent of firms are running tax season on manual coordination — spreadsheets, emails, verbal hand-offs, and heroic individual effort. They are doing the equivalent of running a warehouse without a pick list, hoping everyone knows what to ship next.

That cost estimate includes the direct time spent on non-technical coordination work, the productivity loss from returns sitting idle between stages, the overtime premiums for the additional hours required to compensate for lost time, and the rework caused by miscommunication — the returns that went to the wrong reviewer, the client who was sent the wrong year’s return, the document request that was never sent because someone assumed someone else had sent it.

The Transformation: What Changed

I worked with the Adelaide firm over a four-month period between April and July — deliberately starting after tax season so we were building in calm water, not during a storm.

The core insight was this: their tax season was not one process. It was seven distinct sub-processes, stitched together by humans. Each sub-process had clear inputs, outputs, and handoff points. And at every handoff point, something was falling through a crack.

Here is how those seven stages looked before and after:

The Results: One Year Later

The firm ran their next tax season on the new workflow. Here is what happened.

The Monday status meeting was eliminated entirely. Not shortened. Eliminated. Partners checked a live dashboard that showed every return by stage, assigned team member, and days in current stage. If a return had been in preparation for more than five days, it was automatically flagged in red. The partners did not need to ask anyone for a status update. The status updated itself.

Average return turnaround dropped from 22 days to 14 days. That is a 36% reduction. Not because the technical work was faster — the actual preparation and review time was roughly the same. The improvement came entirely from eliminating idle time between stages. Returns no longer sat in someone’s inbox waiting to be noticed.

The office manager — who had been spending twenty hours per week on status tracking during busy season — was reassigned to client liaison work. She now spent her time having conversations with clients about their tax positions instead of updating a spreadsheet about where their file was in the queue.

And the hours. The partners went from averaging seventy-five hours per week during peak season to fifty-eight. Still above a standard workweek, but the difference between unsustainable and manageable. The senior preparers dropped from sixty-five hours to fifty-two. Junior staff, who had been working fifty-five hour weeks, dropped to forty-six.

Nobody was working less. They were spending less time on the overhead that inflated their hours without producing any output.

Building the Workflow That Runs Itself

The mistake most firms make when attempting to automate tax season is trying to automate everything at once. They buy Karbon or TaxDome, configure a workflow template with forty steps, and then abandon it within two months because nobody wants to update forty status fields for every return.

The approach that works is different. You automate the transitions, not the work itself.

You are not trying to automate tax return preparation. That is skilled technical work that requires human judgment. You are automating what happens between the steps: the routing, the notification, the status tracking, the client communication, the deadline monitoring.

Here is the framework I use with firms:

Phase 1: Map the current process honestly. Not how it is supposed to work. How it actually works. Where do returns actually get stuck? Which handoffs are reliable and which are the ones that cause the Monday morning meeting arguments? Interview every team member, from the most junior preparer to the managing partner.

Phase 2: Automate the worst bottleneck first. For most firms, this is either document collection (covered in a separate article) or the prep-to-review handoff. Pick the single point of highest friction and automate it. Prove the concept. Let the team feel what it is like to have one stage of the process work smoothly.

Phase 3: Extend to adjacent stages. Once the first automation is running, extend outward. If you started with the review handoff, add client delivery automation next. Then add intake triage. Build incrementally.

Phase 4: Close the reporting loop. Once the major stages are automated, the status dashboard populates itself. You can now see, in real time, every return in the pipeline, where it is stuck, and why.

The Capacity Multiplier Effect

Here is the part that firm owners rarely calculate but should: automated workflow does not just save time. It increases the number of returns your existing team can handle.

In the manual process, a fourteen-person firm was completing approximately 340 returns per tax season. After automation, the same team completed 410 returns the following year. They added seventy returns — a 21% increase — without adding a single staff member.

The reason is idle time elimination. In a manual workflow, every return has dead time. It waits in an inbox. It waits for someone to notice it. It waits for a status update. It waits for the client to be notified. Cumulatively, a return that takes 8 hours of actual work might spend 15 calendar days in your firm, because 60% of that time is the return sitting idle between stages.

When you compress idle time through automated routing and notification, the same 8 hours of work happens in 7 calendar days instead of 15. Your team is not working faster. Work is simply reaching them sooner.

For a firm charging an average of $1,200 per individual return, seventy additional returns represents $84,000 in incremental revenue. With no additional staff cost.

What About the Tools We Already Have?

This is the question I get in every engagement. “We already have Karbon. Doesn’t it do this?”

Yes and no. Karbon, TaxDome, and Jetpack Workflow all have workflow automation features. They are good at managing checklists, assigning work, and tracking progress within their own platform. If your entire workflow happens inside one tool, their built-in automation may be sufficient.

But in practice, your workflow does not happen inside one tool. It spans your practice management platform, your email, your calendar, your document storage, your accounting software (QuickBooks or Xero for the client’s books), and your lodgement system. The handoffs between these tools are where manual work creeps back in.

The most effective approach treats your existing tools as components of a larger system. Karbon manages the internal workflow. Gmail handles client communication. Google Calendar tracks deadlines. QuickBooks or Xero holds the client data. Automation connects these systems so that an event in one triggers the appropriate action in the others.

The Before and After, Distilled

A partner at the Adelaide firm told me something six months after the implementation that I think about often. She said: “I used to start tax season with dread. This year I started it with a plan.”

That is the real transformation. Not the hours saved — though those matter. Not the additional revenue — though that matters too. It is the shift from reacting to managing. From being dragged through tax season by events to moving through it with a process that holds even when the volume surges.

Busy season will always be busy. The nature of tax work makes that unavoidable. But the difference between busy and chaotic is entirely a question of whether your workflow depends on human memory or systematic automation. The firms that figure this out do not just survive tax season. They scale through it.