Firstly, congratulations on completing yet another tax season! Whether it’s your 2^nd or 3^rd or your 45^th one, we all know it’s a major undertaking every year and now it’s time to take a well-deserved break! If you have quarterlies or other deadlines coming up and can’t take much time off, then definitely plan on something asap, so you get a chance to recharge those batteries!

Once you’ve done that, then as soon as possible thereafter, let’s do an analysis of how the season went. Memories can fade pretty quickly making this analysis harder to do.  So here are a few of the areas to look at:

1)How were your phone calls handled? Were clients serviced well by your administrative and other staff or were you interrupted too often to handle client questions yourself?

2) Did clients get well serviced? Their questions promptly responded by you and your team?

3) How was missing information handled? Smoothly? Or did it cause a lot of downtime and frustration in not being able to finish returns?

4) Was all work fully tracked so you weren’t having to worry about returns falling through the cracks? Were you quickly able to tell where each return was at in the process, and how near to completion?

5) Personnel – did you have enough? Did they perform well? Was staff morale good?

6) What was your client retention rate over the previous year?

7) Any problem/shady clients you want/need to get rid of?

8) How did your marketing preform for you? Even if it’s just referrals – were your new client numbers up or down over previous years? If you ran additional marketing campagins – what were the results?

9) A/R – any collection issues that need to now be addressed?

10) Opportunities for more work throughout the year! Who did you talk to that needs more tax and accounting help throughout the year.  E.g you recommend to a client that they should incorporate, you take a few minutes to explain how their tax liability would have been reduced if they had done so last year. Then you get back to the business of preparing their return, and the subject gets dropped and it’s left to chance as to whether the client follows through or not.. These are great avenues to provide additional off season revenue but more importantly, following up shows the client that you care and that you didn’t forget about them!

It’s also a great idea to get input from your team – some will have very useful insights and suggestions. However, it can be somewhat subjective so I always recommend doing the above objective analysis first!