Many CPA firms enter tax season with cautious optimism. Last season’s problems are still fresh, the lessons were applied, and there’s a hope this year will be different.
Then the first few weeks hit.
Reviews start backing up. Senior staff get pulled back into admin work they thought they’d left behind. And, the pressure feels much the same, even after the changes that were made.
What’s often the case is that the changes the firm made weren’t the changes they actually needed.
Why tax season hits CPA firms harder than others
CPA firms operate with a level of built-in complexity that most other professional services firms don’t face. Much of that strain comes from two structural factors:
- Compliance-driven work with layered reviews. CPA work has to move through multiple hands — preparers, reviewers, and often partners — creating layers of work that, without deliberate structure, become sources of risk no one can see or control.
- A mixed client base with different needs. Most CPA firms serve both individual and business clients. That work requires different flows, timelines, and handoffs, but it’s still often handled by the same people at the same time.
During tax season, all of this is forced into a short window. To keep things moving, firms rely on workarounds to push work through. After the season ends, they look back at what broke and patch those specific points — adjusting isolated steps or adding new tools. Workflows become piecemeal, leading to a bloated tech stack and a process that runs on people remembering how all the scattered pieces fit together.
Nick Boscia, CPA, EA, and managing partner at Boscia & Boscia PC, has seen it firsthand. “When I joined my dad’s firm, every process was in his head. Everyone was doing things differently — collecting documents, onboarding, managing workflows.”
Over time, this starts showing up in day-to-day work: constant client calls, team burnout, and avoidable mistakes. Exactly the problems CPA firms seek to avoid each tax season.
For a while, these issues can be absorbed operationally. But eventually, they start showing up in the bottom line.
What this means for CPA firms
Once these issues move beyond day-to-day friction, they start to leave a real mark on the firm.
- Visibility is often the first thing to go. When work is spread across disconnected tools and informal handoffs, there’s no clear view of what’s actually happening. Leadership can’t step in to support the team and starts losing talent. Client questions go unanswered, eroding trust and loyalty. And firm owners are forced to react to issues as they appear.
- Costs follow. Firms end up paying for overlapping software. Research shows companies waste an average of 37% of their software spend on underutilized tools while unbillable time disappears into coordination and context switching.
- Growth becomes constrained as well. When workflows rely on people holding processes together manually, firms can only grow as fast as those individuals can handle the load. Training new team members takes time, and losing experienced staff becomes especially costly.
At Boscia & Boscia, Nick recognized these signals early. Today, he describes a very different reality: “Now everything’s consistent and trackable. Our team is more productive and our clients notice when we’re energized and not running on fumes and stressed out.”
The interesting part is what he — and other firm owners — changed to break that cycle.
Four practical lessons from CPA firm owners
While it’s not encouraging that so many firms run into the same breakdowns year after year, there is an upside: many have already worked through them. The tips below reflect what CPA firm owners have done to break the cycle and regain control of their practices.
1. Go digital
One of the first decisions many leaders point to is going fully digital. Brian Davis, CPA, CFE, founder and CEO of One Stop CPA, reached that conclusion after seeing how much time paper-based firms lost to basic retrieval issues. “Sometimes we’d spend an entire day searching for something that wasn’t filed properly,” he recalls.
Davis’ experience shaped what he wanted to avoid in his own firm. His goal was to build a practice that was “fast, efficient, and relationship-driven.” That led him to shift back-office work and client communication online, aligning with how clients want to work and providing more efficient service. A recent survey of 1,000 taxpayers done by TaxDome, a popular practice management software, found that 1 in 5 clients are willing to pay up to 50% more for faster service and 70% expect core collaboration to happen digitally.
Going digital wasn’t meant to replace personal connection; if anything, it freed up time for more of it. “You can still meet clients in person,” Davis explains, “but imagine how much more professional it feels to open a clean, organized digital file on an iPad instead of shuffling through folders.”
His advice to other firm owners is practical: “don’t wait for the ‘perfect’ system before you start. Pick one platform that handles 80% of what you need and commit to mastering it.” Consistency, he found, mattered more than perfection.
2. Make the system mirror how your firm works
Visibility is another key piece. Andrea MacDonald, CPA, owner of Steadfast Bookkeeping, shared that she focused on aligning her systems with how work actually flowed through the practice rather than layering on more tracking or reporting.
Andrea started by mapping out each service the firm offers and defining the steps involved. “We went through a process mapping exercise and then built out pipelines for every service we offer,” she explains. That work made workflows explicit and consistent.
Just as importantly, those workflows were built in one place. All clients and services were brought into a single system for managing work and communication. “I have more visibility into where every single task in my firm sits than ever before,” Andrea notes.
3. Automate where it actually helps
One more common piece of advice is to take routine work off the team’s plate so your team can focus on higher-value client work. Marie Greene, CPA and founder of Connected Accounting LLC, explains, “Automation allows accountants to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on strategic client support, directly impacting a firm’s bottom line and leading to better client satisfaction.”
Marie also stresses that the impact of automation depends on where firms apply it. “Start by identifying processes that are time-consuming and prone to error,” she advises. These are often tasks like data entry, reconciliations, or document management — work that repeats across clients and absorbs time that could otherwise be billed.
By focusing on a small set of high-friction tasks first, firms can introduce automation gradually, build internal confidence, and see early gains before expanding further.
4. Overcommunicate
Clear communication is one of those areas where small habits tend to make a disproportionate difference. Nick Boscia, CPA, EA, managing partner at Boscia & Boscia PC, describes it as a mindset shift. The assumption, he says, should be that people don’t know unless you’ve said it clearly — and more than once.
Inside the firm, that means setting expectations before tax season starts and reinforcing them through regular meetings, documented processes, and clear standards. Nick also emphasizes that leadership support has to be tangible, not symbolic: “You can’t just say you’re available — you need to show it consistently.”
The same approach applies to clients. Nick advises acknowledging questions as soon as they come in, even if you don’t have an answer yet. A quick confirmation, clear next steps, and written follow-ups reduce uncertainty and prevent small issues from escalating.
Nick’s rule is, “When in doubt, communicate more — not less.”
A final note
Busy season will never be effortless. Andrea MacDonald, CPA, said what we all know but don’t want to admit: “There will be stress — there is no way around that. Dealing with other people’s money is inherently stressful.”
But while some pressure is part of the profession, firms can control how it shows up day to day. From the insights shared by firm owners throughout this article — and from Andrea’s own practice — the difference comes down to structure. “The key is to build workflows and processes that smooth out the work to eliminate those peaks and valleys that traditional firms encounter,” she advises.
The work remains demanding. But with the right system in place, it becomes manageable and changes how firms, teams, and clients experience busy season.
- Learn more about the latest in automated practice management at Discover TaxDome – take a tour.
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