Case Study: Accounting Firm Automates Tax Season Workflow

Brennan & Associates is a 35-person accounting firm based in suburban Chicago that serves roughly 1,200 individual and 180 business tax clients each year. Like most mid-sized firms, their workload is wildly seasonal. From January through April, every member of the team operates at maximum capacity, and the administrative burden of collecting documents, assigning work, and tracking deadlines threatens to overwhelm the firm every single year.

By the time the 2024 tax season ended, the firm's managing partner had reached a breaking point. Three experienced staff members had resigned during the previous twelve months, citing burnout. The firm had turned away 40 prospective clients because they simply did not have the capacity. Extensions were filed on nearly 30 percent of returns, not because of complexity, but because documents arrived too late or tasks were assigned too slowly. The firm needed a fundamentally different approach to tax season operations.

The Challenge

Brennan & Associates faced three interconnected problems that compounded each other throughout tax season. First, document collection was entirely manual. The admin team sent emails to every client in early January with a list of required documents. Clients responded in every format imaginable: email attachments, physical mail, secure message through the client portal, even text messages with photos of W-2s. Tracking which documents had been received for which client required a massive shared spreadsheet that three people updated throughout the day, often with conflicting entries.

Second, task assignment happened in weekly partner meetings where work was distributed based on who the partners believed had capacity. There was no real-time visibility into workloads. Senior preparers frequently discovered mid-week that they had been assigned returns for which documents were still incomplete, wasting time they could not afford during peak season. Junior staff, meanwhile, sometimes sat idle waiting for work to be formally assigned.

Third, deadline tracking was a patchwork of calendar reminders, sticky notes, and institutional memory. The firm had no centralized system that showed which returns were on track, which were at risk, and which had already missed their internal deadlines. Partners learned about problems reactively, usually when a deadline was imminent or already past.

"We were running a modern accounting practice with a tax season workflow that belonged in 1995. Every year we said we would fix it, and every year we were too exhausted after April 15th to follow through." — Managing Partner, Brennan & Associates

The Solution

Brennan & Associates engaged OrderSync Pro to design and implement an automated tax season workflow that addressed all three bottlenecks. The project began in June, giving the team seven months to build, test, and train before the January kickoff.

The four-stage automated tax season workflow eliminates manual handoffs between document collection, triage, assignment, and deadline management.

The solution was built around three core automation modules. The first was an automated document collection system. Each client received a personalized portal link in early January showing exactly which documents were needed based on their prior year return and any known changes. As clients uploaded documents, the system checked them against the required list and updated the status in real time. Automated reminders went out on a configurable schedule: a friendly nudge after one week, a more direct reminder after two weeks, and a phone call prompt to the admin team after three weeks for any client still missing critical items.

The second module was an intelligent task assignment engine. When a client's document package reached completeness, the system automatically scored the return for complexity based on the number of schedules, entity types, and special situations involved. It then matched the return to an available preparer based on three factors: the preparer's skill level relative to the complexity score, their current workload measured in estimated preparation hours, and the filing deadline. Assignments were pushed to the team's practice management system instantly, with all client documents already attached and organized.

The third module was a deadline tracking and escalation engine. Every return was assigned a series of internal milestones: preparation start, first draft completion, reviewer assignment, review completion, client delivery, and filing. The system calculated these dates backward from the filing deadline and adjusted them dynamically based on actual progress. When a milestone was at risk, the system escalated automatically, first to the assigned manager, then to the partner if the issue was not resolved within 48 hours.

The Results

The first tax season with the automated workflow produced results that exceeded the firm's expectations. Document collection time per client dropped from an average of 6.5 hours to 1.2 hours. The automated portal and reminder system achieved a 91 percent document completion rate before the first internal deadline, compared to 62 percent the previous year. The admin team, which had previously spent nearly all of January and February chasing documents, was able to redirect that time to client service and return processing support.

Task assignment became virtually instantaneous. Returns were assigned to preparers within two hours of document completion, compared to a previous average of five to seven business days waiting for the next partner meeting. The capacity-based routing eliminated the feast-or-famine workload distribution that had been a primary source of staff frustration. Senior preparers saw their workload variance drop from plus or minus 40 percent week over week to plus or minus 12 percent.

The extension rate fell from 30 percent to 8 percent, and the remaining extensions were genuinely complex situations rather than administrative failures. The firm processed 1,680 returns that season, a 40 percent increase over the prior year, without adding a single staff member. Partner time spent on workflow management dropped by an estimated 15 hours per week during peak season, time that was redirected to client advisory work billed at premium rates.

Quantified results from the first tax season operating on the automated workflow system.

Key Takeaways

The Brennan & Associates project illustrates several principles that apply broadly to professional services automation. First, the highest-value automation targets are often not the core service delivery tasks but the administrative processes surrounding them. The firm's preparers were already efficient at preparing returns. The bottleneck was everything that happened before and around the preparation work.

Second, capacity-based task assignment is transformative for firms with seasonal workload peaks. The manual approach of assigning work in weekly meetings creates unnecessary delays and uneven distribution. Automated routing based on real-time capacity data ensures that every available hour is utilized effectively, which is the difference between needing to hire and being able to handle growth with existing staff.

Third, deadline tracking must be proactive rather than reactive. A system that alerts you to a missed deadline is only marginally more useful than discovering it yourself. A system that alerts you when a deadline is at risk, with enough lead time to take corrective action, fundamentally changes how the firm manages its workflow.

Finally, the return on investment for workflow automation at accounting firms is exceptionally high because the impact is concentrated in the period when every hour of professional time is most valuable. The $340,000 in additional revenue capacity generated during a single tax season dwarfed the implementation cost by a factor of eight.

Learn more about how OrderSync Pro's accounting firm automation can transform your firm's tax season operations, from document collection through filing, into a streamlined, scalable workflow.