get clients to bring tax docs early … yes, early

the secret? humor, sarcasm and shame.

by frank stitely
the relentless cpa

there are easy ways to get clients to do what we need them to do. in our office, we call the process “training” clients. one of our biggest headaches is the late delivery of tax materials. so, we train our clients to bring their tax documents in early.

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we accomplish this through a series of e-blasts explaining our deadlines. the e-blasts start in december, and we call them “countdown to tax season.” they cover much more than our deadlines for clients to provide business and personal income tax returns documents.

we use the blasts to train clients in other areas – such as minimizing the use of staples when they give us their documents. we also discourage people from putting their documents in three-ring binders. as i’m certain you already know, staples and binders drive your admin staff crazy when they’re trying to scan documents.

the key to these e-blasts is humor. many of these e-blasts come from “the tax lady.” the tax lady is the church lady from “saturday night live” with my wig-adorned head photoshopped in. the e-blasts are written in her voice. the blast about staples talks about the need to conserve the world’s supply of staples for future generations. steel is expensive and damages the environment. think about that the next time you pick up that stapler.

our tax document deadline blast happens in late december or early january. for businesses, we follow up with a “do you know where your bookkeeper is?” blast. this targets business owners with bookkeepers who do little all year and then spend january and february trying to prepare the prior year’s books. we know that leads to late and lousy records for income tax preparation.

also, we know that last one works because we get pushback from the bookkeepers. shame is a powerful tool, particularly when done with humor and sarcasm’s special sauce. we have clients compete to be the first to get their corporate tax returns prepared in january.

as further reinforcement for our training, our engagement letter provides for a surcharge on tax returns prepared after our document deadlines. we offer a $50 credit for people who voluntarily go on an extension before we start working on their returns. this discourages people from dropping off a couple of documents and proclaiming that they met our deadline. the $50 credit gives them a reason to avoid that charade.

bonus tip: schedule only productive meetings.

by now, you had better be on board with the concept that meetings can be a huge waste of productivity. our first salvo in the war against useless meetings was surrender. rather than tell people that we weren’t going to schedule useless meetings, we just stopped scheduling them.

if you schedule meetings, they will come. we stopped scheduling tax season meetings to get tax documents. we feared a tsunami of phone calls in late march to schedule that never came. our phone volume actually decreased from a lower volume of phone calls to rescheduling the meetings that we had scheduled.

before we were married, my wife used a different tax preparer. i know what you’re thinking. laura didn’t marry me for my good looks. she married me to get a lifetime of free tax returns. that’s possible. she was maxing out her 401(k) before i came along. i told her i found that sexy. i still do.

every year she trekked to her tax preparer’s office to have the annual tax meeting, where she dutifully handed across the table one form at a time at the request of the preparer. her preparer thought this exercise the height of great client service – boring the crap out of a client who needed to be in other places.

laura was a single mom who needed her time back to do minor things like pick up her daughter from daycare or help her daughter with homework. compare those alternatives to meeting with a tax preparer to hand over paper documents one at a time. pick the least important activity.

i’ll wait. …

this brings a little perspective to who actually wants meetings, doesn’t it?

laura knows a lot about my firm. we spend time in the mornings talking about work while she does stuff with her hair for at least eight hours before work. land wars in asia have been won in less time.

she has told me many times what a great deal she thinks we have for people. they can post their documents to our software app, and we take it from there. clients get hours of time back in their lives.

i’ve mentioned previously that sometimes we, the cpas, are the ones who get trained. sometimes we are the ones who need the training. stop wasting clients’ time. consider yourself trained.

posted on june 20, 2023