“i know you’re busy, but …”
by frank stitely
the relentless cpa
a well-known practice management expert, whom i greatly respect, advises cpas never to tell clients that you don’t have time for them. i disagree with the never part. you know how it starts. on march 25th, the call comes in.
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“i know you’re busy, but…”
a request follows that could most certainly wait until after tax season. you are hip deep reviewing all the personal tax returns that got stuck in the process while you climbed out of the march 15th corporate tax ditch.
“i need to know if i’m paying unemployment taxes to the right states. i think i should be paying taxes to the people’s republic of california, but i’m not. i’ve been paying unemployment taxes to uzbekistan instead.”
you know this doesn’t have the urgency of picking at navel lint during tax season. she has been paying it incorrectly for the last half-century. another month won’t matter. nonetheless, you have a client who expects you to research unemployment taxes for california and uzbekistan in late march. of course, it’s just a “quick” question. what do you do?
our respected practice management expert would have you perform the research under the principle that you must always appear to have time for everything. i disagree. during tax season, you don’t have time for every request.
that’s a fact, jack.
if you drop everything to respond to this request, you’re keeping one client satisfied, probably not even happy, while making three or four others very unhappy waiting for their tax returns, which presumably are the entire point of tax season.
here’s where i think he goes wrong. he doesn’t believe in telling clients upfront, before and during tax season, that you simply don’t have time for everything and tasks that can wait must wait. that’s tax season. if you follow his advice, you have two alternatives.
do the research and make other clients unhappy. or tell the client that you don’t have the time to do the research until after tax season. both are bad alternatives. you end up making someone unhappy and probably getting an earful when your emotions are already raw.
i believe in setting expectations before tax season. i have previously written about our series of pre-tax season e-blasts getting clients ready for tax season. one of those explains that we don’t have time for everything during tax season. we focus on tax returns and year-end financial statements during tax season. we don’t have time for much else.
we do this with humor. we explain that the biggest problem we have during tax season is actually finding the time to prepare tax returns amid all of the other non-tax season requests. i use some ridiculous example of something a long-dead client asked me to do in the past. i explain that it’s not their request that’s the problem. it’s the 400 requests from other people that are the issue.
an underlying cause of the problem is that all your clients see themselves as your only client. if that’s the case, you are doing a great job of client service. however, this leads to the mindset that you surely have time for this one request. of course, we know it’s not one request. it’s 400 requests.
for example, a client told one of our admin staff last week, “frank will do this for me. we go way back.”
this came from a $500-per-year client. clearly, he sees himself as a very important client. i like him, but our practice doesn’t survive on $500 clients asking for favors in late february.
it doesn’t look like i’m succeeding at stopping the non-tax season requests from the above example. however, my goal isn’t 100% success. that’s not realistic, given the size of our practice. the goal is to stop most of the bleeding. any time that we recover adds to our tax season capacity and pushes off tasks until after tax season when we have more free capacity.
of course, april 16th rolls around and 400 clients all think i’ll have their tasks completed by close of business. but at least you’ve stopped most of the bleeding by communicating up front.