Thursday thoughts: Status reports
Rory Sutherland is an expert on marketing and consumer behavior. I’ve seen a clip of his talk about Uber’s map feature a few times recently.
He explains that people are lot more patient when we can visually see progress being made. Calling for a ride and not knowing when it will show up is far more distressing than watching it slowly traverse the city on its way to pick us up. So even with two similar wait times, we’re a lot calmer as we watch it on the app’s map.
This year, I’ve fielded more tax return status requests from clients than in all my previous years combined. Some of that was due to a set of clients who had never had their return deadline extended. Some was due to a late and slow start to the season.
We’re working to communicate better about the status of tax return work to clients:
We will file an extension (with a valid estimate of the tax due, if applicable) for every return. (We’ve already explained this to our current clients.)
Clients will schedule a document review week. They commit to providing all of the necessary information to us by that week, and in return, we commit to completing their return(s), including passthrough returns, within three weeks of that week. They schedule on a first come, fist served basis with a limit of 10–12 reviews per week. If they miss the deadline they chose, they have to reschedule for later in the year.
We will use client-facing status indicators to signal where the return is in our workflow. (We use TaxDome, which recently added this feature.)
We spent way too much time and energy this year providing status updates, explaining extensions, and justifying our timeframes. I’m hoping our new systems mitigate much if not all of that next year. I know some will still want a speedier turnaround or be unhappy they couldn’t schedule an earlier document review week. But I’m hoping we can replicate the calming effect of watching the little car move along the map.
Speaking of a status update, we still have about ten passthrough returns and about 40 individual and corporate returns to prepare and file. My goal for next year is to be completely done by the end of August so we can focus exclusively on tax projections in September and October.
Now for your thoughts…
What changes are you making for next tax season to improve your clients’ and your experience? (If you haven’t done your tax season review yet, do it now!)