If you don't know where you are, a map won't help!

Written before the October 15 extension deadline.

In two weeks the extensions go out. Then most firms exhale, and by mid-November year-end planning is on top of them. The debrief never really happens. Someone says “we have to fix the organizer process” in a hallway, and next March you have the same conversation.

This window is the only honest look you get at your practice all year: close enough to remember accurately, far enough away to discuss without anyone getting defensive.

So it's time to assess how your practice is doing, and prioritize what needs fixing.

Questions, not opinions. If you can answer most of them, you're ahead of nearly everyone. If you can't, that's the finding.

Work dynamics

• How many times does a human touch an average return, start to finish? Not hours — touches. Every pick-up and put-down.
• How many partner hours went to work a senior could have done? The Rosenberg Survey puts partners at roughly 14% of the billable hours under their control. Under $10M, it's usually higher.
• How many days does a return sit in WIP — and how many of those are you waiting on a client who doesn't know you're waiting?
• What share of returns came back from review more than once? Were those notes judgment, or arithmetic?
• What was your extension rate, and how does it compare with three years ago? If it's drifting up, extensions have stopped being a service and become a coping mechanism.
• Is there one documented way a return moves through your firm, or one per preparer?
• How many overtime hours did the firm log between February 1 and April 15, and what did they cost?
• Who left between April and June — and would they have, if the season had run differently?

Technology

• How many separate applications and subscriptions does the practice pay for? Count them properly: tax prep, practice management, document storage, portal, e-signature, payments, research, time and billing, payroll, the workflow tool someone bought in 2023.
• How many of them hold a copy of the same client's data? When two disagree, which one is right?
• When something breaks between two systems, who diagnoses it? Not which vendor — who in your firm. Each vendor will tell you it's the other one's problem, and somebody on your payroll referees that, unbilled.
• What is total annual software spend — per seat, and as a percentage of net fees? Most firms are surprised, because it arrives on a dozen different credit card statements.
• How much staff time went to re-keying data from one system into another — the same figures, typed twice, by someone you pay $90 an hour?
• When you onboard a new hire, how many logins do they need before they're useful?

Business

• Which clients did you lose money on last season? You can probably name two. The list is longer.
• Which clients haven't been repriced in three years or more?
• What share of fees was advisory rather than compliance — and is that share moving in the right direction?
• What's your net remaining before partner compensation? The AICPA's MAP survey puts the median near 37% of net fees.
• If you were buying this firm, what would you pay — and what would you fix first?

Put this one to the partner group out loud: if next season looks exactly like this one, is that acceptable?

Not “could it be better.” Of course it could. The question is whether a repeat is tolerable — because a repeat is the default.

Nothing changes between now and January unless someone decides it will, in the next six weeks, while the evidence is still fresh.

Next, the map: the seven stages every 1040 passes through, and what each one actually costs.

Which of the three would you start with? Work Dynamics, Technology or Business?