Essential Metrics for Increased Efficiency During Tax Season

Tax Season can feel like a nonstop whirlwind of paper and data entry, but it can be conquered by breaking it down into metrics. Tracking those is key to managing, and increasing, your tax season efficiency.

To manage your efficiency, you need visibility over your bookkeeping activity. After all, if you can’t measure your performance, how can you improve it? Using easily accessible data to track performance is one of the best ways to keep a pulse on how efficient your firm is.

Depending on your current tech stack, you likely already have access to important data that you can use to identify areas needing improvement. 

Below are a few lessons in efficiency you can take from Dext Prepare Advanced. From client-by-client insights to firm level statistics, use these metrics to track internal processes, improve client relationships, and boost efficiency and profitability during Tax Season.

Build a watertight workflow

Some bookkeepers gauge their outstanding tax season workload from the amount of paper in their in-tray, for others it’s a gut feeling. Neither of these works well in a digital world.

Our Outstanding Workload metrics give you the ability to take control of your work allocation with precision. At a glance you can tell, for each client, how many items are waiting to be processed and how many items need to be reconciled in your cloud accounting software. You can even see an estimate of how much time you need to spend per client to get up to date.

• Keep a tight hold on staff costs at the busiest period by ensuring that work is allocated to team members as efficiently as possible, making full use of all your staff’s time.
• Stay on top of everything and maintain a consistent, stable workload. No more late nights and overtime from work building up behind your back.
• Build a seamless client experience while taking care of your team – if staff need a break, you have the visibility to easily re-distribute work among the rest of the team and maintain a high standard of service.

Ensure you have the right data to close the year

As well as providing a range of methods for your clients to easily submit invoices and expenses, Dext’s Item Delay lets you track the average time between your clients receiving an item and submitting it to you. Here’s what the Client View page looks like.

Sending in their information promptly is essential to providing a reliable stream of data to sort their Tax Return quickly – make sure they’re doing their part.

• Ensure your clients are submitting items quickly so you can provide the most accurate, prompt service possible.
• The sooner your clients send in their information, the less chance there is of invoices and expenses being lost.
• Submitting information straight away means your clients don’t need to store any paper throughout the year. All they need to do is snap a picture of the invoice with the Dext app, and they can throw it away. We store the information securely in the cloud for at least 10 years whilst your subscription is active. For further information see our data retention policy here.

No item left behind

With an office full of paper, it is worryingly easy for documents to go missing. The cloud lets you track all your clients’ information as it comes and make sure you are staying as up to date as possible.

Inbox age showcases items in the inbox that have not been actioned. So if a receipt have been sitting there for over 30 days, you get a reminder to reconcile it and push it into your accounting software. This ensures that the information in your cloud software is complete, with no more items left behind to hold you up come Tax Season.

• Track the efficiency of your team to ensure they deal with items within a reasonable time frame after submission and work doesn’t stack up.
• Make sure you are meeting all of your Service Level Agreements with your clients, maintaining a high standard of service.
• Provide the most comprehensive advice possible, with all available information at your fingertips.
• Set deadlines within the team to make sure you are working at your planned rate and not falling behind.

Improve your client relationships

Chasing clients for items is an activity as old as bookkeeping itself. It wastes time, it’s stressful for clients and it gets in the way of productive relationships.

The Client View tracks when your clients last submitted information to Dext Prepare, giving you an easy way of tracking their engagement and activity. It also tells you if your client is doing their part to ensure their books are sorted in time.

• Reduce client exits by having the right conversations. Use the data to track if clients are becoming disengaged, before it becomes a problem for your firm. Have a soft conversation early instead of a more serious one later to keep your clients in good habits for their own benefit.
• Catch issues early with our Missing Paperwork Report. It  easily produces a report for your client of any items in your cloud accounting package that do not have an image of the document attached so you can have every box ticked.
• Avoid any sudden workload spikes by helping your clients submit their items often rather than letting them build up and submitting them all at once.

Use technology to share the workload

Automation is bringing huge changes to the world of bookkeeping. Dext Prepare gives you the tools to get information from your clients, extract the data automatically and publish it straight to your cloud accounting software, without you having to see a single item.

Our Efficiency metric monitors what percentage of your clients’ suppliers are currently set to publish to the cloud automatically. For example, if a client’s supplier sends invoices on a regular basis with the category and same tax coding, you can set rules to apply these automatically, and then publish straight away. Our top partners have at least 25%-30% of their suppliers fully automated. Find out more about Practice Insights here.

• Track how efficiently you are servicing your clients. Use automation to provide the most seamless experience possible during the busiest time of the year.
• Save time on data entry and checking, which you can use to provide more useful, more valuable services to your clients.
• Take on the extra tax season workload without the need for extra staff, as you can let technology do more of the work.

Take your Tax Season one step further

Moving your firm from where you are today, to a more efficient and profitable practice starts with identifying bottlenecks in your current processes, tax preparation included. Tracking these metrics easily within Dext Prepare Advanced will help you do just that — manage your tax season more effectively.

Dext Prepare gives you the tools to make bookkeeping more profitable by boosting productivity and efficiency by 3, 4, or even 5 times, while at the same time making the bookkeeping side of the tax preparation process effortless. This scalability allows you to increase the value of services for your firm and drive growth.

To keep you going on your journey towards increased efficiency, use these metrics to drive up your bookkeeper to client ratio. This is the key metric of productivity and tells you the capacity of each person on your team.

The journey towards tax season efficiency never ends – there are always areas for analysis and improvement. Using the metrics within Dext Prepare will take you further along your journey and give you the visibility needed to improve efficiency for you, your team, and your clients.

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