Accounting
Art of Accounting: Planning for 2025’s tax season
Tax season is about providing superior , high-value services to clients. That means doing everything necessary to make the experience of working with you pleasant. It also means considering everything you do from the vantage point of the client.
It’s about the client. That means user-friendly engagement, processes, communication and availability. It’s also a matter of exceeding expectations, treating deadlines as promises, keeping your promises, avoiding unnecessary extensions, never bad mouthing or blaming the client, and looking to add value at every opportunity.
It’s about your internal processes. Your processes should be established to facilitate your work and what your staff does. This includes major initiatives on error avoidance, sequential work scheduling and checklists. That’s all good, but the focus needs to be on how what you are doing will affect client services and deliverables. For instance, are the instructions clear? Can they be downloaded effortlessly by the client? Are the deliverables carefully labeled and identified? If paper documents are to be returned or forwarded, are clear instructions and envelopes provided? If there is a rush, were stamps put on envelopes, or a courier envelope provided (using the client’s account number)? Was your invoice presented with clear payment instructions? The point is that what you do is your business, but what the client receives from you is also your business. Do not sacrifice user-friendly client processes for internal expediency.
It’s about your staffing and training. Staff longevity with your firm is important, but it is also important to your clients. Revolving door staffing is upsetting, disconcerting and wasteful for you, but also for the clients who work with those staff people. Turnover is inevitable, but slowing down turnover can be very helpful on your internal processes as well as with client service. Clients have deep relationships with the partners but develop comfortable working relationships with the staff they regularly see and who they know do the bulk of the work. They open their books, share their concerns and in many cases look forward to their visit, be it in person or virtually. For that reason, reducing turnover is important. However, do not keep underperforming, undergrowing and underachieving staff for these reasons. Clients know who the dead heads are, but as long as they know there is a pipeline from that staff person to the partner, they overlook the staff person’s inadequacies. For that reason, you need to train your staff to let you know everything the client says to them and what is going on with the client. Everything! Staff who do not do that should not be permitted to continue working for you. Staff that do, regardless of their deficiencies, have a value to you. You need to manage this segment of the relationship because it is important.
It’s about making more money. This means pricing your services appropriately. You need to communicate the need for additional services before you perform them, explaining the reason and need for the added work, value or benefit to the client. It’s about the value. Provide value and you will make more money. Morphing into a commodity service practice will work great for you if that is what you want. Hey, H&R Block does quite well with that. However, if you want to be above the commodity level and be the true professional service provider you studied and trained to be, then you need to look at adding value at every interaction with the client. Also, bill promptly and if a special bill is necessary explain it to the client before you perform the services, so the client becomes empowered with making the decision. Doing the work because the client needs it, and charging for it afterward, does not work, is not a good best practice and will not have you get paid for the value you conferred to the client. One more thing (for now — there are a million more things, but not for now) is to call for payment as soon as the invoice becomes past due. My definition of past due is 10 days after the invoice was provided to the client. Make the call. It’s your money. Also, clients find comfort knowing you approach your practice as a business and also by knowing they are current with you. Yes! Comfort!
It’s about your culture. Your culture permeates everything you do and everyone you interact with and every minute anything is done in your practice. Your culture should include keeping every due date, responding promptly to every text, email or call from a client, and making the call when there is something unpleasant to tell the client or when something is on the client’s mind, and you know it is the kind of thing they will call you about. If you don’t know what’s on their mind, then you need to be in better touch with your client, so work at this. Also train your staff to understand how to anticipate questions about what is on your clients’ minds. They are part of your team.
It’s about having fun. What we do is work, but it also should be fun. Fun is contagious. If you are not having fun, the clients will sense that, and it will cause a fissure in the relationship. All fissures start small until they burst. Communicate that fun, and so should your staff. That way, your clients will look forward to your calls, not dread them.
Make your plans for tax season now based upon happy, pleasant and fun relationships with your clients while figuring out how to add value to every interaction with them. This works. I know this for sure!
Do not hesitate to contact me at
Eide Bailly, a Top 25 Firm based in Fargo, North Dakota, is expanding its presence in Southern California by adding Hamilton Tharp LLP. a firm headquartered in Solana Beach, its third M&A deal in a week.
Hamilton Tharp dates back over 45 years and provides services such as tax planning, trust and estate consulting, family office solutions and accounting to clients in the biotech, real estate and health care industries.
“Bringing Hamilton Tharp into Eide Bailly is an exciting step forward in our continued growth,” said Eide Bailly managing partner and CEO Jeremy Hauk in a statement Monday. “Their strong client relationships, deep technical expertise, and commitment to personalized service align seamlessly with our values. We’re proud to join forces with a team that shares our passion for helping clients thrive.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Eide Bailly ranked d No. 19 on
“While this is a relatively small acquisition in terms of size, the real significance lies in the strategic value it brings to Eide Bailly,” said a spokesperson. “This move strengthens our presence in California — particularly in the Solana Beach area — and reflects our continued commitment to serving clients throughout the state with a local, personalized approach backed by the resources of a top 25 CPA and advisory firm.”
Hamilton Tharp managing partner Tina Tharp wanted to expand her firm’s services for clients and create provide more growth opportunities for staff while staying true to their culture. “We were intentional about finding the right fit,” Tharp said in a statement. “Eide Bailly brings the scale and expertise we were looking for, but just as importantly, they share our values and people-first approach.”
Last week, Eide Bailly announced two other M&A deals: with
Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.
The most important issue is staff recruitment, training, retention and work conditions. While each of these is a separate issue, the whole staff issue is a neglected area when it should be the top area of concern. This has been so since I started practicing, and I am perplexed that meaningful actions are not taken to remedy the situation. I did, and many firms do, and they are much more successful than the others, but too many do not deal realistically with this.
Recruitment: Starting salaries have not kept up with overall business conditions, and I do not believe they have remained competitive when about 15 years ago they were at the top of the curve. This can be easily corrected by firms increasing their starting salaries. Many refer to the added 30 credits as a hindrance, but I don’t believe this is a more important objection than the lower starting salaries being offered. Staff recognize having master’s degrees as an enhancement that makes themselves more valuable and they feel good about it … after they get their degree.
Training: Training is a significant area and is done by many firms, particularly smaller practices, as a cookie cutter obligatory process, not focused on the staff person’s responsibilities and expected work assignments. Firms send staff to available CPE courses when they should be developing customized CPE, either in their firm or in partnership with similar firms or through their state society committees. (I’ve done all of these and it works.) Firms also need to become training organizations using error disclosure as immediate training opportunities and deliberate on-the-job training by everyone in a supervisory position. Firms’ cultures have to be to train and develop. In conjunction with this, all supervisors need to be trained on how to train.
Retention: Turnover is terrible. Two years ago, a Big Four firm had 25% staff turnover. Last year it was 17% (and they were voted one of the Top 100 best places to work both years! Huh?). Many firms neglect “marketing” the benefits of working for them and take the current staff for granted. Retention needs a deliberate effort by every supervisor, manager, partner and owner. It needs work and will pay the best dividends. This effort might not stop a person from leaving, but it could retain them for an extra year or more. An attitude that you want them to stay forever also helps.
Work conditions: Tax season hours are untenable at most firms, while some larger firms maintain tax season conditions after tax season ends or add mini periods of extended hours. In my own informal and unofficial exit polls, most people provide as the primary reason for leaving a lack of work-life balance. I know people from top 10 firms that leave public accounting for reasons that indicate a complete noncompliance by their employers with the stated “favorable work-life and caring atmosphere and culture” in those firms’ recruitment brochures. Firms show a total lack of attention to this.
Solution: This is an industry problem, but it can only be solved one firm at a time. My solution is to acknowledge the problem at your practice and then make every change necessary to eliminate that problem. You might not be able to do it immediately, but you can start immediately and work on these issues as they come up while starting a serious and meaningful training program. Every change needed can be implemented within a year. Let that year start now!
Do not hesitate to contact me at
Big Four firm KPMG
The solution draws on client-specific historical data, current tariff information, and the user’s organizational objectives to generate a tailored interactive dashboard that can provide detailed financial information with trade-related insights and data visualizations. People can examine their trade data, identify areas of risk, and understand the financial impacts of said risks. The solution also does in-depth scenario modeling, letting users look at a number of different hypotheticals and examine how tariff policy impacts them. Users can also refine insights by isolating high risk areas based on product, vendor, and country of origin.
Users get access to comprehensive tariff analysis that provides detailed insights into current and potential tariffs affecting your products and markets; real-time updates on the latest tariff changes and regulations; customizable reports to help make informed decisions and communicate effectively with key stakeholders; and an intuitive interface made to be understandable to those who are not trade experts.
“Today’s volatile global trade landscape requires companies to fundamentally rethink how they anticipate and respond to policy shifts,” says Rema Serafi, KPMG’s vice chair of tax. “By leveraging AI to transform vast streams of global trade data into actionable intelligence, organizations can rapidly model complex scenarios and make more informed decisions. Those who embrace this AI-powered approach will not only navigate current uncertainties but also position themselves to capitalize on emerging opportunities in this new normal of trade complexity.”
Llamadex Investment
KPMG also last week
LlamaIndex’s suite of services enables organizations to connect their proprietary data to large language models (LLMs). The company’s flagship offerings include LlamaParse, which provides parsing for complex documents with embedded tables and figures, and LlamaCloud, a managed ingestion and retrieval service for Retrieval Augmented Generation implementations.
KPMG’s investment is spearheaded by KPMG Ventures, which is dedicated to collaborating with and investing in early-stage start-ups in areas like agentic AI, data infrastructure, cybersecurity, and more. KPMG Venture’s minority equity investment follows recent investments in other AI-driven startups including Ema, Wokelo and Rhino.AI.
“As we continue to innovate and push boundaries in applied AI, a robust data foundation is essential for building effective AI systems, particularly sophisticated knowledge assistants and agentic solutions,” said Swami Chandrasekaran, KPMG principal for AI and data labs. “LlamaCloud and LlamaIndex provide the frameworks necessary to access, curate, and ingest data at-scale, enabling KPMG to develop differentiated, industry-specific solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes for our clients.”
KPMG’s investment was made in parallel to another made by the data and AI company Databricks. Together, these investments will accelerate the development and adoption of LlamaIndex’s innovative LlamaCloud and LlamaParse services, which have emerged as critical tools for enterprises implementing production-grade AI solutions.
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