Tax Season 2018 Blog Series [9/10] – 5 Next Steps After Tax Season Is Over

With Tax Season 2018 blog series, our aim is to help accountants, CPA, tax professionals and business owners to have an easy, accurate and a secure tax filing season.

As we are coming to the end of the blog series, in this post, we’ve shared few things that you should keep in mind and follow to better cope with your business finances and taxes next year.

Even if the tax season is over, the work doesn’t end. After all the chaos of documents and forms, accountants and CPAs often experience less stress. However, they have plenty of things to do that keep them busy throughout the year.

things-to-do-after-tax-season

And this is the right time to secure success for the year make sure that all your professional practices are right as they look forward to next busy season.  Here are some ways accountants and CPAs can make the most of their post-tax season.

1. Filed for an Extension? Get Busy on It

Often companies, small business owners, and accountants need to file for various extensions which means that tax season isn’t actually over. This allows companies to organize their financial information, determine goals and catch up accounts before filing the return.

Don’t wait until the last moment to file the extended return. Try taking advantage of post busy season lull and finish your returns. Also, if you are getting a refund, the sooner you file, the sooner you will get the money.

2. Do a Post-tax Season Analysis

After the tax season is over, various firms engage in self-examination and analyze how successful they were as compared to previous years. Whether it is done through a standardized process or through informal conversation, the goal remains to evaluate the overall performance, build up their strength and get rid of all the weak point faced during the season.

It’s important to talk to your CPA or tax preparer about things that went well or didn’t during the season. Discuss how things can be improved for a smooth process in the coming years.

3. Consulting and Financial Advising

If you never took services of a tax professional in the past, consider reaching them out now. Since most of your time is consumed with purchases, taxes, financial contracts etc. getting more business becomes difficult.

If there are major changes happening during the year, tax professional can offer you support to understand what implications they may have on your business before the busy season and keep your finances on track.

Touching base before the end of the year provides a chance to minimalize tax obligations before it is too late more than reporting and cleaning up what has been done already. For people with variable income, coordination with your tax professional is the key to ensure that there isn’t any over and underpayment of tax.

4. Focus on Marketing

It’s understandable if you haven’t been paying much attention to marketing because of tax season. However, marketing isn’t something that would work well if you don’t focus on it for very long and needs attention to spur along the growth of your company.

Even if you trust 100% on referrals, marketing is important to ensure the best ROI. While it may seem like a daunting task, creating a marketing plan for your accounting firm would not require much time or a large investment.

5. Seminars and Workshops

Although tax seasons may not afford practitioners the opportunity to get involved in the community, the post-tax season can easily make up for those busy times. Continuing educations is one of the key aspects of career growth in any field.

After the busy season, many CPAs and accountants turn to lecturing and training. You can connect with state CPA society to find prospects to mentor students or get involved with an organization to present tax-focused seminars during the off-season, when people may not be thinking about taxes.

For example, CPAs might give lectures on hosted QuickBooks or other tax and cloud accounting software, or lead a webinar on tax preparation and planning.

Final Note

You may be happy to finally see the end of the busy season of the year. However, next year’s season is not far away. By applying these strategies, you will be on your way to smooth sailing and profitable tax season 2018 and even beyond.

In the next post of the blog series, we’ll discuss why Ace Cloud Hosting is a perfect choice for hosting your tax software and data on the cloud and how it can help you save your time, money and efforts. Follow Ace Cloud Hosting on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and subscribe to the email newsletter to receive updates when the article goes live.

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About Julie Watson

Julie is a dynamic professional with over 16 years of rich experience as a VDI and Application Hosting expert. At Ace Cloud Hosting, she humanizes disruptive and emerging remote working trends to help leaders discover new and better possibilities for digital transformation and innovation by using cloud solutions with an enterprise-class security approach. Beyond work, Julie is a passionate surfer.
On the weekend, you will find her hanging out with her family or surfing around the North Shore of Oahu.

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Comments (1)

  • Sharique Anwer's profile picture Mark says:

    Tax season analysis is a must and post-analysis, there may be some things/ideas missed out that could smoothen the taxation.
    Investing in that thing or software or technology before the next year’s tax season starts is a good tip to follow.

  • Sharique Anwer's profile picture Jonny says:

    Nice post!
    I always prefer to go on a vacation or a short tip. Tax always leaves to an unstable state, treating yourself relaxes the mind and improves efficiency.

  • Sharique Anwer's profile picture Susan says:

    Adding to this, there’s always a dilemma to keep or fire the CPA/tax professional after the tax season.
    It is completely a personal choice, working on tax extensions and providing financial advises are reasons because of which some prefer to use their services afterward.

  • Sharique Anwer's profile picture Adam says:

    For me marketing is not an easy job, so I spend the part of my time on strategizing too. Read your whitepaper for help, and need to say, it’s awesome.

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