The first few months of the year signify the start of tax season – that dreaded time for accountants and tax preparers as we race to meet tight deadlines for clients. As if the pressure weren’t enough, we must tackle ever-growing mounds of financial data. Thankfully, technology can help us rise to the occasion as long as we have the right tools integrated into our workflows.

Here are my top 3 tax prep arsenal must-haves this season:

Client Collaboration Portals

Secure client portals enable you to easily request and organize financial documents from clients in one centralized platform. Features like bulk document requests, customizable questionnaires for client tax info, and built-in review / e-sign capacities streamline processes that used to require a mix of email, paper forms, spreadsheets, and more. Portals permit clients to directly submit tax documents as soon as they receive them too. This eliminates the common client delay tactic of overwhelming preparers with a massive document dump last minute.

Top benefits:

• Automate administrative tasks
• Improve client response rates
• Receive client tax documents faster
• Eliminate version control confusion

Recommendation: ClientHub

Business Intelligence Software

As accountants, we deal with massive amounts of disparate tax data. Business intelligence software delivers a unified interface to import, organize, analyze, and visualize information from multiple sources seamlessly. Robust tools provide deeper insight into numbers through customizable reports, dashboards tracking KPIs, interactive visualizations uncovering trends, and more. Many integrate directly with practice management, document management, tax prep solutions, and other platforms to pull data for consolidated viewing and reporting. This keeps us from toggling between applications.

Top benefits:

• Consolidate data into a single dashboard
• Interact with visualizations to uncover insights
• Create custom reports catered to different clients
• Identify outliers and errors for auditing

Bank Statement Converters

Bank and credit card statements remain key inputs this time of year. However, reconciling across paper and online statements is administrative drudgery. Bank statement converters eliminate manually collecting, downloading, and entering statement data for tax prep. Optical character recognition and machine learning instead extract details automatically into categorized reports ready for tax documentation. Say goodbye to manually reconciling or tagging hundreds of entries per statement. Some tools like RocketStatements even integrate directly into leading tax prep solutions  like UltraTax for seamless statement data flow into returns.

Top benefits:

• Extract statement data up to 80% faster
• Auto-categorize transactions using AI
• Gain insights from reporting dashboards
• Push reconciled reports directly into tax returns

Recommendation: RocketStatements

While the quickening tempo of tax season may be unavoidable, the right workflow integrations provide rhythmic balance. Spend less time on tedious and repetitive tasks by leveraging efficiency-focused tools. Not only will portals, business intelligence platforms, bank statement converters, and similar solutions enable you to take on higher volumes under tight deadlines…they empower you to deliver greater value to clients through expanded advisory offerings. The result? A thriving practice that makes tax season less taxing.