The Tax Professional’s Guide to a Paperless Tax Workflow

Best Practices for a Paperless Tax Workflow - Suggestions from Peer Professionals

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At the close of tax season 2008, we interviewed hundreds of tax professionals about how the season went—what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently next year.  Of about 50 questions, two in particular really stood out to us.  For these two questions, survey participants weren’t choosing one of the five answers that best relates to them—they were writing in their own answers.  And even though these questions were open-ended, we kept seeing the same responses over and over again. 

Question #1:  What advice would you offer someone who is considering adding scanning to their tax workflow?  

Overwhelmingly, the #1 answer was: "Do it."  "Go for it."  "Get started."  "Try it."  And my personal favorite: "Change or die!"  You get the idea.  Paperless is the way the industry is headed, and the general consensus is that it’s a better, more efficient way of preparing tax returns. 

Question #2: Share your best practice from this tax season.  

Here are summaries of the 5 most popular responses we received (following the order of the tax preparation process):

1. Use a high-quality scanner to scan tax documents before tax preparation
   
   
2. Automatically organize your clients’ scanned tax documents with a scan-and-organize or scan-and-populate tax document automation solution
   
   
3. Supply your tax team with dual monitor workstations.  This allows them to view the source documents on one screen and their tax compliance software on the other, without all the messy clicking in and out of windows.
   
   
4. Save the organized scanned tax documents to a document management system (DMS) or an informal file organization system on a shared network drive so that all preparers can quickly access documents from a centralized location at different stages of the tax preparation process.
   
   
5. Train your tax team to use PDF editing software, such as Adobe Acrobat Standard, to add tick marks, comments, and annotations to digital workpapers.  It’s easier than you think and a little training goes a long way.

We’ll dive into each of these bullets individually in the coming weeks—starting with scanning tax documents.  Until then, you can learn more about the responses to our tax season survey by watching the webcast replay, "Scanning Tax Documents - A Look Back at the 2008 Tax Season" (brought to you by the CPA Technology Advisor). 

NEXT UP: Scanning Tax Documents—Learning the Basics