How to Avoid Burnout - A Tax Season Survival Guide for Accountants

Introduction

Burnout is common in many accounting practices throughout all levels of the firm, with many working over 60 hours a week regularly.

This inevitably leads to burnout, which at best sees a drop in productivity, at worst a complete stop to work and impacting your health.

Tax season is notoriously bad for burnout, every year accountants promise themselves it will be different next year… but it never is.

Not only do you have the tax return deadline looming, but there is also the highest hit of year end account filing deadlines in December, VAT return deadlines and the general demands of managing a client portfolio.

How many times do you start the day with an action plan, only to get to the end of it and achieved none of it, only to have a larger list of client queries and deadlines.

The end result?

More hours need to be worked to cope with the mounting list of tasks - But it doesn’t have to be that way.

This virtual classroom seminar will discuss how this can be overcome, with the presenter having reduced his and his team’s working hours while growing revenue by 30% year on year for the last 3 years.

What You Will Learn

This live and interactive session will cover the following:

Planning & Preparation

• Why, awareness and vision
• Working out the root cause of burnout for your firm- is this tax season or a constant issue?
• Proactive planning and structured workflow.
• How do you allocate YE accounts and deadlines to the team currently?
• Processes to speed up year end accounts and tax return data collection
• Examining why your worst clients often get the best service, and how to change this
• Is busyness a badge of honour in your firm?

Productivity & Discipline

• Best practice time management and the 3 C’s
• How to deal with difficult clients that are always last minute
• Meeting discipline and agendas for you and your clients
• To timesheet or not to timesheet, how analysis can help beat the burnout
• How to carry out A,B,C task analysis to highlight time inefficiencies
• How to harness automation to eliminate duplication

Creating Balance & Habits

• Monk mode and email discipline
• Managing a large portfolio of clients effectively and coping with a volume of the same deadline day
• Streaking to make habits happen
• The importance of meeting free days and implementing firm wide
• Stopping urgent tasks replacing the important ones- Dealing with client grenades effectively

Autonomy & Influence

• The power of No
• How to move yourself away from being the bottleneck of your firm
• How to create urgency with clients to your advantage
• Managing client expectation and communication channels
• Making the 4 day week and flexible hours a reality and how to overcome obstacles

Recording of live sessions: Soon after the Learn Live session has taken place you will be able to go back and access the recording - should you wish to revisit the material discussed.