Overwhelmed This Tax Season? What to Eliminate, Automate, or Delegate

Today's Topic: Elimination vs Automation vs Delegation

You've probably heard the saying, When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And when you're an AI-savvy tax pro, everything starts to look automatable.

But really, automation isn't always the right solution. Here's a quick story of how I learned that lesson.

A few months ago I had an Excel with a list of people I wanted to reach out to. But the first column had data that was formatted wrong - and I wanted to fix it. But because the doc had hundreds of rows, so I asked my virtual assistant (VA) to fix it for me.

She got back to me within the hour - it was fixed. She said she just used one of Excel's tools to fix it automatically.

Then, three days later, I realized I didn't even need the list anyways.

Moral of the story: I delegated when I should have automated. Or eliminated. There's a difference between the three.

Whenever you have tasks you want to take off your plate, before rushing to a new AI tool or outsourcing the job, start by asking: should I delegate this? Automate it? Or just eliminate it?

When to eliminate

Elimination should be considered first. Life's too short to be wasting time doing things you shouldn't.

In the context of tax prep and bookkeeping, I see a few common things to eliminate:

Clients that cause headaches and don't pay enough
Work that's not in the engagement letter
Work outside your area of expertise
Work that makes you want to bang your head against a wall
Collecting redundant info
Answering unreasonable client emails / requests
Taking unnecessary calls
Things "that have always been this way" but you don't know why

The #1 piece of advice I hear from experienced practice owners is to set tighter boundaries and focus your services earlier.

When starting out you have to take what work you can find. But as you grow you should be reducing the scope of your services and "firing" your worst clients.

Elimination is always the easiest way to free up time - to focus on higher-value work, to grow your client base, to live your life, to spend time with family.

When to automate

If you don't want to eliminate a task, try automating it.

Setting up automation can be an investment, however, so it's best for tasks that are:

Done often
Cost a lot to do manually
Repetitive
Require less human touch

Once you've found things worth automating: choose your tools, build, test the automation, monitor and refine over time. If you're completely stuck: Upwork has overseas engineers you can hire for affordable rates to build custom automations.

When to delegate

How I define delegation = getting your team to do it, hiring a VA, outsourcing, hiring contractors on Upwork, or getting friends to do it.

Delegate to humans when automation doesn't make sense and you aren't the person for the job. Maybe it's simple work that's just not worth your time. Maybe it's work you don't want to do. Maybe you just don't have the time.

When delegating, clarity and context are key. If you give a smart person the right clarity and context around a job, you can empower them to make their own decisions and execute.

One of the hardest things to outsource is decision making. But even as a leader, it can be done.

Tell your team how you make decisions. Empower them to do so. Hire the best talent you can. Over time they'll take over.

When to do things yourself

Doing things yourself should be a last resort.

As a leader of your practice, the growth of your practice is only capped by your own time limits.

There's a saying: poor people buy things. Rich people buy time. Successful tax practice owners successfully take themselves out of their business so they can focus on their business instead.

And this process never stops - you should be evaluating your workflows for every season.

P.S. this email series is by CleanUpBuddy.ai, which helps you turn a tangle of bank statements into a clean P&L in under a minute using AI.

It's great for those Schedule C clients without clean books. You know who I'm talking about. Feel free to check out our siteto see how we can help you reclaim hours of manual work this tax rush without outsourcing or hiring.

We also invite you to join our Discourse community for other bookkeepers & tax pros using CleanUpBuddy here. We'll add more content there as well as announce events, special promos, and more.

Thanks for tuning in, happy to help with any questions. Just drop a reply.

Touch base next week,

~Toni, CEO of CleanUpBuddy.ai