Preparing for a Paperless Tax Season

By Kenneth McCall
December 2006
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Scanning: Several tax preparation software vendors, and some document management software vendors as well, have developed products designed to simplify the scanning and organization of client source documents. The use of these products greatly reduces the time spent by professional staff organizing, sorting, and indexing the paper documents submitted by your clients. By use of bar coded separator pages, a stack of documents can be scanned with minimal preparation, routed to the correct client electronic file, and arrive there sorted, indexed and organized by document type. A few of these products are emerging with the next logical step of reading data from fields on these forms and transferring the values into the proper input fields of the tax return.

Workflow Control: One of the strategic byproducts of the outsourcing movement has been the creation of online (web-based) workflow control models. These are obviously necessary when work is being shared among accounting professionals half-way around the world. The best news is, the outsourcing vendors have made these workflow control tools available for licensing and use by firms whether they outsource any tax work or not. The benefits to multi-office firms that wish to “load balance” work between offices should be obvious, but even single office firms can gain instant access to knowledge about progress of work through the office, the status of any given tax return, and the workload assigned to a particular tax preparer or reviewer.

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