For as long as I have been in this profession, the job has been getting the returns out. Nobody decided the return should be the center of everything. It was hard, it had to get done, and it ate the whole firm. How we staffed, trained, billed, promoted, and lived from January to April all took their shape from that one fact.

AI is changing that fact. Preparation is one of the first places we’re seeing it happen, and I don’t think most firms have thought about how much was built on top of it. As the time spent preparing a return comes down, the way you train people, review work, divide roles, charge clients, and run the year all come up for reconsideration. That is a bigger question than which software to buy.

Three questions run through all of these changes, and every firm leader will have to answer them.

  • Staffing: Who do you hire, how do you train them, and what do you ask them to do when they aren’t spending their days preparing returns?
  • Economics: How do you price and measure the work when billable hours no longer tell you enough about its value?
  • Client service: What do you do with the capacity you get back?

How people learn

We used to train people by sitting them down with returns to enter data into, then handing back everything they got wrong, one review point at a time. The next return looked nothing like the last one, so we did it again, for three years or more before someone could prepare on their own. It worked. It was also slow and demoralizing, and it cost us good people before they ever got good.

Now a new person can start learning through review much earlier. Instead of spending most of their time entering numbers and correcting mistakes, they can look at the whole return, ask why something was treated a certain way, and start developing judgment, which is ultimately the skill that matters. A new staff member told me recently that he was using Accrual to learn how returns work. That is the change in one sentence.

Learning without getting burned

A lot of us learned by getting burned. When I was training people, the joke was “ask me how I know,” and the answer was always that something had gone wrong once. So if we take the pain away, do we lose the lesson? I don’t think so. The pain was never the teacher. It was a cruel and random delivery system. You only learned the lessons your own returns happened to hand you, and only after they bit you.

When a firm captures judgment on purpose, in shared SOPs and file documentation done systematically, it keeps the lesson and drops the part where each person bleeds for it alone. A call made once is there for the whole team, and it doesn’t walk out the door when a senior person leaves. We lose the scar that makes a thing unforgettable. We gain a team where everyone can learn from decisions they didn’t have to make alone. People will still make mistakes. They will make better ones.

And a word to the seniors: writing down what you know doesn’t make you replaceable. It makes you scalable. Your judgment trains the whole team instead of getting rationed one return at a time.

How review works

Old review was bottom-up and field by field. Confirm every number, tick it, sign off once you had touched all of them. Now a review can be more top-down. The numbers tie out on a lead sheet, and attention goes to the items that need judgment instead of re-confirming figures that already reconcile. Of course, numbers can reconcile and still be wrong. The tick mark used to be proof you did your job. Trusting a tie-out is a real leap, and that trust has to be earned.

Roles and paperwork

Roles change too. We used to put staff on preparation, seniors on review, and keep admin away from clients. Now staff can get involved in review earlier, and administrative teams can take on more of the client follow-up and document collection. The work goes to whoever is best placed to do it.

Intake changes as well. The ten-page organizer assumed everything would come back before we touched the return. It never did. The late K-1, the corrected 1099, the thing that happened in June always showed up after we thought we had everything. Intake now never really closes, so a late document is a normal Tuesday and not a reason to start over.

How the work is priced

Billing compliance work by the hour never made sense. A client doesn’t get more value because a return took us longer, and they would rather we were fast. The return is something the law makes them file, not something they are glad to pay for.

What they pay for, and what keeps them with us for years, is the relationship. They want to call with a question, send us the IRS notice without worrying about it, and know someone who understands their whole situation is paying attention all year, not just in March. That is worth real money, and it has nothing to do with how many hours the return took.

There is a practical reason hourly is on its way out. As tools cut the time a return takes, the billable hour becomes a harder way to measure the value of the work. Pricing the relationship and sharing the savings with clients is the honest move, and I think it is the one that wins. It also means rethinking compensation structures, realization targets, and what a firm is worth, all of which are built on the billable hour. That is real work, and firms should start it now.

The shape of the year

For decades the whole calendar bent around April 15. We trained clients to dump everything on us at once and rush to file, and we built our capacity around surviving the peak.

Moving clients to a year-round rhythm is not a switch you flip. When I did it in my firm, it took at least a year before clients saw the planning was working and stopped freaking out about extensions. The IRS has done a great job making everyone afraid of April 15, but rushing to file by April 15 doesn’t necessarily serve the client. Once clients were confident that their tax obligations were being handled, they started to see the benefit of taking more time. A filing extension is perfectly fine when the planning and projections are done right and payments are made on time. The prize is clients who know their payments are covered and aren’t worrying about the filing deadline, so filing is a formality and not a fire drill.

The deadline reflex lives in clients, not just in us. Firms have to lead this and sit through the discomfort until the trust is there.

What firms do with the time

This is the question I care about most. Once preparation stops eating the calendar, what do you do with the hours? Here is what I hope firms do.

  • Stop setting chargeable-hour goals for staff as the primary measure of their performance. If the work isn’t priced by the clock, the clock is measuring the wrong thing.
  • Spend the capacity on clients. Schedule monthly or quarterly calls, or meet for coffee or lunch.
  • Do more business development, aimed at the clients who fit your firm’s culture and goals.

At Sherwood Tax, my goal was a smaller number of clients paying higher fees for a year-round relationship, and letting go of the clients who only wanted a return prepared. That is one answer. Other firms will use the capacity to take on more clients at higher volume, and that is a legitimate choice too. What matters is that the firm makes the choice on purpose, instead of letting the default become more returns.

The point

For decades we made 50, 60, even 70-hour weeks feel like just what tax season is. It burned people out and pushed good ones out of the profession. We built the old world around the grind because we had to. Preparation doesn’t have to keep forcing that on us, so what firms build next is a choice. I would choose time back, expertise that lasts, a career you can advance in without burning out, and clients who finally get the attention they were paying for all along.