The 15 May lodgment rush starts in August
The fortnight before 15 May is not a capacity problem. It is a queue of client files that were never opened in the nine months before it, and it can be sorted early.
It is the second Tuesday in May. The office has been ordering dinner in for a week. Somebody has written a list of client names on the whiteboard and is crossing them off in red, and the list has not got shorter since Thursday because every name that comes off seems to bring another one back.
You open the next file. It is a client you have done for six years. Wage income, two rentals, a share portfolio. The folder holds a PAYG summary that arrived in July, a property manager's statement for one of the two properties, and an email from October that says "will send the rest soon".
That email is the whole problem, and it is seven months old.
The rush is a queue you built months ago
For a practice on the registered agent lodgment program, the ATO sets a series of dates through the year, and the last big one for individuals and trusts is 15 May: on the ATO's own due dates page for individuals and trusts, it covers the remaining individuals and trusts not required earlier and not eligible for the 5 June concession. Read the page for your own client mix. The point here is not the date. It is that nearly everything that ends up on the whiteboard in May could have been known to be a problem in August.
Most practices treat that date as the end of a period of work. It behaves much more like a deadline on a period of waiting. The preparation on the rental file above is perhaps three hours. The waiting on it has been seven months, and nobody was measuring that part, which is the argument of why chasing documents is the bottleneck. This post is about the calendar that bottleneck produces.
What the nine months actually look like
The top of the list is easy. Wage-only clients, a phone call, a pre-fill, done in July. The bottom is where it gets interesting. Do this for last season and look at the files that lodged in the final three weeks. The ones worth noticing had their first document by early spring. They were not late clients. They were started clients, with one document in the folder, which reads to everyone in the office as "under way".
That is the trap. A folder with something in it looks like progress. Nobody opens it again until someone has a reason to, and the reason usually arrives in April: the date getting close, or the client ringing to ask where their refund is.
Meanwhile the quiet months happen. October, November, the stretch after Christmas when the phones go still. The team does BAS, catches up on admin, takes leave. All reasonable. But every one of those weeks was a week in which a stalled file could have been opened for fifteen minutes and told what it was waiting for.
Fifteen minutes in August, not three hours in May
Fifteen minutes is enough for most. You are not preparing anything. You are answering three questions and writing the answers on the file where anyone can see them:
- What has arrived? Not "some documents". The PAYG summary, one of two property statements, the broker's annual tax statement.
- What is missing, specifically? "Property statement for the unit in Footscray, full year" is a thing a client can find. "The rest" is not.
- Who has the next move? The client, a third party such as a property manager or a fund, or us. A file where the next move is ours and nobody knows it is the most expensive kind.
Then send the one request that matters, while the client still remembers which property manager they used. A client asked in September for one named statement can usually forward it the same day. The same client asked in late April for "everything for the year" is now looking for an email from eleven months ago, at night, and it is not their fault that it takes a week.
The partner who signs the return will recognise the value of this immediately, because it is the same discipline that makes a file reviewable. A working paper that says what it is waiting for, in the file rather than in somebody's head, is the same paper that comes back from review less often.
Schedule by readiness, not by due date
It becomes three. Files that are complete and only need preparing. Files waiting on the client. Files waiting on someone else. Each of those is managed differently, and only the first one is preparation work in the sense the team means when they say they are busy.
The complete files are the ones to pull forward into the quiet months. They are ready, and preparing a ready file in November costs exactly what it costs in May, minus the dinner orders. Every one of them done early is a slot freed at the end.
The two waiting lists are chasing work, and they want a rhythm rather than a panic. A short weekly pass through each, asking for the specific missing item, and noting the date the request went out. The date matters. When a file is still waiting in March, you can see that it has been asked for three times since September, and you can decide something about it with the client: lodge on what you have with a note, or agree in writing that it will run late.
Nothing in that process needs new software. It needs someone to own it, and an hour or so a week in the months when an hour a week is available.
What it does not fix
The aim is not an empty fortnight. It is a fortnight in which the files on the whiteboard are the ones that were always going to be late, and everybody in the office knows why, rather than the ones that were quietly ready to be finished in November and nobody had looked.
That distinction is also how you price next year. A file that runs late because the client could not find a statement is a different conversation from one that runs late because it sat in a folder. Fixed-fee work needs a stop point for exactly that reason.
Where BeforeMay fits
The part that matters most does not need us: open every file once, early, and write down what it is waiting for. The calendar gets easier from there.