Your next hire is not another preparer

The ad is about two thirds written. Intermediate accountant, three years minimum, individuals and entities, immediate start, friendly team. It has been sitting in a tab since the deadline went past, and you keep opening it because the season hurt and hiring is the thing a person does about a season that hurt.

Fair enough. But before it goes up, one question, and it is worth being annoyingly literal about it: which pile actually grew?

Not "we were flat out". Everyone was flat out. Which stack of paper got taller as March turned into April, and whose desk was it on.

The season didn't run out of preparers

In most practices this size, the answer is not a stack of unstarted files. It is a stack of files that were done, more or less, and were sitting there waiting for one person to look at them. That person signs. That person also takes the calls, quotes the new work, decides the arguable ones, and is the only one who can tell a client something they won't like.

Add a preparer to that and the stack in front of the bottleneck gets taller faster. The work arrives at the same door. The door is the same width.

This is the least popular sentence in practice management and it is nearly always true: capacity in a small firm is set by whoever reviews and signs, not by whoever prepares. You can prove it to yourself without a spreadsheet. Think of the last fortnight. Were you preparing? Or were you clearing a queue of other people's work, twelve minutes at a time, between phone calls?

What another preparer really costs in year one

Say you hire one anyway, and say they're good.

They still need supervision through their first season, which lands on the person who is already the constraint. Their first twenty files come back with queries, which is correct and healthy and also expensive. They need the firm's conventions explained, and every practice's conventions live mostly in someone's head. And they need work to be ready for them, which means the chasing has to keep up with a new pair of hands as well as the old ones.

Somewhere around September the arithmetic starts working. That is the wrong side of the year to be solving next March.

None of this argues for never hiring a preparer. It argues that a preparer is a capacity purchase with a long lead time, and it is the default hire because it is the easiest role to describe in an advertisement, not because it is the shortest thing in the building.

Four hires that usually relieve more than a preparer does

Ranked by how often they turn out to be the real gap in a two-to-twenty person practice.

Someone who owns the document chase, end to end. Sending a reminder template on Monday morning is not the job. The job is knowing which client is missing which account for which quarter, ringing the four clients who have never once replied to an email, and being measured on files being ready rather than on messages sent. This is the one that unblocks preparers and reviewers at the same time, and it is routinely handed to whoever looks least busy that week, which means it is owned by nobody.

A second person who can review. Expensive, hard to find, and the only hire that widens the actual gate. It does not have to be full-time or permanent. A senior contractor for two days a week through the back half of the season splits the queue in a way no amount of preparation capacity can.

A bookkeeper for the eight clients whose books are the reason. Every practice has a short list of clients whose files cost triple to prepare, and the cause is almost never the tax. Fixing the source is a different job from absorbing the consequences of it every year, and one person doing it deliberately in the quiet months changes what arrives in February.

A workflow owner. Somebody whose actual job is knowing where every job is, what it is waiting on, and who is next — and who is allowed to reallocate work without asking. In a lot of firms this is done by the partner, in the evenings, from memory, and it is the least visible unpaid job in the practice.

Work out which one before you write the ad

You do not need a project. You need about an hour with last season's job list, and one column added: where did this file sit longest?

Four answers cover nearly everything. Waiting on the client. Waiting to be started. Waiting on review. Waiting on somebody to decide something. Tally them honestly, and don't let the interesting exception outvote the boring majority.

If most of the delay was waiting on the client, a preparer will sit idle in February and drown in April, which is the pattern you already have. If most of it was review, a preparer makes the queue longer. If most of it was files not started, then yes — you are genuinely short of preparation capacity, and the ad in the tab is the right ad.

Do the tally before you decide, because the memory of a season is dominated by the last fortnight, and the last fortnight is always review. It feels like a review problem to everyone, including the practices where it isn't one.

The honest case for hiring a preparer anyway

There is one, and it isn't capacity.

If your practice has nobody in the pipeline — if the youngest person doing real work is thirty-eight, and every judgement call in the building goes to the same two people — then hiring a junior or intermediate is a succession decision, and succession decisions get made early or not at all. That hire will cost you for two years and repay you in year four.

Just don't confuse it with relief. It is an investment dressed as a headcount, and it should be argued for on those terms, in writing, so that when it doesn't fix next March nobody concludes that hiring doesn't work.

Where we sit in this, plainly

We build software that removes the preparation-shaped part of the work, so we have an obvious interest in you not hiring another preparer. Worth saying out loud rather than letting it sit underneath the argument.

The part we would defend is narrower than the pitch. Preparation capacity is the easiest constraint in a practice to buy, whether you buy it as a person, as an offshore team or as software. Review capacity is the hard one, and nothing we ship widens it directly — what it can do is make a file quicker to believe: show which document each figure came from, and raise the calls that were genuinely uncertain instead of quietly settling them. A reviewer who can see the trail spends their time on the four things that matter rather than re-deriving the forty that don't.

That is a real gain and it is not the same as another reviewer. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, and so, to be clear, are we.

The ad will still be in the tab tomorrow. Spend the hour on the job list first.