Every accounting firm knows the shape of its year. The quiet stretch runs from the summer to the new year, then everything arrives at once and does not let up until the end of April.
IT problems ignore that calendar. A laptop that has been limping since August fails in March. The tax software rollover that nobody tested breaks on the first busy Monday. The seasonal hire starts with no account because nobody created one.
None of that is bad luck. It is work that could have been done in October and was not. Here is the list, roughly in the order worth tackling it.
October: the things with lead time
Plan the software rollover. The annual releases of your tax and working-paper software arrive ahead of the season. Decide now who installs them, on which machines, and when. Then confirm you can still open last year's files after the new version goes on, because prior-year access is the thing that breaks quietly and gets discovered in the middle of a review.
Replace the hardware you already know about. Every firm has a machine that is slow, noisy or older than it should be. Replacing it in October takes a day. Replacing it in March takes a day you do not have, at whatever the store has in stock. If any of your machines still run Windows 10, read what the October deadline means before you decide anything.
Put the annual renewals on a calendar. Software licences, registrations that have to be renewed before filing opens, domain and certificate renewals. Each one has a date, and each one belongs to somebody by name rather than to the office in general.
November: access and people
Review who has access to what. Former staff, last season's contractors, a consultant from a project two years ago. Anyone who no longer needs access should lose it now, while there is time to check nothing depended on them.
Get the seasonal onboarding ready before anyone starts. Write down what a seasonal hire needs on day one: an account, multi-factor set up, access to the right client folders and nothing else, a laptop that is patched and encrypted. When the first person starts in February, it should take an hour, not a week of favours.
Plan the offboarding at the same time. Seasonal staff leave in May, often all at once. Decide now what happens to their accounts and files on their last day, so access does not linger into the summer. Our offboarding checklist covers the order to do it in.
December: the things that fail quietly
Test a restore. Pick a client folder and a mailbox item, restore them, and time how long it takes. A backup that has never been restored is an assumption, and tax season is the worst possible moment to find out it was wrong. If you are relying on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace to keep copies, read Microsoft 365 is not a backup first.
Make sure the client documents folder is actually in the backup. Firms often set up a new folder or a new portal during the year and forget to tell the backup about it.
Test remote access from home. If partners and staff will be working evenings and weekends, try it now from a home connection, on a real file, with the tax software open. Slow remote access is survivable in November and miserable in April.
January: the client side
Get secure document exchange live before the first slip arrives. Clients will email you a T4, a void cheque and a mortgage statement in one unencrypted message, because it is easy. A portal only works if using it is easier than not. Set it up, send clients the link with your first document request, and make it the default path from the start of the season rather than halfway through.
Brief the team on this season's phishing. Tax season brings a predictable wave of fake government notices, fake client emails with "my documents" attached, and fake requests to change where a refund or payment goes. Fifteen minutes with the team, looking at real examples, does more than any annual training video.
Check multi-factor is on for everyone. Including partners, including the shared inbox, including the seasonal accounts you just created. One exception is enough to undo it.
February to April 30: the freeze
Once the season starts, stop changing things. No migrations, no new software, no hardware refreshes, no "while we are at it" projects. Security patches still go on, because skipping them is worse, but everything else waits until May.
That rule only works if the work above got done. Which is the point of doing it now.
If you are reading this in February
Do the restore test, check multi-factor, and brief the team on phishing. Those three take an afternoon between them and cover the most likely ways a busy season goes wrong. Everything else goes on the list for next October.
We plan the year this way for the accounting and bookkeeping firms we support: disruptive work in the quiet months, closer monitoring through the season, and nothing scheduled that could break a filing week.
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