Short entries, mostly for clients.

Season wrap — a cleaner April than we expected

Twenty-two deployments closed Apr 20. Eighteen ran end-to-end without a mid-season seat swap, which is our best rate in four years and probably a result of pushing the calibration week from "optional" to "in the contract" for the 2025 season. The four that needed a swap: one family emergency, one software-switch a firm neglected to mention in October (Drake-to-UltraTax between seasons — never do this to a seasonal preparer), one firm-owner-reviewer falling ill the second week of March, one preparer-firm personality mismatch we should have caught at calibration and didn't.

Bench loss: eight preparers retired out after this season (knees, grandkids, snowbird relocations). Backfill search runs June and July. We will not take the bench above 38, which means we will close the book at Thanksgiving even if firms are calling in December.

— M.H.

A short note on conversion offers

Every spring, usually around the second week of March, a firm owner asks whether a preparer on the bench would stay on year-round if the money were right. The honest answer is almost always no: the reason the preparer is on our bench is that she specifically wants January-to-April work and then wants her garden back. We won't put a no-conversion clause in the contract, and we won't block the firm from asking — it's the preparer's decision, not ours. But we will say, plainly, that seven of the nine conversion offers we've seen accepted in the last decade resulted in the preparer leaving inside eighteen months and coming back to the bench the following season.

If a firm owner wants someone year-round, the right answer is almost always to hire a regular staff preparer in June and use our bench to fill the gap during the season, not to turn a bench preparer into a full-timer.

— M.H.

On scoping a seat that isn't a lie

The most useful exercise we do at October intake is ask the firm owner to pull up last season's worst-week preparer schedule and describe what actually happened on a Tuesday in mid-March. Nine times out of ten the seat we thought we were filling isn't the seat that actually needs filling. The firm says "one preparer at the Oshkosh office." The Tuesday log says: three walk-ins between 10 and 11, a forty-minute phone consultation about a K-1 that should have been a ten-minute email, the printer jamming on 1099-NECs for the dental practice, and the Appleton reviewer driving over for an hour to cover the front counter while the firm's regular receptionist left for a dentist appointment.

If the contract describes the first thing and the preparer walks into the second thing, the deployment fails by the second week of March. We'd rather put the real week on paper and send a preparer who signed up for it honestly.

— D.K.

Remote, hybrid, and in-office — where the bench lands

Quick distribution from last season's twenty-two deployments, Upper Midwest:

• 1040 preparers: 12 in-office, 8 hybrid (three days in-office during peak weeks, remote on the slower days in early February), 2 fully remote. The remote ones are both review-adjacent preparers who take the complex folders off the firm's queue and send back review-ready returns.
• Reviewers: almost entirely in-office through peak. Preparers with a question at 4pm need a reviewer they can walk to, not one they have to Slack.
• Floaters: physically rotating, by definition. A floater who wants to work fully remote is not a floater; she's a 1040 preparer with a different billing arrangement, and we'll say so.
• Front-counter: always in-office. The job is literally the counter.

The single best predictor of a clean remote-preparer deployment is whether the firm already has a permanent remote preparer on staff. Remote works where remote is already working; it does not become a habit mid-February.

— M.H.

The glossary, for our non-accounting visitors

Folks ask occasionally what some of the words on this site mean. Short answers below.

Full-charge bookkeeper

Runs the entire bookkeeping function without supervision — AR, AP, payroll coordination, bank rec, month-end close. "Full charge" as in fully in charge of the books.

Staff vs. senior accountant

Staff is the entry-level public-accounting seat, usually years 1–3. Senior (roughly years 3–7) owns engagements end-to-end and mentors staff. The gap between staff-senior and senior-manager is where most turnover happens in small firms.

Controller

Runs the accounting function inside a company (not a firm). Owns the close, the financial statements, the annual audit relationship if there is one, and increasingly the systems.

EA

Enrolled Agent — a federal tax credential. Narrower than a CPA license but focused specifically on tax, which matters a lot for tax-heavy seats.

1040 / 1120 / 1120S / 1065

Individual, C-corp, S-corp, and partnership tax returns, respectively. A firm's mix of these says a lot about what kind of seat it actually is.

Busy season

In public accounting: roughly late January through April 20, with a smaller wave through October 15 for extensions. Nobody in their right mind makes significant decisions during March.

— D.K.