Six seats. Roughly four months. Clean in, clean out.

1040 preparers

The workhorse seat. Experienced individual-return preparers who can take a folder, an intake interview, and a bank feed and produce a reviewable return without three rounds of questions back to the partner. Most of our 1040 bench came up on Drake, ProSystem fx, or Lacerte, and roughly a third can move between two of those inside the first week. We slot preparers into specific offices for the full season, not on a day-of rotation — firm owners consistently tell us the continuity matters more than the headcount math suggests.

Typical seat: 32–45 hours/week, Jan 15 through Apr 15, with an optional September return window.

Reviewers

Senior preparers or retired tax partners who sit at the review desk while the firm's own reviewer runs point on the complicated K-1 work and the walk-in 1040X queue. We ask reviewers to keep a one-column log of the corrections they send back — it's the single most useful artifact when a firm owner sits down in May to rebuild her prep training program.

Typical seat: one reviewer covers 8–12 preparers cleanly. Past that, add a second or expect the review stack to tip.

Office floaters

For chains running more than three offices. One preparer rotates Tue/Thu/Sat across the network to cover the lower-volume locations without leaving them dark. Floaters get a firm-issued laptop (or we'll spec one), a preloaded client roster, and a standing Monday-morning 15-minute call with the review desk to calibrate. Most of our floaters have run this pattern four or more seasons in a row and have strong opinions about which highway makes the Virginia-to-Grand-Rapids leg work in February.

Billed by the week. We require the firm to pre-build the schedule; we don't reshuffle mid-week.

Front-counter & intake

The quietest lift on our menu and the one firm owners underrate. A good front-counter hand during February and March shaves forty to sixty minutes a day off every preparer behind her by asking the right intake questions, catching the missing 1099-NEC on the first pass, and closing out the returning-client folder while the client is still in the room. A third of our bench started as preparers and rotated into counter work because they liked the clock and the interaction.

Full-charge bookkeepers (burst only)

Occasionally a firm has business-return clients (1120S mostly) whose books arrive in February in a state that will eat a full week of preparer time if somebody doesn't clean them up first. We send a full-charge bookkeeper for two or three weeks, she sorts the feed, the preparer runs the return, and the bench seat closes when the last S-corp files. We don't place FCBs year-round — if the firm needs one fifty weeks a year, that's a different kind of search and we'll say so.

The extension-wall mini-bench

September 1 through October 20. A tighter, smaller deployment — usually one preparer and a half-time reviewer per firm — aimed squarely at the 1120S, 1065, and 1040 extensions that were never going to land before April anyway. Firms that book the spring bench typically book this one in the same contract; we offer a small discount for doing both.