Tax Resolution Academy - r

Here is a question worth asking about your current client intake process. How many times does the same piece of information get typed in by you or your staff before a new client is fully onboarded?

For most practices the answer is more than once. Sometimes significantly more.

The fix is not complicated. Use AI to create template letters and emails with placeholders for the client specific details. You insert the name, the relevant numbers, and send. No starting from scratch. Then use a tool like Zapier or Make to connect your different software platforms through their API. When information goes into one system it moves to the next one automatically. No duplicate entry. No copy and paste. No dropped details.

This is not about replacing the personal side of client service. It is about making sure the back end of your practice runs cleanly so you can focus on the front end.

What part of your intake or onboarding process is eating the most time right now? Drop it in the comments.

Every week I send two recurring emails. I have not written either of them in a while.

I built an AI agent that pulls from a few source documents, formats the content, and drops a draft straight into my Gmail folder on schedule. I open it, make minor edits, and hit send. That is it.

The part that still gets me is how straightforward the setup was once I actually sat down to build it. The learning curve people imagine around AI is almost always bigger than the actual curve.

If you have recurring emails, reports, or updates that follow the same format every week, that is exactly what AI is built for. You do not need to be technical. You need to be willing to spend a few hours setting it up once so it runs on its own after that.

What is one recurring task in your practice that follows the same format every time? Drop it in the comments. That is probably your first AI project.

Here are the scheduling rules that changed how my practice ran.

Client calls at two set times per day only. No live phone answering under any circumstances. Mondays and Fridays completely blocked from client meetings. Recurring calendar items audited and cut if they had no clear agenda or purpose.

Most tax professionals treat their calendar like an open door and then wonder why focused work never happens. Availability is not the same as service. It is just noise dressed up as responsiveness.

Add exercise, real food, time blocking for deep work, and learning to use AI for the tasks that eat your day without requiring your judgment. Put all of that together and the practice starts running on your terms instead of everyone else's.

What is one change you have made to your schedule that actually gave you time back? Drop it in the comments.

Here is a habit worth building starting today.

About 15 minutes before you plan to leave the office, do a brain dump. Write down or type out everything you know needs to get done. Do not filter it, just get it out of your head. Then look at that list and identify the top three things that have to happen tomorrow. Put those on a separate sheet or as your first calendar reminder of the morning.

When you walk in tomorrow you are not deciding where to start. You already know.

The second piece is protecting a one to three hour block during your highest energy window for that priority work. For most people that is early morning. That block is not for email. It is not for phone calls. It is for the work that actually moves things forward.

Two habits. 15 minutes of planning tonight and one protected block tomorrow morning. What does your current morning routine look like before you get into real work? Drop it in the comments.

Here is what I hear from almost every tax professional I work with. There is not enough time. I am already stretched too thin. I cannot take on anything new.

And here is what I find every single time. They are losing 10 to 20 hours a week to three things that have nothing to do with actual tax work.

Answering every phone call live. Responding to email the moment it lands. Doing admin or bookkeeping or payroll input that someone else or something else should be handling.

Those are not workload problems. They are habit problems. Get an answering service. Batch your email. Stop doing $10 to $100 an hour work when AI and delegation can cover it. Add all of that up and a 40 hour week during tax season is not a stretch. It is just what happens when the work is organized correctly.

What is the one thing on that list that is costing you the most time right now? Drop it in the comments.

Here is a list worth going through carefully.
Responding to a CP2000 notice. Filing a power of attorney to call the IRS for a client. Removing penalties through first time abatement or reasonable cause. Triaging a client with a wage garnishment or bank levy.
If you handled any of these in the last twelve months and did not charge a separate fee for it, you did resolution work for free. The minimum on any of these should be $500. Many of them warrant considerably more.

Dennis was new to the representation side of his practice when he took on a collections case involving somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 in IRS debt. He charged $750 for two years of returns and $1,000 to get the client into currently non-collectible status. Still below what that work is worth on the open market but more than double what he had been charging. He described it as a total eye-opener.

That is the moment most tax professionals have once they start treating resolution work as a separate service category with its own pricing. The work was already happening. The only thing that changed was the fee attached to it.

Which of these services have you been handling without a separate charge?
Drop it in the comments.

Here is a straightforward question. The last time a client handed you an IRS notice or asked you to set up a payment plan for back taxes, did you charge them for it?

Most tax professionals did not. They absorbed it into the return, handled it as a courtesy, and moved on. And that habit is costing real money every single tax season.

Setting up an IRS installment agreement can be completed in under an hour from start to finish. A client who owes three, five, or ten thousand dollars to the IRS will gladly pay $500 to have that handled by someone who knows what they are doing. They are not shopping on price. They have a problem and they want it solved.

Pulling transcripts, responding to notices, setting up payment plans. These are not add-ons to the tax return. They are separate billable engagements with separate fees. The sooner that distinction is built into your engagement letters and your pricing, the more revenue your practice captures from work it is already doing.

What resolution service have you been giving away that you know you should be charging for? Drop it in the comments.

Here is something worth sitting with. The last time a client handed you an IRS notice, did you charge them to deal with it? Or did you absorb it as part of the return?

Most tax professionals absorb it. And that is exactly the problem.

Roughly 70% of tax resolution work is already happening inside a standard tax practice. The IRS calls, the transcript pulls, the penalty abatement requests, the notice responses. You are doing the work. You are just not billing for it because at some point you started treating it as included.

An engagement letter solves this cleanly. State that the engagement ends at return delivery. Everything after that is a separate conversation with a separate fee. My minimum for a notice response was $750. On top of the return fee. And clients paid it without pushback because the problem was real and they needed it handled.

What is the last notice you dealt with, and what did you charge for it? Drop it in the comments.