Four tips for dealing with busy season stress

Understandably, it may seem quite daunting to deal with busy season this year; factors such as the cost of living crisis, recession and talent shortage have all amplified the typical challenges.

Fear not! The good news is that there are numerous ways you can overcome the struggles.

Here are four pieces of handy advice you can look to implement.

1) Learn from the past

For those who have faced the toils of busy season before, I urge you to use that experience to set yourself up for success this year.

Consider the following areas:

• How did you spend your time in the previous busy season?
• How much was chargeable?
• Who was most productive, and what advice can they give?
• Which clients proved the most or least profitable?
• What was the turnaround time on jobs, and is this feasible with your current team, workloads and clients?
• How can you improve on what has been before?

While there are economic challenges this year outside your control, answering the above points will put your firm in a much better position to tackle whatever comes your way.

2) Find added resources

For many, the workloads during busy season become unbearable, leading to astronomical stress levels. But amidst a talent shortage, what can you do to find added resources?

From a recruitment perspective, ensuring you’re an attractive employer with leading digital processes is crucial to hiring top talent – learn more in this recent blog.

For those who need more resources during busy season but don’t want to recruit additional talent, consider either outsourcing (sending the work to someone else to complete and send back) or insourcing (someone accessing your systems as a virtual member of your team to complete the work in your systems).

3) Embrace digitisation  

Accountancy has seen a major move towards digitised processes and it’s time to make the most of it.

This busy season, allow your software to take some of the strain.

Task management: check the progress of tasks within your software to gauge how you’re faring this busy season. Access to task progress and workloads gives you the information needed to react and move jobs around in real-time if some staff are struggling, reducing stress while making sure deadlines are still met.

Automation: modern accountancy software enables you to automate mundane, admin-based tasks such as data capture, helping you shift some of the busy season load. By automating parts of busy season, you’re freeing up your team to focus on more value-added activities, such as advisory and cost of living support.

Work anywhere, at any time: software hosting and cloud play a major role in ensuring operations don’t fall off during the busy season. Whether it’s disruption due to social distancing, sickness or travel delays, having the option to easily work from home gives you far more security.

4) Focus on your clients

The heart of busy season: clients.

A lot of responsibility falls on your clients, and as such, they must be at the centre of your busy season strategy.

I’d advise you to review your client base and use the data/knowledge you have to ascertain who will require prompting and added support – remember, tax returns most likely will not be at the front of their mind.

Top tip: save time through automated communications. By investing time and setting up automated communications, you have consistent messaging that reminds clients and requests their input.

The Busy Season Stress-Busting Blueprint

With some planning, you can easily turn busy season into your season. If only there was a guide that compiled heaps of advice and guidance...

Look no further - our Busy Season guide is exactly that, offering an all-in-one resource.

Download the free guide here and make this busy season the best yet.