Industries
Busy season leaves no room for a bad morning.
For a few months a year, an hour your people cannot work is an hour that does not come back. The rest of the year is when the work to prevent that has to happen.
Your calendar is set by somebody else. For a stretch of every year the lights are on late, the returns are stacked, and a deadline takes no interest in what happened to your morning. Then it goes quiet, and quiet is when nobody wants to think about any of this.
So the work that belongs in the quiet months keeps sliding. You replace the machine that has been making a noise since November in the middle of March, in a hurry, with whatever somebody could find that week. The copy of your client records that nobody has ever put back goes another year untested. Nothing is wrong, exactly. It is just that everything keeps getting pushed into the one season with no slack in it.
There is the other thing, too. You hold bank account numbers, Social Security numbers and a complete financial picture of several hundred households and businesses. You are required to have a written plan for protecting all of that. And after something goes wrong, the first question anybody asks is what you had in place before it did.
What we handle
What we take off your plate.
The same steady work underneath, pointed at what your week actually looks like.
Nothing breaks in February
Before the season starts we go through what is aging, what is under strain, and what would hurt if it gave out in the middle of it. Things get replaced in a quiet week, on purpose.
One number, and they already know your season
When somebody cannot work at nine on a Tuesday in March, you reach a person who knows your practice and does not need it explained. Most of it is fixed while your people keep working.
A safer way for clients to send you things
Every year somebody emails you a scan of their entire return with everything attached to it. Your clients get somewhere to put documents instead. It is easier than email, and their information does not sit in an inbox for six years.
Client records held the way you told them they are
You know a household's whole financial life. Their file should sit somewhere you can account for, open to the people who need it and nobody else.
The written plan somebody is going to ask for
You are required to have a written plan for how client information is protected, and to be able to produce it. We build yours out of what is actually in place rather than a template, and we keep it current.
A stolen password is not enough to get in
Somebody sends your bookkeeper a convincing message in the middle of March, because everybody is busy and nobody is reading carefully. Even with the password in hand, a stranger gets nowhere without the second step.
Records back in hours, and you know the number
We keep more than one copy, keep one of them out of reach of a bad Friday, and put one back on a schedule. You are told how long getting back would take, and we know because somebody has already done it.
The kitchen table works like the desk
Half your people finish the evening at home during the season. That should feel as ordinary and be as safe as sitting at their own desk, and it should never involve emailing themselves a client file.
The time to look at all of this is while there is still room to fix things in a quiet week. We come out for ninety minutes, walk through what is actually there rather than what a document says is there, and send you a written report a few days later — what we found, what it means, and what we would do first, second and third. You keep it either way.
Start with the review.
Ninety minutes on site, a written report, and no obligation either way.