In busy season the mailbox becomes the supply line for every return sitting on a desk, so the count worth running to zero is not messages. It is the jobs blocked on somebody else that nobody has chased. That number is small, and the inbox behind it can sit at four hundred without costing you anything.
- Busy season does not make the mail more urgent. It makes it concurrent, which is a different problem with a different answer.
- Your half of the work can be scheduled. Their half cannot, and the mailbox is the only place it shows up.
- The follow-up date you would set in July is wrong in March, and wrong in the same direction every time.
- What you will not get to before the deadline should be written down in December, not discovered in February.
What busy season actually changes
Volume is what you feel and concurrency is what changed. Nothing arrives in March that did not arrive in July: the same deliveries, the same half-answered questions, the same signatures waiting. What is different is that several hundred of them are alive at once, and every one is attached to a job carrying the same date as all the others.
Underneath that sit two facts about a practice that almost no other business has. You know the whole body of work before the year starts, client by client and date by date. And you cannot begin most of it until somebody outside the firm sends you something.
Put those together and the scarce thing in season is not hours. It is ready work. A preparer’s afternoon is worth nothing without an unblocked job in front of them, and whether there is one was decided by what did or did not arrive in the mail. For four months the mailbox is not a channel. It is the firm’s supply.
The trap is that the two get confused at exactly the wrong moment. In February the inbox looks worse than it has looked all year, so the number that gets attacked is the one on the screen. Emptying it takes the morning, and at the end of the morning the dozen jobs that went quiet overnight are still quiet.
The year holds more than one of these compressions and they are not the same shape. AI email for accountants sets out how the mail differs between the spring, the flat middle of the year and the extension run. This piece is about what to do inside any of them, on the day.
The zero worth running to
Take every open job in the practice on an ordinary season morning and ask one thing of each. Whose move is it. There are only two answers, and they sort the whole list into work you can do and work you cannot.
Then cut the second half again, because its two parts behave nothing alike. Some jobs waiting on somebody else have been asked for, with a date recorded against the asking, so they will come back on their own. The rest are waiting on somebody who has not been asked recently enough, or at all, and nobody in the firm currently knows which ones they are.
That third pile is the zero.
It is the only one of the three quietly costing money. Ready work is fine, it is what the day is for. Chased and waiting is fine, the date will return it to you. Blocked and unchased is a return that turns up near the deadline needing a fortnight nobody has, and it is invisible in every system you own, because no software anywhere produces a record of a message that was never sent.
The useful property of that count is that it does not grow with the mail. Messages scale with how many clients you have and how much they enjoy writing. Blocked and unchased scales with how many jobs changed state since you last looked, which on a normal morning is a dozen and on a bad one is thirty. Whatever the mailbox says at the top of the screen, that is a coffee’s worth of decisions rather than a day’s.
Reading arrivals against a list is the job underneath all of this, and it is not seasonal at all: running the firm inbox is where that reconciliation lives, along with why a client rather than a message is the unit it works in. What the season changes is only the price of skipping it for a day. In July that price is nothing. In March it is a week.
None of which is an argument against a tidy screen. Clear the list if clearing it helps you think. Just do not let the clearing stand in for the counting, because they are different jobs and only one of them is keeping score. Inbox zero versus a calm inbox takes the general case apart, and the seasonal version of that mistake is simply the expensive one.
Why chase dates shrink as the season runs
Every request you send has a last useful day, and it is never the filing deadline. It is the deadline minus whatever still has to happen at your end once the document lands, which is the standing arithmetic of a practice and is set out in full in running the firm inbox.
In season one term of that sum changes, and the change is easy to miss because the figures look the same as they always did. What you subtract is not how long the work takes. It is how long before the work can start.
In July there is no difference between the two. A return needing two days takes two days, because nothing is in front of it. In the middle of March a two-day return still needs two days and cannot begin for another eleven, because eleven days of other people’s returns are already on the desk in front of it. Subtract two and you have just promised a client three weeks that do not exist. Subtract thirteen and you have a date you can act on.
Which explains something every firm feels and few write down: the window you can give a client gets shorter every week of the season, while the deadline does not move at all. A request sent on the first of February and the identical request sent on the first of March are not the same request. The second one is nearly out of time on the morning it goes out, and neither the wording nor the client can tell.
Most practices already own the firm-level version of this number and treat it as a policy rather than as a calculation. It is the published cut-off: everything in by a stated date, or the return goes on extension. That date is nothing more than the last day a document can arrive and still be workable before the deadline, worked out against the queue instead of against one job.
Two things follow from taking it seriously rather than inheriting it. Set it from the capacity you actually have this year, because the queue is the input to it and the queue moved when the client list did. And then use it as the chase clock rather than as an announcement, so that every outstanding request gets its final chase before the cut-off rather than before the filing date. After the cut-off you are having a different conversation.
It changes what a late chase should say, too. In January “we still need your bank statements” is true and enough. In the third week of March the true sentence is that those statements now decide whether the return is filed or extended, and a client who ignored the first message will often move on the second. That is not pressure applied. It is an accurate description of where their file stands, and the version they are entitled to be annoyed about is the one that arrives after the cut-off has passed.
Unanswered emails and the threads that come back has the general half of this, including how quickly people really reply. The seasonal half is just that both of your dates are computed against a queue that is lengthening while you use them.
Which message actually goes first
Two measurements decide whether a message needs you at all, how much it matters and how soon, and they work by staying separate rather than collapsing into one score. That is not a seasonal question, and important versus urgent answers it properly.
Season adds a third question, and for four months it settles the order among everything the first two let through. Whose hands does this free.
The reason is the shortage of ready work. A message that releases a job somebody is sitting in front of right now is worth more than a message that creates a job for next week, because one of them converts an idle afternoon into a finished return and the other does not. In an ordinary month that gap is small enough to ignore. In March it is most of the ranking.
Two consequences look wrong written down and are right in practice. A client’s two-line answer about which account a transfer came from outranks a warm referral from your best introducer, in March and in no other month of the year. And the highest-value message in the mailbox is frequently an internal one: a preparer saying they are stopped. It carries no client anxiety, no deadline language and no attachment, which is exactly the shape a busy person skips, and it is the only message in the list with somebody’s whole afternoon standing behind it.
The rest of a season mailbox needs no ranking, because most of it is not addressed to you in any real sense. It is delivery: a file, and a line above the file saying here it is. A delivery wants matching against what you were expecting and a short acknowledgment that it landed, which costs seconds, stops the same document arriving three times, and settles in advance the argument about whether it was ever sent.
So the working order is short enough to hold in your head. Anything that unstops a person, then whatever the two measurements have put at the top, then deliveries in a batch, then everything on the list you wrote in December.
Decide in December what will wait
Something has to wait from January to April. That is not a failure of organisation, it is arithmetic: one firm’s capacity against four months of work priced above it. The only real question is whether the list of what waits got written in advance or discovered afterwards, and that difference is the whole distance between a backlog and a mess.
The categories are much the same in most practices. Planning questions carrying no date. Enquiries that are not returns. Software renewals and vendor mail. Anything that would be materially better for an hour of thought, since in season it is not going to get one.
Write that list before the season, and write the sentence that goes with each entry. The sentence is the load-bearing part, because what loses a firm a client in busy season is rarely the delay. It is the silence. “I have this, it needs proper thought, and I will come back to you in the week of the twenty-second” takes eleven seconds and buys a fortnight. Saying nothing takes no time and buys a client who assumes they were forgotten.
Two disciplines come attached to that. A deferral carrying a date is a fresh promise and belongs on the same list as everything else you owe, or you have written a covering note on an unanswered email and changed nothing. And the dates have to be spread. If everything you put off in February says the week of the twenty-second, you have moved the crisis rather than survived it.
One category deserves an exception, and it is the one that always gets deferred because it never complains. A prospect who writes to you in March is worth ten minutes on the day. They carry no deadline, no chase and no consequence for ignoring them, which is precisely the profile of the mail a practice loses the most money on, and busy season is where that quadrant does its worst work.
The hands you take on for four months
A firm in season is a different firm. Extra preparers, a part-timer back for the run, sometimes somebody hired to do nothing but log documents. All of them read the mailbox, and in May most of them leave.
What leaves with them is everything they learned by reading it. A temporary preparer who knows the second account is still coming and that this client has already been chased twice holds both facts in one place, and the place goes home in April. So the rule a practice can afford to be loose about in July has to hold in February: a thing you are waiting on gets recorded where the whole firm can read it, not where one person happens to remember it.
Routing tightens for the same reason. Every extra pair of hands is another address a client can reply into, and clients reply to whoever wrote to them last, which is sensible of them and will not change. If the firm has never named the mailbox that holds the record for documents, the week before January is the week to do it, not the second week of February.
Then there is the part that outlives the season by accident. Accounts opened for four months are the accounts still open in July, and the person who finished in April is usually still on the list too. Client confidentiality in an accounting practice treats that list as the access control a firm actually operates, which it is. Read it beside the seat list on one afternoon in May.
Where does Point fit?
Every count above can be kept on a sheet of paper, and was, for a long time before software offered to help with any of it. What a tool changes is who holds the running total between Monday and Thursday.
Point reads the mail before you get to it and weighs each message on how much it matters and how soon, so on the morning four hundred things arrive the client with a date on them is at the top and the software renewal is not. Every thread carries its summary in a line, which a season needs more than any other stretch of the year: thirty messages about one return can be judged without being opened.
The season jobs land where you would want them. Something a client asks of you halfway down a message turns into a dated item without anybody copying it out. A request you sent is held as something owed to you and comes back on the date you chose rather than the day it happens to occur to you, which is where the waiting half of the count keeps itself. You can also leave a standing instruction: ask to hear the moment a named client’s signed authorization arrives, or the last statement you are missing, and hear about it once, when it lands, rather than checking. Files gather in one place, dated and named, without losing the thread they came in on, and a question put to an attachment is answered with a pointer to the line in the file it came from, which counts for a great deal when most of what you were sent is inside the documents rather than in the messages.
Two things fit the season in particular. A short briefing gathers what needs you before the day starts, which is as close to a stand-up as a small firm gets in March, and the same digest catches you up after a day out of the office. And you set what is worth interrupting you for and what can wait for that briefing, which is the difference between being reachable and being available.
How much Point does on your behalf is a dial with its own setting for each kind of task, sitting at review out of the box. The seasonal use of that is worth saying plainly: the routine kinds are the ones to raise, acknowledging a delivery or sending a chase you have already worded, while anything needing judgement stays where it is. At the top of the dial Point acts without checking in, which is what the top of the dial is for. Everything done shows up in a log with times against it, and most of it can be reversed from there, with the exception no software gets round: a message already delivered to somebody else’s server has been sent. For the extra hands, seats go on as the team grows and come off again afterwards, and Point signs in to whichever mailbox the practice already runs, on Google or on Microsoft, so nothing about your address or your eleven years of archive changes in January.
What Point cannot do is the counting this piece asks for. Point holds no job list, has no view of how deep the queue on any desk is, and cannot set your cut-off date, because all three of those are facts about your capacity rather than about your mail. They stay yours. The full inventory is on the benefits page, and Point for accountants walks the rest of it through a practice.
Common questions
Should we be clearing the inbox every day in busy season?
Only if it is free, and in February it is not. The morning it takes to empty a season mailbox is a morning not spent on the dozen jobs that went quiet overnight, and the clean screen certifies nothing about them, since a message you filed and a message that never arrived look identical on it. Split the open jobs three ways instead. It takes a fraction of the time and produces the one number the season is keeping score with.
When should we chase a client in March?
Work back from the cut-off rather than from the filing date, and subtract the queue rather than the job. If a return needs two days of work and eleven days of other returns are in front of it, the client’s window shut thirteen days before the deadline, not two. That sum usually produces a date that feels impatient and is simply correct, which is why it is better computed than felt.
Is it a mistake to change how we handle email in the middle of the season?
It depends entirely on whether the change needs learning. A new inbox adopted in February means learning software in the worst month of your year, and the sensible window is the quiet middle; AI email for accountants covers that timing and what to test a product against. A drill is a different matter. Splitting your open jobs into ready, chased and unchased costs a sheet of paper and ten minutes, needs nobody’s permission, and can start on a Tuesday in March.
What happens to everything we deferred when the season ends?
It arrives at once, in the week nobody has any energy left, which is the argument for never giving it all the same date. Spread the promises across the month afterwards and the pile lands as a workload rather than as a second season. It is also worth reading the deferred list once before working it, because it is the only honest record of what the compression cost you, and a category that turns up on it three years running is telling you something about the shape of the practice rather than about the season.
Our busy season is not tax season. Does any of this still hold?
Yes, because none of it depends on which months they are. The shape is a fixed date somebody else set, a body of work known in advance, and half of that work sitting with people outside the firm. A bookkeeping practice meets it at every month-end, an audit team at year end, and a UK practice in January. The compression is shorter, so the queue term in the chase arithmetic moves faster and the cut-off matters more. Everything else reads the same.
The short version
Busy season does not make your mail more urgent, it makes it concurrent, and the shortage it creates is not hours but jobs that are ready to be worked. So the number to run to zero is the jobs blocked on somebody nobody has chased, which stays small however loud the mailbox gets. Work chase dates against the queue rather than against the task, and give the firm one cut-off date that does the same sum for everyone. Rank what unstops a person above what creates work. And write down in December what will wait, with the sentence and the date that go with it, because the difference between a backlog and a mess is only ever whether the list was made in advance.