Tax season exposes the weakest points in a firm’s operations. The same bottlenecks recur each year: documents that arrive in the wrong format, data that has to be re-keyed, returns whose status nobody can confirm, clients who go silent, reviews that run past midnight. The question for firm leadership is which of these failures is worth automating first, and which still require a person.

Most firms have not acted on this. A 2025 Karbon poll of more than 300 tax professionals found that client information capture and document assembly rank as the biggest challenges in tax season, yet fewer than 22% of firms have automated those steps.
Below are the five workflows that most commonly break during tax season, ranked by automation return and annotated with where human review still belongs.

1. Document handling 

This is the first thing to automate and the one with the clearest payoff. Client documents arrive in a dozen formats: portal uploads, emails, scans of scans, photos of paper, faxes. Every one of them has to be classified, renamed, filed, and checked against a list. Done manually, this work absorbs a meaningful share of staff hours before a single return is prepared.

Practitioners interviewed by the Journal of Accountancy for its January 2024 tax season guidance describe document intake and transmission as the first process they automated, and describe assigning a dedicated administrative role to own electronic document handling across the firm. That shift, which pulls document work out of the preparer’s path, is the structural change automation enables.

Human judgment still matters where documents deviate from standard formats: handwritten annotations, unlabeled attachments, K-1 footnotes that a classifier will mislabel. Automation should handle the throughput; preparers should be spending their attention on the exceptions.

2. Data collection and organizer completion

Pre-population is the highest-leverage step in this category. A blank organizer sent to a client returns late, incomplete, and requires re-keying. An organizer pre-populated with prior-year data, direct brokerage feeds, payroll imports, and parsed K-1s and 1099s returns faster, arrives cleaner, and frees the preparer to focus on what changed rather than what was already known.

The preparer still has to notice what is missing. First-year elections, life events the client did not volunteer, changes in filing status, and unusual basis calculations remain a reading job, not a parsing job.

3. Status tracking

The case for automating workflow tracking is the simplest on this list: there is no judgment call embedded in “which stage is this return in.” Yet many firms run this workflow across spreadsheets, whiteboards, email chains, and the tax software itself, often simultaneously and none of them synchronized. The result is the 10 p.m. call where nobody can confirm whether a return was extended, filed, or waiting on a signature.

This is the category where automation should be most complete. Stage transitions triggered by e-file acknowledgments and signatures eliminate an entire class of status-checking overhead.

4. Client follow-up

Chasing documents is typically assigned to the most junior staff, who are the least equipped to move a reluctant client along. Templated automation handles the first three rounds well, a human should step in on the fourth.

Writing in Accounting Today, Justin Pulgrano argues that firms manufacture their own bottleneck by treating prepared-by-client lists as a separate phase and falling back on open-ended requests rather than standardized, test-aligned asks. Automating the cadence is easy. Standardizing the content of the request is the harder and more valuable change, along with building in a human handoff for repeated silence.

5. Review prep

Review is where the stakes are highest and the temptation to over-automate is strongest. The evidence supports partial automation with a firm line drawn at judgment.

The Journal of Accountancy’s June 2025 profile of AI use in practice documents the split clearly. Practitioners report meaningful time savings on mechanical review, including diagnostics, research memos, and tie-outs, but also recurring errors in AI output on inflation-adjusted calculations and similarly specific facts. The working rule that emerges is straightforward: use automation for the mechanical layer, double-check the output, and reserve human attention for the plausibility question.

Where to start

Status tracking is the easiest to automate and the lowest risk. Document handling and client follow-up are the next two to add. Organizer pre-population and review automation offer more value but touch preparer work directly, so they are better piloted in the fall than rolled out mid-season.

The cost of continuing to do this manually is documented. The 2024 PCPS CPA Firm Top Issues Survey ranked finding and retaining qualified staff as the top issue for every firm size category with two or more employees. Firms that do not automate the mechanical layer of tax work are paying for it in staff hours, turnover, and the quality of the judgment work their senior people should be doing instead.
The firms that come out of next season in better shape will be the ones that were specific about what broke, automated the mechanical layers completely, and protected the judgment layers deliberately.