Business Strategy for CPA's · Geraldine Carter

360 Pick Your Week Tax Season with Holly Sexton, CPA

·45 min·2 clips

Holly says she would not go back because workflows removed 3 a.m. worry and let her plan ahead.

1. Business Strategy for CPA's episode 360, “Pick Your Week Tax Season with Holly Sexton, CPA,” focuses on a tax-season workflow change for a CPA firm. 2. Geraldine Carter hosts and Holly Sexton returns as the guest, bringing a year of experience with the new process and a prior appearance in episode 346. 3. The episode asks whether “pick your week” can replace a first-in, first-out tax-season pile with a metered calendar that gives both CPA and client clearer expectations. 4. Holly says her first version sorted clients by orphan 1040s, multiple Schedule E's, other business returns, and bookkeeping clients with K-1s ready. 5. She says the firm used date buckets so some clients went earlier around February, some later in March, and some later still after broker statements arrived. 6. Geraldine contrasts that with the old method, where tax season felt like waiting to see who would show up and when the pile would hit. 7. Holly says the new structure gave clients a window, told them when to expect the next communication, and gave her a more predictable revenue flow. 8. She says clients treated the chosen week like an appointment and rescheduled themselves when they could not meet the document deadline. 9. Holly says Calendly, templated emails, and portal notifications reduced the amount of chasing she had to do. 10. She says the firm’s workflow became easier to plan because she could schedule tax returns one or two days after the client upload slot. 11. Holly says the biggest emotional shift was moving from uncertainty to security in revenue, because she no longer had to wonder whether people would arrive on March 15th. 12. She says she ran ahead by a couple of weeks for almost all tax season, which felt uncomfortable because she kept expecting something to be wrong. 13. Holly says double-checking showed that the earlier pace came from clients sticking to the appointment they chose and uploading through the portal at the scheduled time. 14. She says the hardest setup question was how to communicate the change to longtime clients, including her “little old ladies” and clients who were not tech fluent. 15. Holly says loom videos, printed instructions, portal access, and iPhone upload links helped clients adopt the new process without much pushback. 16. She says the first cracks showed up in Calendly wording, where some clients thought the slot was a Zoom or in-person meeting rather than an upload appointment. 17. Holly says she fixed that by changing the wording and adding a Wednesday reminder that restated the appointment was only for uploading documents. 18. She says another crack was incomplete uploads, which led her to add a questionnaire to the organizer so clients would report life changes like marriage, a house sale, or a baby. 19. The conversation is practical and coaching-driven, with Geraldine pushing for concrete examples and Holly answering in a reflective, process-focused way. 20. CPA firm owners who want tighter tax-season boundaries would likely get the most value; solo tax preparers who hate process changes may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical look at using tax-season reservations to make revenue and workloads more predictable.

Tax season is presented as a process to be scheduled rather than survived in a rush, and Holly Sexton makes the benefit plain: it did not cut much time, but it did bring a stronger sense of revenue security.

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Why you'd press play

Turn tax season into a reservation system instead of a scramble.

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