The Part of Tax Season Nobody Talks About

Tax season is almost over for most firms. Returns are filed, extensions are queued, and partners are finally sleeping again. But before everyone moves on, I keep thinking about something a CPA told me last month. He said the hardest part of tax season wasn't the returns themselves. It wasn't the deadline pressure or the new tax law changes. It was the two weeks before any of that — when he was just trying to get clients to send him their documents. "It's like herding cats," he said. "Every year." He's not alone. According to a 2025 Accounting Industry Report, 69% of firms say they're delayed in getting client documents. Nearly seven out of ten firms. That number stopped me cold when I read it. Here's what's interesting: most of those firms have a client portal. They have TaxDome or Canopy or ShareFile or something similar. They've invested in the technology. And they're still waiting on documents. So the portal isn't the problem. I've been spending a lot of time in r/taxpros reading how real practitioners talk about this. One person described their intake setup as "a branched survey that became messy." Another said they're still mixing paper organizers with PDFs. Someone else said their biggest issue with their portal was implementation — they were "left hanging" with no direction. The pattern I keep seeing: the tools handle what happens after the docs arrive. They're great at organizing, routing, and managing. But the moment of actually getting clients to understand what to send, and send it correctly? That's still a manual, chaotic, human problem. One CPA put it bluntly in a thread about onboarding: "I definitely need to up the intake game." Not the software game. The intake game. There's a difference. Intake is the front door. It's the moment a client decides whether to dig through their files right now or put it off for three weeks. It's whether they send you one W-2 or the six they actually have. It's whether your team spends Monday morning prepping returns or Monday morning sending reminder emails. The firms that cracked this tend to have a few things in common. They've made the process feel guided — almost like a conversation — instead of a form to fill out. They've reduced the cognitive load on the client. And they've built the expectations in before tax season starts, not during it. None of that requires a massive software overhaul. It requires thinking about the intake experience the way you'd think about any other client experience — with intention. We built Paloma because I kept hearing some version of this story over and over. But honestly, whether or not you use us, it's worth asking the question: what does your intake experience actually feel like for your client? Not for you. For them. That might be the most useful post-mortem question of the season.