Tax Season Stress

Tax season is a stressful time for many accounting firms, workloads increase, your customer base grows, and clients want everything completed immediately.  

If you are in the accounting industry you will be more than aware of the importance of data management. With the advancement in technology the industry has seen a huge spike paperless data management.

The Challenge:

Unfortunately for one of our tax accounting clients tax season became extra stressful due to hard drive failures. The subsequent identification of insufficient backups meant that the firm lost a majority of their client data which included their financials, tax returns, financial data, timesheet entries for WIP to be billed to clients and more. The client had a paperless office and as such did not have physical copies of the tax returns.

The task of identifying what data had been lost, ascertaining which client returns had already been lodged with the ATO and recreating the lost data would be very time-consuming. These tasks were over and above the regular workflow that was supposed to be undertaken by the clients.

In order to best manage client relations, especially in light of the recent cyber crimes reported in the news, they had been attempting to exhaust all possible avenues for locating data prior to contacting the client directly.

This included checking:

• for any available paper copies that may be in office (for example waiting to be signed).
• their server for any information, including Handisoft’s document manager.
• the ATO’s SBR system
• emails sent including final copies provided as attachments
• copies made available electronically through software such as DropBox
• the ATO portal to recreate simple returns & BAS’s lodged
• client software such as Xero, MYOB or Banklink in order to recreate returns from original data
• rolling data forward from prior year returns
• tax planning work papers and letters created prior to the event

The Outcome:

The client reached out to APT for additional assistance. Where the lost financials & tax returns for the firms clients could be recreated, our clients sent this work to APT. This allowed the firm to keep their regular processes move effectively without any hurdles and freed the time of their local accountants to attend to the necessary client relations. APT had also created an in-house software application for the firm that could extract data from the DAT files lodged through the SBR system.

Our client acknowledged the help we extended in recreating the data lost and recognised that we played a pivotal role in the data recovery.

At APT we are a solutions-based firm, we adapt to any new tasks that are required from your business. We understand that each industry constantly evolves and often situations occur that need to be resolved immediately. We have therefore ensured that we have the people and the infrastructure to support your organisation when these situations occur.  If you need additional assistance in your business now is the time to contact APT, click here to contact us today.