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Words like “season” mean different things to people – holiday movie superfans, farmers with multi-acre peach farms, chefs with a propensity to over salt their various stews. While I can’t predict what most people think of when they hear the word “season” – I know absolutely what accountants do.

Tax season is where the action lies for a great number of firms – they live for compliance, for details, for maximizing deductions. To be buried beneath a mountain of forms! To navigate phone menus when talking to the federal government! To see what can be digitally signed this year and what’s going to require a great deal of mail!

To that end, no client ever holds up a 300-page Form 1065 and says, “Look at what my accountant got me!” They instead tell their friends about the personal advice, the guidance, the expertise their CPA or their EA provided them as a part of that relationship.
It’s crazy to think that in a tax engagement the physical return may be the least valuable part of all your labors.

It’s hard to have time for the relationship part. Income tax has a lot of moving parts and a lot of tiny little numbers across a myriad of forms, each with their own subsections and codes. We often talk on our team about how the books we keep (and the books our clients keep) can fundamentally alter the preparation experience for our tax team. And rest assured – no one wants to cross the tax team.
We’re an exclusively QuickBooks Online firm – we want to have easy, unfettered access to our clients books and be able to work alongside them to ensure they’re timely and accurate. The time we used to spend with transfer files and backups is a thing of the past and we’re all the better for it.

And you know what a tax team loves? They love clean, organized sets of books that are easy to parse and easy to digest. And like I said – no one wants to cross them. We prefer to keep them happy.

Tax compliance has a different fundamental goal compared to bookkeeping or advisory – really, it’s about accuracy in topline revenue and minimizing tax burdens. The last thing any tax preparer needs during their season-of-need is to worry about reconciliation or goofy coding.

So how do we hand cute, perfect, flawless, gorgeous books over to our tax team? We close every month with Books Review and every year with Prep for Taxes in QuickBooks Online. And, to answer your first question – they are both features included with QuickBooks Online Accountant at no cost to you. I get it. We’re accountants. We always ask.

Books Review makes sure we don’t miss anything – that everything is reconciled, categorized, posted, applied, and recorded. That controlled oversight means we leave no stone unturned and when our tax team opens those books, they can be confident in their accuracy.

Once those books are spot-on perfect, the tax preparer can map every account line to its home on the appropriate tax form. That means without even leaving QuickBooks Online, they already know what every line on the tax return should be. Plus – taxes are hard. Taxes are tricky. There’s a reason I don’t do taxes anymore – I couldn’t hang. I leave it to the professionals.

And then there are those technical adjustments – those Tax Journal Entries. Friend to CPAs everywhere; nemesis to in-house bookkeepers who Do Not Like the outside accountant making changes to their beautiful books. Prep for Taxes has a fix for this too – journals can be made that reflect solely in the tax mapping and don’t exist in the general ledger. So maybe a client uses straight-line depreciation? Or GAAP rent liabilities? Or they have multinational locations and keep their assets on the IFRS standard? They might love that Section 179 deduction, but they don’t want to see it on their balance sheet. Tax Journal Entries ensure that the data can be calculated, entered, and tracked by the tax preparer without altering the bookkeeper’s hard work.

The tax mapping can then be locked, so that no general ledger updates change any of the balances. Or you could do the opposite – update it instantaneously so that the changes in QuickBooks Online flow directly through to the mapping you’ve already done.

Plus – Prep for Taxes generates workpapers. It generates CSV exports. That means once you’ve mapped a client one time that any future year, your work is already halfway done. At that point, you can make a file to import into your tax prep software of choice or directly feed into ProConnect Tax Online. Or get an intern to type it all in. Interns love to type.

It’s an easy process:

• Keep great books alongside your client in QuickBooks Online
• Tell your tax team about Prep for Taxes for tax journal entries, workpapers, and mapping
• Use all that extra time you used to spend sending files back and forth and sorting through pages and pages of statements and making journals in spreadsheets and recalculating every time the books were updated to Do What You Love, Instead

No one got into accounting to spend all day on their ten-key. We became accountants to know how things work, how to parse complex info, and how to turn that knowledge into actionable feedback for our clients. Being able to utilize QuickBooks Online to the fullest is crucial to make sure you’re working efficiently – and working efficiently means a lot less working at night, and on weekends, and all those other times where you have more important places to be than your office.

It’s 2025 – time is at a premium and it’s increasingly important to differentiate yourself from the sometimes-great-sometimes-not-so-great AI competition. I truly believe you do that by spending more of your valuable time with your clients and you do that by spending less time typing numbers into software (unless you’re an intern … then, sorry, but you’ll get your time, I promise).