There is nothing useful left to start today. Whatever is not finished is either going out tomorrow or it is not, and no article is going to change that.
So this one is about something else. The single most valuable thing a firm can do in the last two days of an extension season is write down what just happened, while it is still true.
January has no memory
Every firm plans to fix next October. The planning happens in January, at the point where fees are set and the client list gets looked at properly for the first time in months.
By then the only thing anyone reliably remembers is which returns were large. That is the wrong variable, and it is the reason the same three clients cause the same crisis every year while nothing about the arrangement changes.
What nobody remembers in January is which client took eleven emails to produce a brokerage statement. Or which return looked routine and turned out to have a state issue buried in it. Or which one was genuinely hard, as against merely slow.
Those three facts are the whole basis for a repricing conversation, and all three decay to nothing within about six weeks.
Two scales, captured separately
On our platform a preparer grades every return at the moment they send it to review, on two independent one-to-five scales.
Complexity is how hard the return was as an objective matter. Client effort is how much the client cost in coordination and chasing. They are deliberately not combined, because a single "difficulty" number destroys exactly the distinction a January conversation needs.
A straightforward return for an impossible client is a one and a five. It does not need a higher fee for the work; it needs a different arrangement for the chasing, or a conversation about how documents arrive. Average those two numbers into a three and you have a return that looks moderately difficult and tells you nothing about what to do.
There is a free-text note alongside them — what actually made it hard. In practice that note is the part that earns its keep. Scores tell you which files to look at. The note tells you what to say.
Why it is a gate rather than a prompt
The grading is not an optional field on a form somebody might complete. A preparer cannot send a return to review without it. Both scores must be present and both must be between one and five, or the handoff is refused.
That is a deliberately blunt design, and it exists because of what October does to optional fields.
An optional quality field in a busy season is a field that is empty. Not because preparers are careless, but because the thing being asked for has no value today and a real cost in seconds, and everyone is making that trade forty times a week. The data is only worth something months later, to somebody else, which is precisely the kind of value that loses every argument against a deadline.
The same logic applies to the workpapers. A return cannot go to review without the schedules and computations behind it either — a reviewer needs the working, not just the answer. Both requirements are the same idea: capture the thing at the only moment it is cheap to capture.
What you do with it in January
Plot fee against complexity across the whole client list and the picture resolves quickly. Most returns sit on a sensible diagonal. The interesting ones are the outliers.
High complexity with a low fee is a pricing error, and usually an old one — a fee set years ago for a return that has quietly grown a rental property and two states since.
High client effort with a low fee is a different problem, and it is the one that actually burns people out. It is also the one that a fee increase alone rarely fixes. We wrote about the options in fire the client, eat the hours, or find a third option.
And the low-complexity, low-effort cluster is your extension pile candidates for next year. We set out how to think about that in which returns should leave the building — this is the data that makes that triage a matter of record rather than recollection.
Confirm your own numbers
One caution about any costing built on this, including ours.
Our platform ships a standard-hours grid and default hourly rates so the cost figures work before anyone configures anything. They are a plausible starting point for a small-to-mid firm and they are not your numbers.
The system records whether an owner has actually confirmed those settings, specifically so it can tell you whether a cost figure rests on your rates or on our defaults. Until you have set them, read every number as an illustration. A pricing decision taken on somebody else's assumed rates is worse than one taken on instinct, because it comes with unearned confidence.
If you are not on any of this
None of the above needs our platform. It needs a habit, and the habit is the hard part.
Add two columns to whatever list you already keep. Score each return one to five for difficulty and one to five for how much the client cost you, and write one line on what made it hard. Do it as the return goes out, not in a review session later, because a batch exercise in November produces remembered scores rather than observed ones.
Make it mandatory in whatever small way you can — a field that has to be filled before a return is marked complete, or a partner who checks. An optional version of this will be blank by the second week.
Two numbers and a sentence per return. That is the entire input to next January's pricing conversation, and this week is the only time it can honestly be collected.
Our desk prepares expat and domestic returns — Forms 2555, 1116, 8621, FinCEN Form 114 and Form 8938, alongside 1040, 1120-S and 1065 work. Every return is prepared by one IRS-licensed enrolled agent and reviewed by a second before it reaches your firm. Your letterhead, your client, your review — our hours. Preparing US returns since 2003 — 5,300+ tax returns filed in the last 4 seasons.