Training seasonal tax staff at a St. Charles firm

It is the second Tuesday of January at a three-partner firm in St. Charles. The seasonal preparer you hired back in November started Monday. She knows how to prepare a return. What she doesn't know yet is how your firm runs.

By 10:30 she has asked four things. Where do scanned client documents go before somebody reviews them? Does a return with a new rental property go to a partner or to the senior? Which template is the extension letter? A client just emailed a photo of their W-2, so is it fine to reply and ask for the 1099s the same way?

Each answer takes the partner about two minutes. The last one should have taken longer than that, because the honest answer is no, and the reason is written in a security plan she has not read yet.

Nothing went wrong this morning. The partner just had a dozen two-minute conversations before lunch, in the weeks when their time is worth the most, and February brings a second hire who will ask all of the same things again.

What learning by interruption costs a firm

Most of the cost lands on your most senior people. A seasonal hire can prepare a return already. Your firm's habits are what they lack: the folder structure, the review routing, which client gets a call instead of an email, which templates are current, and what never goes out by plain email. All of that lives in the heads of the people who have been there longest, so those are the people who get asked.

The answers also drift. One partner says to save the source documents by client and year, and the senior says to sort by return type. Both work. When March comes, though, nobody can find anything quickly, and the reviewer spends part of every review hunting for documents instead of reviewing.

The bigger risk is the handling of client data. The IRS says plainly that federal law requires tax and accounting professionals to create and maintain a Written Information Security Plan, and it lists employee management and training as a core part of that plan (IRS news release IR-2026-92, August 2026). Most small firms do have the plan, sitting in a binder or a PDF. A seasonal hire reads it in a rush on day one, if at all, and then learns the real rules from whoever happens to be sitting next to them.

Then there are the dates nobody tracks. Anyone who prepares returns for pay needs a valid PTIN for the current year before starting, and a seasonal hire who worked somewhere else last year may not have renewed it. Software logins, building keys and remote access have to be set up before Monday and shut off when the season ends. Usually one person carries all of that in their head.

What replacing the interruptions looks like

Write your firm's answers down once and put them where a new hire will look before walking over to a partner's desk. This is how I would build it.

• For the first two weeks of the season, every question a new hire asks goes on one shared list. It will be shorter than you expect and far more repetitive.
• Each question gets answered on a single page: where documents get saved, how review routing works, which templates to use for engagement letters, extensions and organizer requests, and how to answer a client who sends something sensitive by email. Wherever possible, the answer quotes your own security plan.
• An assistant sits in front of those pages. The new hire asks in plain words ("who reviews a return with a K-1?") and gets your firm's answer with a link to the page it came from. When the answer isn't in your material, the assistant says so and points them to a person. It doesn't guess.
• Anything the assistant couldn't answer goes to whoever owns the playbook. That list is your to-do for next season.
• Day one is a checklist: PTIN confirmed, software accounts created, security plan acknowledged, a sample return walked through with the reviewer, and keys and remote access logged. The office manager sees what is still open without having to ask anyone.
• The last day is a checklist too. Access gets switched off on a date set at hiring, so a seasonal login doesn't sit open into the summer.

If you're also losing time to the client side of onboarding, meaning engagement letters, bank access and prior returns, that is its own problem. I wrote about it in why accounting firms sign a client and then can't start.

What stays with the partners

Judgment stays with the partners. No playbook decides how to treat an unusual position, whether a return is ready to sign, or how much to tell a client whose numbers look wrong. Review stays human, and so does the signature.

So does the teaching that only works side by side. You still need to sit next to a new hire for the first complicated return and watch how they think. What changes is where your two minutes go. You stop spending them on folder names and template versions and spend them on the judgment calls you hired a professional for.

Your security plan stays yours as well. I can make it easier to find and quote it at the right moment. Writing it, keeping it current and deciding what it requires are your firm's responsibility.

When not to build this

If your staff has been the same for years and you never take on seasonal help, this isn't your bottleneck, and I'll tell you that in the first ten minutes. If your process exists only in one partner's head, the first step is a few hours of that partner's time getting it out, and that part I can't do for you. Builds start at $500 one-time, then a flat monthly from $99 after an included run-in period, cancellable. You'll find more on the accounting firms page and on what I build for businesses in St. Charles.

Where to start

Start with a free 20 minute process audit. We'll go through what your last seasonal hire asked in their first two weeks and where those answers live today. If you'd save partner hours by writing them down once before January, I'll tell you what the build costs. If you wouldn't, you keep the list. Book it here.