exhaustion, chaos, and missed lives are the result of design choices—not destiny.
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the disruptors
with liz farr
brenda cannon, co-founder of cannon and associates, has been pioneering a creative approach for taming tax season madness: every return is scheduled like an appointment. “we know how long it takes us to prepare a tax return. why could we not control each week and the number of tax returns we prepare each week?” she recalls thinking after hearing jason staats introduce the concept on a podcast in 2022.
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over the last three tax seasons, cannon and her team, which includes her husband and co-founder, randy cannon, have been refining the process. clients choose a date on a calendar on which they will deliver their documents to her office, with the understanding that their return will be ready three weeks after that date.
“on a friday, if we’ve prepared all the returns we have to prepare by this friday, we are caught up. and so we can have the weekend off, and our clients have a specific date their tax return will be completed.” the psychology of being caught up every week eliminates the stress of a growing pile of returns. it allows the entire firm to rest easier.
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the number of slots available on the firm’s calendar is matched to the firm’s capacity, which means that more clients will be extended than before the scheduling system was instituted. “for many years, march 15 was our deadline, and we would kill ourselves to get the return done, because we had no way of knowing how many clients would get us their information by march 15,” cannon recalls. but those days are over.
in the first year, cannon’s team estimated they could prepare eight returns per day, monday through thursday, with generous cushions for illness, weather, internet outages, and other unforeseen issues. clients are required to submit their documents on their scheduled date, and a team member reviews the submitted documents to ensure that everything is in place by the time the preparer begins work.
an unexpected benefit has been the increase in efficiency: preparers are no longer having to pick up and put returns down when they realize they don’t have everything, and then switching back to the original return when the information becomes available. today, when the preparer begins the return, they should have everything they need.
another unexpected benefit has been improvements in quality. “there are fewer mistakes now,” cannon reports. “nobody wants you to work on their tax return at two o’clock in the morning when your brain is mush.”
like most tax pros, cannon paid the price for miserable tax seasons. “i’ve missed easter so many years,” she recalls. “i didn’t get spring break with my kids.” that price isn’t just missed family time, says cannon. “i found out that working over 55 hours a week increases your chance of stroke by 35% and your chance of heart disease by 17%.” her friends also stopped inviting her to do things from january to april because they knew she’d say no.
she also recalls being angry one day in march when an employee left the office at five o’clock. “i heard the door, and i was so mad. why are they leaving at five o’clock? like, what are they thinking? and then, when i think about that, i think that’s so messed up that i would expect my employees to also give up their life for three and a half months.”
both cannon’s firm and the clients benefit from the new arrangement. while a few clients left – approximately 5% – most remained and appreciated the new structure. “they know a specific date their tax return will be completed,” cannon says. “that has helped tremendously.”
after two years of refining the process using calendly, airtable, and other tools, cannon partnered with a developer to create?schedulease, software designed specifically for scheduling tax prep. schedulease is now available on a subscription basis. she also coaches accountants through this process in her take your life back tax pro community.
by scheduling returns, cannon’s firm has demonstrated that tax professionals “can work normal hours like the rest of the world, with scheduling their tax prep.”
13 key takeaways
- cannon requires clients to pick their 2026 tax preparation dates by the end of 2025. this eliminates last-minute scheduling conflicts.
- no appointments are available for the week three weeks before april 15. this ensures the team isn’t working on new returns and can instead focus on extensions.
- clients receive multiple reminders to schedule their tax returns, and if they don’t pick a date, they are notified that their status has been changed to “inactive,” which often triggers a response.
- the firm has also created a waiting list so that clients who don’t get the date they want can be pulled into earlier slots as capacity allows.
- scheduling returns revealed the firm’s actual capacity. now they only take on new clients when there is room in the schedule.
- stop apologizing for raising your fees. cable companies, netflix, and insurance companies all raise their fees without explanation or apology. we have nothing to apologize for.
- it’s easier to set higher fees for new clients than to adjust the pricing for existing legacy clients.
- if you make changes to how you run your firm, you will likely encounter pushback from some clients. don’t make decisions based on just a few clients. look at the bigger picture.
- ai won’t take our jobs. we’re still the most trusted advisors, so our profession is here to stay.
- our profession is in a great place to set our fees and to set the rules for how we operate.
more about brenda cannon
brenda cannon is a tax professional with over 20 years of experience and the owner of cannon & associates, where she partners with her husband, randy. after years of enduring long tax seasons, they developed a new process to schedule tax prep, manage their workload, and regain control of their time. cannon & associates is proud to have won the oklahoman’s community choice award for three consecutive years. she was runner-up for the 2024 aicpa/cpa.com digital cpa innovative practitioner award and was named a forbes 2025 best in state cpa for 2025. she also co-authored an article for bloomberg tax insight called “five don’ts when starting your own tax and accounting business.” outside of work, brenda enjoys exercising, gardening, and spending time with family and friends, and anything crafty and creative.
transcript
(transcripts are made available as soon as possible. they are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.)
liz farr
welcome to accounting disruptor conversations. i’m your host, liz farr from 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间, and here i’m talking to owners of firms who are doing things a little differently than our parents’ and our grandparents’ accountants and bookkeepers. my guest today is brenda cannon, who is co-founder of cannon and associates and founder of schedulease. welcome to the show, brenda,
brenda cannon
thank you for having me.
liz farr
well, you know you came to my attention a little a couple years ago on twitter about the way that you were running your firm, and we will talk to that. so i am just delighted that we’re finally getting together to talk about what you are doing now. can you start off by telling listeners a little bit about your firm, where you’re located, what services you offer, what kinds of clients, things like that.
brenda cannon
sure, so we are in edmond, oklahoma, and we’re smaller than we were five years ago, kind of on purpose. now it is me and my partner, husband, randy cannon, and we have one full time accountant, one full time admin, and we have an ea who does contract work for us part time. we are trying to move in the direction of having mainly business clients that we do accounting for and taxes and tax planning, we still have a number of orphan 1040 clients, and we do still take 1040 clients if, if we can help them with tax planning, we don’t really take basic 1040 tax returns anymore.
liz farr
okay, that makes sense. now, as i mentioned just a minute ago, you landed on my twitter radar a couple years ago because you were doing something different with the way you were you were operating, you were scheduling the returns in your office. can you explain how this works?
brenda cannon
i sure can. so this is our third year to schedule tax prep. i’ve talked in the past about how just i got so frustrated with, you know, not having a life january, february, march and part of april, and the stress of the work piling up. and thinking, there could should be, you know, there’s got to be a better way. i just was. i was just sick and tired of it. and it was november of 2022 i was on an airplane, and i was listening to jason staat’s podcast, and he introduced the idea of scheduling tax prep, and i thought it like we know how long it takes us to prepare a tax return. why could we not control each week and the number of tax returns we prepare each week? so i got when i got back home, we had a team meeting, we had more employees then and we just started talking about, how can we implement this, and what would it look like, and how, how can we communicate with our clients? and we started doing it, and we’ve learned from our mistakes, but it is working so well, we have a manageable number of tax returns to prepare every week now and and there’s some psychology to that, like on a friday, if we’ve prepared all the returns we have to prepare by this friday, we are caught up. and so we can have the weekend off and and our clients have a specific date their tax return will be completed. and so our clients like that. also, they they like the structure.
liz farr
also. i like that, and that is so different from my memories of working as a tax preparer. you know, initially, at the beginning of tax season, you know, you’d get a trickle, and you’d be able to knock them out in a day or two, and then the pile would start growing. and i would say, okay, let me try and get things out in two weeks. and then the pile grew some more. and then it was, well, i just can’t work anymore hours. let me try and do three weeks, and it just, it just got worse and worse. so how, how did this kind of even out your workflow. you know, you already touched on that a little bit
brenda cannon
what we did. so what we did the first year, we did a little bit different the second and third year. the first year we we use firm360 practice management, and you can budget your time for each project. so we, we looked at, we ran a report to see how the average time it takes to prepare a tax return in our firm, which is a big like, there’s a big difference. some might take you a couple of days, and one you can do in 30 minutes, but we just kind of came up with an average, and we decided to add a ton of cushion, because unforeseen things happen every year, like you lose a loved one, or somebody gets sick, or there’s bad weather, just, or your internet goes out, there’s just, you know, we forget about that, but there are always unforeseen things that happen. so we added a ton of cushion. so the first year, we had four preparers, and we decided we could easily prepare 12 returns a day for four preparers, but we knocked it down to eight and and then no. so eight spots a day on the calendar, monday through thursday, and no spots on friday. fridays are like they’re left alone for accounting, client meetings, non tax type, things you know, dealing with correspondence, so nothing on fridays. and we told our clients, we’ll have your return prepared by the end of the week three weeks later, and and we were able to stay on schedule, and we we did have clients that were upset they were going to be extended. you know, for many years, march 15 was our deadline, and we would kill ourselves to to get the return, because we had no way of knowing how many clients would get us their information by march 15. so many of those clients, you know, not, you know, we spread the work out. so many clients that hadn’t been extended in the past had to be extended. so we also sent an eform to our clients called, “i didn’t get the date i want,” and that is kind of like a waiting list, like, i’m not happy that i had to get a date in may or in april or whatever. and so if we got ahead of schedule, we could pull a client, pull their return and work on that and get that completed if we had all their information. and that’s another important thing about this process, clients have to give us all their information on the day they pick and so they have to pick a date that’s appropriate for their tax return, and they’ve done a pretty good job of doing that. we do have an employee that looks at their tax documents the day after the date they picked. so the day after they give us their documents, she goes through their documents, compares them to their documents from the previous year. she emails the preparers and says, you know, they had these last year. they don’t have them this year. and we would ask her to reach out to the client and ask about those documents and let them know, you know, we need this as soon as possible to keep your spot on the calendar. and that sense of urgency has really helped. so then by the time we get to the return, we usually have everything, and we don’t have the status check phone calls and emails from clients, you know, just checking in see how my return is coming, because they know a specific date their tax return will be completed by a specific date. so that has helped tremendously.
liz farr
that i can imagine that that would help a lot. so so i’m trying to picture this in in my mind, so you have this four day calendar with eight slots for clients for each day. and how do you how do you allocate these? do do you just send out a mass email and people sign up? how does that work?
brenda cannon
the clients receive. we’re we used to use calendly, and then we used an api called make, and we used airtable, but there were kinks with that, but we did that for two years, and i, so i, i partnered with a software developer, and he created schedulease, which is specifically for this. so we send the calendar to our clients, and they’ll see all these spots available, and they’ll pick a spot on a day. our calendar starts like the second week of february, and it ends around august, 20. that’s for business and personal returns, and each tax return has to they need to pick a. spot for each tax return. so they have a business and a personal or a business and a trust, they need to pick a spot on the calendar for each of those, and the dates go really fast. they are like our clients are putting reminders on their phones. one of my clients told me that he was going to pick two spots on the calendar and sell one on ticketmaster. so, but we get the biggest obstacle was clients being frustrated or scared about being extended. so in communicating with our clients, we, you know, we offer to do tax projections in the fall. and now for new clients, even if it’s a 1040 client, our minimum fee includes one tax projection, and so if they don’t owe, then they don’t need to worry about being extended. so we just give them every opportunity to let us do a tax projection so they won’t owe. and now, after three years of doing this, they understand there’s a chance they’re going to be extended, so they’re not, you know, take the risk of if they think, you know, if they had extra income, or maybe they didn’t make their estimated tax payments, or whatever they need to. let us do a tax projection. so they won’t, they won’t have a penalty.
liz farr
okay, i understand. and has there been pushback from clients about this? you know, you mentioned that, you know, initially, i bet it was hard for them to figure this out. how’s that worked?
brenda cannon
there was pushback. and i’ve heard that somebody has to read something seven times before they pay attention to it. and i do believe that now, because we sent emails out about this, we announced it couple of times, and then we announced when the calendar was going out, the day and the time, and still, like a week later, after we’d send the calendar out, many clients had picked a spot on the calendar. we sent a reminder email, and some clients were like, i’m just now seeing this. why am i just i can’t get a date until may. what are you talking about? so we you know, there were some upset clients that i i talked to and explained it to them. and clients don’t know what they don’t know. they don’t know that i’ve missed easter so many years because working on tax returns like they don’t know that we miss. i didn’t get spring break with my kids. thank goodness for grandparents like they know that they have their tax return, but they have no idea that you’re killing yourself. and it’s so unhealthy working 55, i found out that working over 55 hours a week increases your chance of stroke by 35% and your chance of heart disease by 17% so it’s it’s extremely unhealthy to work like 70 hours a week when we communicate with our clients, we did try to explain to them how it’s beneficial to them, but in talking to a few disgruntled clients, i also told them about how it’s it’s good for us too. it’s good for our health. and you know, we’re just, we’re just, we’re just don’t want to give up a fourth of our life every year. and we did have some clients leave, and i’m calculating about 5% we were fine with that. we were so tired of the chaos and the long days and the seven days a week for three and a half months, we were tired of it, so we were to a point where we were fine if clients left.
liz farr
i completely agree with you there, you know, and you know, i agree that clients don’t really know what we do to get their work done. they don’t understand that in the background, behind the scenes, we’re back here doing back flips and working along around the clock and missing things in our kids lives and having to say no to family things and what you just brought up risking our health, they don’t realize any of that. so i think that when they do understand that, then they’re a little more willing to say, okay, you know, i’m not real happy with having to extend my return, but the benefit, i would imagine, is that they get a thoughtful tax preparer doing the work
brenda cannon
right. they’re they’re more rested. there, and they have a dedicated time just for that client, so they’re not juggling between other terms. we between other tax returns. we have time, you know, more time with each tax return to communicate. you know, have a conversation with our client about, maybe i don’t know, something they can do different for next year, or we’re just not as rushed. and speaking of giving up, i was remembering that my friends stopped asking me to do things like from january to april, they just stopped because they knew i was going to say no. and that’s so sad. and when i think about also having employees. i remember one day in march when we were still in our office, and one of our employees left at five o’clock, and i was so mad. i heard the door, and i was so mad. why are they leaving at five o’clock. like, what are they thinking? and then, when i think about that, i think that way that’s so messed up that i would expect my employees to also give up their life for three and a half months, like they don’t. i mean, i i’m sure there may be some employees that are just so dedicated. but a lot of people, they want to do their job, but they want to have their life too.
liz farr
yeah, now you’ve already mentioned some of the benefits of having more time having a better life. what are some of the biggest benefits that you saw beyond just that?
brenda cannon
i would say the biggest benefit is the stress is gone. it’s because we have, we know we’re caught up every week. i remember i used to look at that. this was back when we were more paper, you know. and i would have all these, we put them in a brown folder thing with a band that goes around it, and i would have shelf, and they would just, and they would go beyond the shelf and then into the floor behind this like it was so overwhelming, and that stress is gone, because if we everything’s scheduled. so what we have to have done by friday, if we have that done, then we’re on schedule, and it’s just this, this, just that, it just takes the stress away. and i think like my kids are grown now, but i remember having mom and mom guilt, like if i was at work and they were at home, and my husband and i both do taxes, so there were some challenging times. and so i would feel guilty for being at work, but then if i’d be in a soccer game, my son’s soccer game, then i feel guilty for not being at work. you just can’t win. so that for people with young children, i mean, i just want to, i just want to spread the word, because they can, they can, they can work normal hours like the rest of the world, with scheduling their tax prep.
liz farr
oh, it’s so wonderful. did you have any surprising benefits? anything that you didn’t expect?
brenda cannon
we did, and this was something we hadn’t thought of, but we’re much more efficient. you know, when you you never know when your client has all the information to you, and they bring their stuff. and so you look at their stuff, and you’re like, okay, we’re missing this, this, and this. you email the client, then you go to another return. okay, well, they’re missing this. so then you email that client, and then you, then you’re on another return, and then that client sends you the stuff. so then you put that down, and you go back to that return, and you’re it’s just extremely inefficient. now they have to have, and this sounds kind of rigid, but we say they have to have all of their tax documents to us on their day, and if they don’t, they need they’ll need to pick another date on the calendar, and by that time, well, they’re going to be out to may or june. so they are taking that pretty seriously, and we’re not that rigid, like if we notice they’re missing, like hsa forms, it seems like clients forget those all the time, because they have to go online and get those forms. they may not realize they don’t have everything to us, and we have an employee that will email them the next day, and they’ll get it right to us so it doesn’t affect us, so by the time we get the return, we should have everything.
liz farr
well, that’s. i and i, i really remember, you know that that inefficiency of picking up and putting down, and picking up and putting down, you know, i think there’s research that says when you have to change tasks, it can take about 20 minutes to get your head into the new task. and so if you’re doing that three times a day, you just lost an hour of good time, right?
brenda cannon
and then you get back to the other return, and you’re like, where was i? so you kind of go back through the stuff you’ve already done. and so you yes, highly inefficient. and i used to, we used to use practicecs software, and i couldn’t get good reports out of that. and so i was post it note, like i had to, i would manually count how many returns are sitting there, and i would have this post it note, and by the end of every day, i would circle like where i am at the end of each day. and i remember, if i had some of those returns i couldn’t finish, i’d be so frustrated because i needed to get five returns then today, you know, with my internal calculation and but they were all not completed because it didn’t have everything. so again, with the host psychology of just the stress of all this work to get done, i didn’t get my five returns done today. so now my new average, i have to have seven done a day, or whatever it is, yeah,
liz farr
yeah, that’s, that’s crazy. now, you already mentioned that you refined the way that you schedule, you know, the applications that you use for scheduling, and we’ll get into that, because i’m going to ask you about schedulease. but what are some other refinements that you made to this process over the years?
brenda cannon
what we’ve done the last two years on how we set up our calendar now, what we do is we don’t try to figure out the average time a return takes. we just take our number of clients, we added 10% for growth, but i think that was too much. we don’t want to grow that fast. think this next time, we’ll add 5% and then we just kind of spread that out pretty evenly throughout the year, from the second week of february until august, around august 20, but so three weeks prior to april 15, for a week, there are no spots available on the calendar, so when we get to the week of april 15, we don’t have a whole new group of tax returns to prepare. so that is so we can make sure all the extensions are filed. if we have to do any last minute calculations of payments for extensions, like we have some clients that they may receive a k1 but we can’t really do a projection in december or january, because they have no idea, and they might get a draft k1 so we have that week for things like that. and then another thing i’m going to do next year is i do a number of tax projections for clients four times a year for every estimated tax payment. so i want to block off time specifically for that. i’m trying to structure every minute of my my work life like so there’s not anything that creeps up that needs to be done. it’s all just kind of planned, so i don’t forget something or miss something or get behind on something.
liz farr
i like that that i can, i can, i can just imagine how much stress that would take off your shoulders just knowing that you don’t have to try and wedge something in that you forgot, right?
brenda cannon
and what is so funny is i think i became self employed because i didn’t like structure. i got tired of being late to work and sneaking in the back way like i wanted to be, but i didn’t realize how much structure calms me down.
liz farr
yeah, it really does. you know, when i started out as a freelance writer, one of the coaches i worked with had this, had like a scheduling tool. it was a capacity planner, and you would figure out how much time. a project would take you and then block out that time over, you know, a week or two weeks, or however long it would take. and then you could see clearly, okay, i don’t have any more capacity this week or next week to take anything on, though, that would help with scheduling new work, and it would also tell me what it was that i was going to be working on that day, and also what i’d be working on the rest of the week. so i can i can see that i i agree, having things planned out and having that structure isn’t an imprisoning, it’s liberating.
brenda cannon
that’s a good way of putting it. that’s so true. another thing, another benefit, is we know what our capacity is. now, in the past, this is so crazy, but in the past, we just would take new clients. we had no idea we had room for new clients. we would just take them, and we thought, well, it’ll get done. it’ll get done. but now, with the work spread out throughout the year, we have a better idea what our capacity is, so we know how many new clients we can take or whether we shouldn’t take new clients. it’s helped with that also.
liz farr
i can see that now you recently turned your scheduling into software. as you mentioned, you paired up with an app developer and created schedulease. so can you explain what this is?
brenda cannon
yes, he’s been working on it for a couple of years, and we tested it this last year, and it is specifically for this. you set up as many calendars as you want. you can do. like some people, it’s so interesting how firms are all very different, and so they’ll have to set up their calendar. how it works for them. but some people, like you might have clients that have more simpler tax returns, so they can easily schedule early in the year. so you might have a calendar for your easier 1040s and then a calendar for your more complex 1040s and then maybe a calendar for your businesses. we have one calendar, but i can see the benefit to having more than one. so in schedulease, you can set up as many calendars as you want you can and then you send the calendar link, and it’ll show the client, will see if it looks like a calendar, and you’ll have numbers on each day that where there’s spots available to pick from. and then also you can send reminders to clients. it’ll it’ll just pick the clients who haven’t picked a date yet. and you can send a reminder to them, like a week later, or however long you want to wait. i i like. so we want our clients to pick their date for 2026 by the end of 2025 we we want the entire 2026 scheduled out. so by the end of 2025 they need to all pick a spot on calendar, and so we’ll send reminders. and this, we did that this last year or two, we decided we wanted because if they don’t pick a date, we had some clients the first year that didn’t pick a date until we’re getting into june. well, then those spots that are available that’s shrinking, so there might be more people like if we’re into july, there might be more people who haven’t picked a date yet, and not that many spots still left. that’s why we want every client to pick a spot on the calendar before the end of the year, and we asked them to do that last year, and there were still some who hadn’t, and in january, like early january, we sent them an email and said, we haven’t heard from you. you haven’t picked a spot on the calendar, so we’re changing your account to inactive. this which is and a number of clients contacted us and wait, wait, we’re still clients. so we said, then pick a spot on the calendar. it’s a learning curve for clients. but yeah, schedulease, so you can send the calendar that way. also, there’s a link. so if you want to use mailchimp or outlook, or maybe even do it through, i don’t know if there’s a way to do it through your practice management, but you can send them a link to schedulease instead of emailing them from schedule these so you have different options on how to do that,
liz farr
okay? and, you know, i’m just kind of, you know, my mind is kind of working, and i’m thinking, you know, maybe a future iteration might be pairing, connecting this to your client portal.
brenda cannon
i don’t know i am right now the software developer, he just wants to make sure everything is working very well the way it is. and, you know, we’re not even he’s added a few features that clients, that the customers have asked for, but he’s, he’s very careful to make sure it’s working accurately before taking, you know, more steps, and also for people who subscribe to schedulease, you get a free membership in a community i started called take your life back tax pro, and it is in the circle app, and it’s going very well. we have about 20 members in there now,
liz farr
oh, nice. that’s very nice. now, how do, how do your clients typically get their documents to you? is it a mixture of paper and a portal or what? what is your client base like?
brenda cannon
it is a mixture of portal and some clients dropping their information off. i do think i want to try to use stanford tax this next year that will send them a list of specific documents that they had last year, so they’ll have a better idea of what documents you know, they need to get to us. we’ve tried to create organizers with different form software, but it’s not specialized to each client, and so i want to try stanford and see if we’ll get a better you know, we won’t have to follow up with as many clients to get us the rest of those missing documents.
liz farr
okay, that makes sense. now, before we hit i hit the record button. we were talking a little bit about the covid era, and i was wondering if you could share some of the useful lessons that you learned from that time. right?
brenda cannon
i enjoyed talking to you about that, because it took me back. we were still very much meeting with clients in person. we had a portal, but there were, you know, we didn’t, we didn’t know, i don’t think we knew what zoom was. so i think that it did kind of force our industry to move forward at a faster pace with technology, and i think that society in general are more easy going about how you’re dressed in a zoom meeting like i’m pretty casual today, but that seems to be kind of standard now, and if you have a dog that barks, it’s not as offensive as it used to be. so yeah, and honestly, i so i still meet with clients in person. i have a number of older clients. i call them mom’s friends and love them. and you know, some of them still want to meet in person, but my husband, who goes to the office every day, he does not, he doesn’t do in person meetings anymore, but i work remotely most days, but i actually drive to the office for in person meetings, but i think it’s pretty standard now to have a fully remote accounting firm, and i think that is so i mean, you could live on an island and to have an accounting firm. so i think that’s so cool.
liz farr
yeah, yeah. i think it’s really amazing. you know, i remember when i was back in public accounting, one of my co workers had to have medical procedure with a very long at home recovery period. so our it person set up a laptop for her so that she could dial in, but this was like a one time thing that he set up for her so that she could kind of work at home and in bed. but, you know, working remotely was not. not really the norm, even though, you know, our audit team always went somewhere. they were always working remotely. they weren’t in the office. they were in someone else’s office, yeah, so it was, it was kind of a weird mix of remote, but not remote.
brenda cannon
and i think that speaks to our industry, how we don’t adapt to change very well. i have had a number of people tell me that they are so interested in scheduling text prep, but their boss will not even think about it. and i said, if i could just talk to your boss for five minutes, could i just, i just want five minutes, but they just, i don’t know. i think back when i was a boss, and i regret that i had all these requirements for my employees to work crazy. it’s just kind of the standard for our industry, but it’s so messed up. i mean, as accountants, we are organizational. we are organizational people. we organize everything. we organize we do tax returns. we organize your your tax documents. we that’s what we do. we organize your numbers. but when it comes to when clients give you their information, it’s just completely chaotic. it’s crazy.
liz farr
i agree, and you know, i remember that my bosses would always ask me to look for opportunities to help somebody, opportunities for additional services when i was starting out. you know, first of all, i had no clue what to look for in a return to trigger that conversation now, first of all, and then second, i didn’t even have time to think about it. so there were times where we neglected to have an important conversation with somebody. or i remember one year where we left off a document just because we were so rushed, and then the client got a nasty gram from the irs saying that they were missing this and, oh my, you know, suddenly it was our fault. we had to do an amended return for no charge. and
brenda cannon
i’m glad you brought that up, because there is, i feel like there are fewer mistakes now, because first of all, i’m not working on a return at two o’clock in the morning, nobody wants you to work on their tax return at two o’clock in the morning, when your brain is mush, you know. and just having more control over how many returns we do each week, we’re just not making as many mistakes because we’re we’re just not rushed.
liz farr
that’s right, i can imagine that in your office, and the offices that do this, there is less need for the back and forth between the reviewer and the preparer, because the preparer isn’t just trying to dash it out as quickly as possible. yeah. is that true?
brenda cannon
yeah, yes. it’s you just have more time and, and you’re not, you’re not, you know, going through the returns, like, which one do i want to do next? oh, that one’s yucky that, ooh, i’ll pick, you know. and that’s another thing, is there’s always that yucky return that you don’t want to look at. it’s they’re always, you know, their hand scratchings don’t make any sense, or whatever it is. and i would pick the one behind it, pick the one behind it. well, now, because it’s scheduled, i have to face it and i have to prepare it based on the date they picked. but it’s good because i’m not looking at that in october, and i’m getting it to the client. when i tell them, i’m going to get that to them. and clients like that. clients don’t mind if you’re ahead of schedule. they just don’t like when you’re behind schedule.
liz farr
that’s right. that’s right. now i’m going to switch gears a little bit and ask you a few questions that i ask almost all of my guests. now, many of us learn best when we make mistakes. it’s sometimes a painful way to learn, but it’s quite effective. would you be willing to share. a mistake that you made, the most valuable mistake you made.
brenda cannon
oh, goodness, there was, there was a capital gain exclusion i missed. and again, it was because we were rushed. but oklahoma, for, oh, you have a capital gain exclusion for, like, if it’s a business or land or real estate investment, real estate that you have held for a certain period of time, it’s excluded from oklahoma tax. and i had a client that sold a lot of stock at a it was a big oklahoma corporation, and again, we were rushed, and the preparer missed it, and i was the reviewer, and i missed it, and his employer had a financial advisor type company who was offering tax planning, and they caught it and we fixed it, but felt so terrible, but that, i mean, just, you know, that’s just one of those things i double check. because sometimes, when someone sells a ton of stock, you know, many times i’ll, i’ll upload a pdf of it, and just give the totals on the tax return. you can do that, and then you can attach the pdf, but i need to go through every stock that’s being sold and check for oklahoma companies. yeah, that’s bad one.
liz farr
that’s an icky one. yeah, yeah, yeah. now, what do you think accountants should stop doing immediately?
brenda cannon
well, we were just talking about this in a live event we had in our community about raising fees, and we need to stop apologizing for like we struggle with our value, and we feel like we have to explain why we’re raising our fees and but your cox cable, like your cable, they’re raising their feet. netflix raise their fees. insurance companies, your phone company, and they don’t explain it. they just raise it. and we, we are pleasers, and we don’t want to upset our clients, and so we tend to apologize. we don’t have anything to apologize for
liz farr
no, no, no, and many accountants have been under pricing their work for decades, yes, so yeah, it will take quite a few years of incremental fee increases to get up to where we’re supposed to be, we may never get there.
brenda cannon
and it’s hard to raise fees for a client when you’ve already set them too low. it’s so much easier to just set it for a new client, you know, than to get a legacy client up to where they need to be.
liz farr
that’s right. that’s right. now you’ve already mentioned some of the things that keep accountants from changing and where we undervalue ourselves. we’re people pleasers. what are some of the other things that stop us from making the changes we need to make.
brenda cannon
well, it may go along with being people pleasers, but i think accountants are afraid of upsetting clients. they’re afraid of client pushback. and here’s the thing you no matter what you do, you will have pushback by some clients. it doesn’t matter if you make a change, somebody’s going to be you can’t always please everybody. so you can’t make decisions for a small portion of your clients. you need to look at the bigger you know, the the bigger picture. so i think that we’re just really worried about client pushback.
liz farr
and many times that’s completely unneeded, because many times i’ve heard from other professionals that they they raise their fees, and they’re, they’re, you know, oh, my god, you know, what is the client going to do? and the client says, oh, okay, yeah. how much is the bill now? how much is it going to be next year? okay, fine, write the check. that’s not a problem.
brenda cannon
yeah, that’s so true. that’s so true.
liz farr
yeah? now i want you to get out your best forecasting software and tell me, where do you see the accounting profession in 10 years?
brenda cannon
gosh, 10 years. i think that we’re in high demand right now. i know there’s concern about ai, but i’m not concerned about the human part of that. i think we’ll still be needed. i think that our roles may change and we may need to evolve as the world evolves, but we’re like the most trusted advisor, so i don’t think our profession is going anywhere. and i think we have, we’re in a great place right now to set our fees where they should be, and set, is it too cold to say, set our rules like this is how we operate, like when i meet with a new client. now i say, you may not, you know, if they contact me, i say you might not want to work with us, because i just need to let you know this is how we operate. we schedule every tax return, and there’s a good chance you’ll be extended, and this is our minimum fee, and nine times out of 10, they’ll say, okay with it. i mean, we go through a discovery process, but i want to let them know ahead of time that that this is how we work, and i think that is a great time for accountants to feel comfortable setting those kind of boundaries and letting their clients know this is how we run our business, and if it’s not for you, that’s that’s okay, you can go find another account.
liz farr
yes, because there are as many ways to run an accounting firm as there are accountants.
brenda cannon
so true, yeah, yeah.
liz farr
well, brenda, i’m so glad that we finally had the chance to have this conversation, because i think that what you’ve happened upon just this brain inspiration, thanks to jason staats of scheduling everything. i think if more accountants would do this, this could really revolutionize the way that we operate. so i want to thank you so much for being on this podcast.