The real cost of chasing client documents every tax season

Where the hours go missing

Ask any preparer what eats the week between January and April, and the answer is rarely the return itself. It is the email chain: a request goes out, a client replies with two of five documents, forwards the note to a spouse, then sends one more thing three days later. Liscio, a client communication platform built for accounting firms, describes this pattern directly: email chains create version control chaos, and staff spend real time sorting threads and matching partial submissions to the right client file.

A 2024 CPA Practice Advisor survey, cited by Liscio, found firms spending an average of 9.3 hours a week on client communication, with a stated goal of cutting that to 7.2 hours through more efficient digital practices. Multiply that gap across a full tax season and across every preparer on staff, and the chase stops looking like a minor annoyance. It becomes a recurring claim on the calendar that has nothing to do with technical skill.

A smaller bench, the same documents to chase

The chase would matter less if firms had spare hands to run it. They do not. Liscio's own reporting on this problem cites Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing the US accounting workforce shrank by more than 17 percent between 2020 and 2024, with over 300,000 professionals leaving the field. The AICPA's 2025 Trends Report, also cited by Liscio, adds a second data point from further up the pipeline: accounting bachelor's and master's degree completions fell 6.6 percent in 2023 to 2024 alone, about 24,000 fewer graduates than the mid-2010s peak.

Fewer people are available to do the one task that scales worst with fewer people: sending the same reminder to forty different clients on forty different timelines. When chasing documents eats a fixed number of hours regardless of headcount, a smaller team either drops the chase and loses the document, or drops something else, usually review time, to keep chasing.

Where the errors actually start

Thomson Reuters names two of the hidden costs of manual collection directly: the time spent chasing down data, and the errors that come from misplaced documents and information entered by hand instead of pulled from a source. A third cost sits underneath both: delayed service, because an incomplete file slows every step of the workflow behind it.

None of this is about carelessness. It is about doing careful work inside a shrinking window. When collection drags into March, the days left for preparation and review shrink with it, and the errors that follow track the deadline pressure, not the preparer's skill.

What Karbon, Canopy, Ignition and Jetpack Workflow already solve, and what they don't

Most independent firms and fractional CFO practices already run part of this on a platform: Karbon or Jetpack Workflow for the task and engagement record, Ignition for the proposal and engagement letter, Canopy for workflow and client portal. Those tools solve the record-keeping half of the problem well. They tell someone what should have arrived, and by when.

What they generally do not solve is the chase itself. A workflow board can mark a document as not received, but a person still has to notice, decide today is the day to follow up, write the reminder, and send it, again, to the same client. That is the part that eats the hours the CPA Practice Advisor survey measured, and it is the part a rules-based reminder, triggered by the calendar and the engagement type rather than a person's memory, can take over.

Liscio describes this shift directly: trigger-based workflows that start collection automatically based on service type and calendar milestones, instead of waiting on a person to start the thread. The pattern is the same one we cover in what automated certificate of insurance requests look like: a request goes out on a trigger, the system tracks what is missing, and a person only sees the exceptions. If you are weighing whether to add a layer like this on top of Karbon or Canopy rather than switch platforms, the questions worth asking are the same ones in how to evaluate an AI automation vendor.

What still needs a person

An automated reminder loop is not the same as an automated firm. Someone still has to build the document checklist for each engagement type and decide what counts as a complete submission. And someone still has to handle the client who calls instead of uploading. The repetitive half of the job can run unattended; the exception, a K-1 that does not match, a client who insists their accountant already has the 1099, still needs a human decision. We describe the same split in a different repetitive task in what answering the phone all day actually costs.

The honest version of this is not that a chase system replaces judgment. It removes the part of the job that was never judgment to begin with: remembering who has not replied, and typing the same sentence for the fifth time. Where automation touches real systems, tax software and document storage among them, it can also fail in ways worth knowing before you turn it on; we cover the common failure points in where AI agents fail when they touch real systems.

One number worth checking before next season

You do not need new software to see the size of this problem in your own firm. Pull last season's engagement list and check one thing: the number of days between when a document was first requested and when the file was complete enough to start work. If that gap ran past two weeks for more than a quarter of your clients, the chase already cost more billable time than a slow return ever would.