Another tax season is finally drawing to a close, my seventh to be exact.  It was a long haul once again.  You really don’t realize how long 4 months can be until you’re asked to do the semi-impossible.  I still don’t know how I did it or how I’ll go it all again in 2017, but, for the love of my sanity, let’s not talk about that yet.

January – Remember when I said I was going to be able to give others more work to do this year?   Yeah?  Well, that didn’t go quite as planned.  I did give some of those dreaded 1099s away but not as much as I’d hoped.  Our new employee really didn’t have enough time to learn how to do them so I was stuck doing the bulk of them again.  All things considered, it was a much smoother start to tax season than 2015.  I was encouraged.

February – The Carolina Panthers’ dismal showing in the Super Bowl aside, February wasn’t a bad month.  There’s a built-in lull in the first two weeks, which I always try to take advantage of.  I still had plenty to do but I didn’t work quite as many overtime hours and worked at super-speed instead of warp-speed.

March – Things ramped back up with the corporate tax deadline at the 15^th and the backlog of individual returns.  It was around this time that I made a few observations.  Last year people called constantly wanting to know if their returns were ready.  Looks like they learned their lesson on that.  People were much nicer this year.  We bought two businesses last year and it seemed every one of those clients wanted to make sure we knew how displeased they were that they were being so grievously inconvenienced.  We weren’t as behind as we were the previous year but there was plenty of stress.

April – Because the government always makes so much sense, DC and the IRS take a holiday on the 15^th so the deadline got pushed back to Monday, the 18^th.  With grey circles under our eyes we worried that our bosses would push us all the way to Monday, requiring more weekend hours.  It’s not unheard of.  Thankfully, they did not.  However, in the meantime, all hell was breaking loose.  A non-tax, part-timer pitched in to help admin and promptly started bossing everyone around.  The receptionist told off the nagging office manager.  One of the partners lectured us about helping the people who have not worked as much overtime and were not nearly as tired as we were just because they have one busy day.  These same people complained to all of us about how “tired” they were.  One staff accountant had a meltdown because her order was wrong when another personally bought us all lunch one day.

Despite the bickering, it was a successful tax season.  Now, I’m ready to get back to quiet days and taking time off.  I think it is well deserved.