Here is a scene that will feel familiar to anyone who has run a firm through tax season. A transaction lands in the wrong place on a client file. Someone catches it, fixes it, moves on. The work has to keep moving, so nobody stops to ask the more useful question: where else is this happening?
Two weeks later the same mistake shows up on a different client. Then another. By the time anyone connects the dots, it has quietly repeated across a dozen files, and what looked like a one-off was actually a signal you didn’t have time to read.
This is something worth sitting with for an hour: the difference between treating the symptom in front of you and treating the cause underneath it. And the clearest way into it starts, of all places, with a newborn.
What can a four-week-old baby teach you about your firm?
One of us had been staying with family, a new granddaughter who wouldn’t settle. The baby was cranky, feeding constantly, barely sleeping. Two exhausted parents were doing everything the internet and the doctors suggested, and nothing was working.
Sitting in the house for a few days, not in the thick of it, she noticed something the parents couldn’t. On the days the older child was at daycare, the house was calm and the baby settled. When Dad came booming through the house between calls, the baby got agitated. The problem wasn’t the feeding schedule everyone was frantically adjusting. It was a loud, intense household, and a newborn who wasn’t ready for it yet.
The lesson is a simple one: sometimes you have to have somebody else look at something, because when you are in the middle of it, you cannot see it. The parents were treating symptoms, the feeding, the crying, because they were too deep in it to see the cause. It took someone with a little distance to ask a different question.
Firms do the identical thing. When something breaks, the instinct is to fix that one thing and keep moving. We go very quickly into solution mode. Solution mode feels productive. It gets the work out the door. But it is usually a band-aid, and band-aids come off.
Are you solving the problem, or just clearing today’s symptom?
The trap is sharpest during busy season, precisely when you have the least time to step back. A single unexamined mistake doesn’t stay single. The same mistake can happen across five, ten, fifteen clients, because nobody has the time to actually take that step back.
So when you see a symptom, the discipline is to not let it fly past. Fix it on the client in front of you, yes, but then stop and ask where else it lives. One mistake caught and traced is a process fix. The same mistake caught fifteen times is a tax season.
This is also where getting the process right before you scale it earns its place. Not as a status update, but as the discipline where someone can say, I saw this happen on a file today, can we make sure the training and the systems are right so it doesn’t happen across everyone else’s clients too. The whole team hears it once, instead of each person rediscovering it the hard way.
“We won’t let it happen again” is not an answer
There is a moment worth every firm owner sitting with. We once found several errors on a client file, transactions dumped into uncategorised when there was a rule in place to handle them correctly. The team leader wrote back: so sorry, we won’t let it happen again.
The response that actually moves things forward is to refuse to accept that. That’s not an answer, and it’s not a solution. The question that matters is: why do you think it happened?
This is the difference between symptom and cause made concrete. We’ll fix it clears the symptom. Here is why it happened gets to the cause. Was it the person? The team leader? A rule that wasn’t followed, or a contingency that existed but wasn’t used? Until you know which, you haven’t solved anything. You have just agreed to be surprised by it again.
And there is a cultural layer underneath. For someone to say here is why it happened, the buck stops with me, the firm has to be safe enough to admit a mistake out loud. Firms are quick to jump on the software when it slips, but it takes a real culture of trust for a person to put their hand up in front of the team and own it. That trust is what makes root-cause conversations possible at all.
Who in your firm is paid to look up, not down?
Here is a pattern we see in the firms that cope best. There is someone whose job is not to be buried in production. Someone who moves around the work asking, where are the blocks, where is this getting stuck, and takes note. The firms that succeed almost always have somebody who is not in the thick of it.
That person is not necessarily the firm administrator in the traditional sense, the one paying the office bills. It is someone trained to understand the workflow and read it, who can spot a pattern forming across clients before it becomes fifteen separate fires.
A smaller, sharper version of the problem shows up all the time. We once got a call from a stressed account manager whose boss kept pulling her aside to ask where everything stood, how many hours, what was billable. The firm had a workflow tool that answered all of it. The boss simply never logged in. He was willing to take an hour out of her day to have her explain something he could have easily looked up himself.
The tool existed. The visibility existed. But a leader who won’t learn the workflow turns a three-click answer into an hour off someone else’s day, and then worries about billable time. If you have paid for the visibility, the least you can do is use it.
The mismatched-process problem hiding in plain sight
One more cause worth naming, because it sets teams up to fail without anyone deciding it should. We came across a firm with five account managers, each tracking their work in their own separate spreadsheet, each prioritising differently. In practice, that is five different companies operating under the one roof.
When the same job is done five different ways to reach the same outcome, the friction is enormous and invisible. Nobody chose it. It just grew. And it is the kind of thing you cannot fix in February. The honest move is to flag it now, tell the team you know it is a problem, and commit to solving it after the season rather than pretending it isn’t there. A team that knows a problem is seen and will be addressed can knuckle down through the season. A team living the frustration with no acknowledgement is a team thinking about quitting.
The one-week sprint
So how do you actually treat a cause when you are drowning in symptoms? One idea sticks. A leader we know asked a striking question: what would it take to clear the calendars for a single week, drop every non-essential meeting, and put the whole team on solving one important problem in a focused sprint, rather than chipping at it over three or four months?
The instinct is that you can’t possibly. The realisation was that you can, if the problem matters enough. A concentrated week on a root cause can be worth more than a quarter of band-aids.
Tax season will always generate symptoms. The firms that come through it without the chaos are the ones that build in a way to step back, spot the pattern, and ask the unglamorous question: not how do I fix this one, but why did it happen, and where else is it happening right now.
If it would help to have someone from outside sit in on those workflow meetings and spot the causes you are too close to see, that is a conversation our team has with firms all the time. You can start with a back-office team that has done exactly this many times over.
For more on building a better accounting practice, MoneyPenny hosts Beyond Numbers, a YouTube channel of practical conversations on capacity, workflow, pricing, technology and the realities of running a firm. Watch and subscribe here.
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