Running tax season in Uku — workflows, monitoring, and billing

January through April is when most accounting firms feel the pressure most acutely. You have the same clients you serve year-round, plus a spike in annual report work, tax filings, and deadline-sensitive deliverables — all landing at once. This guide walks through how to use Uku to stay on top of the rush rather than be buried by it.

Quick answer

Tax season in Uku is managed through three levers: (1) workflow templates that generate the right tasks automatically, (2) Monitoring to spot which clients are behind, and (3) a billing cadence that prevents work from falling through the cracks. Set these up before the season starts, not during it.

Who this is for

• Company Admins and Company Owners who manage the firm’s workflow templates and monitor overall progress.
• Any team member managing their own client portfolio during the filing season.

Before the season — set up your templates

If your firm does not already have a dedicated annual-report or tax-filing workflow template, create one now. A good template does three things: it ensures nothing is forgotten, it makes the work visible to everyone, and it generates tasks automatically without manual intervention.

What an annual-filing template typically contains

• Document collection task (sent to client or via the Client Portal)
• Reconciliation task
• Preparation of financial statements
• Tax return preparation
• Internal review task
• Client approval task
• Filing submission task
• Post-filing confirmation task

Not every client needs all eight. The template should cover your most complex client; you can uncheck steps when applying it to simpler cases.

See How to create a workflow template and Workflow template editor — advanced settings for full instructions on building templates.

Apply the template to clients who need it

If your annual-report template is already in use for clients on a yearly recurrence, the tasks will generate automatically. If you need to apply the template to clients who don’t have it yet:

1. Open each client and go to the Workflow tab.
2. Click Choose template and select your annual-filing template.
3. Set the Repeat tasks from date to the start of the relevant annual period.
4. Confirm the task plan.

If you are applying the same template to many clients, work through the client list systematically — filter by client group if you have categorized clients by service tier or filing type.

During the season — monitor progress

The Monitoring view is your single best tool for seeing the whole picture during tax season. It shows every client’s status at a glance — who is on track, who is under-served, and who is consuming more time than expected.

Use Monitoring to spot trouble early

1. Open Monitoring from the main navigation.
2. Check the current month. Any client shown in red (Over) may be consuming disproportionate time. Any client in green (Under) may have work not yet started.
3. Filter by Status = Over to see only clients where work is exceeding targets. These conversations about scope creep should happen now, not at invoice time.

During tax season, it is normal for some clients to show as Over — annual reports genuinely take more time than regular months. The value of monitoring is not to flag every overrun, but to distinguish the expected spike from the unexpected one. See How to use Monitoring for the full guide on setting and reading targets.

Use the Dashboard to manage daily priorities

Each team member’s dashboard shows their tasks sorted by due date. During tax season, help your team use the Dashboard effectively:

• Tasks with approaching deadlines should be visible at the top. If they are buried, use the Sort option to sort by due date.
• Overdue tasks appear in red. A team member with several red tasks needs a conversation about capacity, not just a reminder.
• Company Admins can filter the Dashboard to any member’s view using the Member filter — useful for a quick check-in without interrupting the person.

See Uku Dashboard overview and How to effectively use your Dashboard.

Time tracking — make it easy during the busy period

Tax season is when time tracking discipline matters most, because this is the period most likely to generate additional billing. If your team is not tracking time during January–April, you lose the data you need to invoice accurately and to have pricing conversations later.

• Set up Magic buttons for the most common tax-season tasks (phone call with client, document review, filing preparation). A single click starts the timer — no form-filling required. See Magic buttons.
• Remind the team to use the timer on tasks, not just log time after the fact. Retrospective entries are less accurate and more likely to be forgotten entirely.
• After each working week, run a quick check with Report > Time tab to see whether any team members have large gaps in their time entries. See Reports — Time tab and Identify overlaps and missing time.

Billing — do not let work pile up unbilled

The tax season billing mistake is waiting until April to invoice everything. By then, three months of work have accumulated, clients are surprised by large invoices, and it is harder to match work to specific periods. A better approach:

Bill monthly even during annual work

If a client is on a fixed monthly retainer, their regular invoice should still go out as normal. Annual report work that goes above the retainer should be tracked as extra work (mark the task with Extra work flag) and billed separately at the end of the engagement.

See How to mark extra work for how to flag tasks and time entries that go beyond the standard scope.

Use Missed Billing to catch anything that slipped

After invoicing each period, run Missed Billing to catch any billable work that was locked out of the invoice. This is especially important in Q1 when work volumes are high and it is easy for individual time entries to fall through gaps.

1. Navigate to yourcompany.uku.app/missed-billing.
2. Set the date range to the last month.
3. Review any items shown. Select those you want to recover and reclaim them to the current period.

See How to find and manage missed billing for the full process.

End of season — close out properly

When the filing season wraps up (typically late April or May), do a clean-up pass:

• Check that all annual-filing tasks are marked done. Undone tasks that have passed their due date clutter dashboards and reports.
• Run the Monitoring report for the Q1 period. Did any clients consistently run over their targets? That is data for a pricing conversation at contract renewal. See Pricing conversations with data.
• Review your workflow templates. Did any step consistently get added ad hoc? If so, add it to the template so it generates automatically next year. See How to update client tasks from template changes.
• Check the Flextime report to see if any team members accumulated significant overtime during the rush. This may need to be balanced against upcoming capacity. See Reports — Flextime tab.

Tax season runs well in Uku when the infrastructure — templates, monitoring targets, billing contracts — is set up before it starts. If you find yourself building these during the season, prioritize getting next year’s setup right. It pays for itself quickly.