The clock is ticking. Annual accounts must be finalized, tax returns are pending, and clients are calling with urgent questions. For many accounting firms, March through May is the period when everything must be done simultaneously. And then it happens: document management is postponed until "after the deadline."
Those stacks of emails remain untouched in your inbox. Important documents disappear into ad hoc folders. And that neatly organized file structure? It gets buried under the time pressure of the high season.
The problem of reconstructing retrospectively
"We'll take care of it after May" is a phrase heard in many offices. But what no one says out loud is that reconstructing things afterwards often takes more time than saving them during the work process.
A real-life example. A client calls in September with questions about his annual accounts. The accountant in question is on vacation, and his replacement has to search for the correspondence from April. Emails are scattered across personal folders, draft documents are still on the desktop, and important advice has never been properly filed away.
The result: an hour spent searching for an answer that could have been given in two minutes. And the customer thinks: "Why is this taking so long?"
Why speed is so important during peak season
Accounting firms work with fixed deadlines that cannot be postponed. The tax authorities will not wait until you have your documents in order. Clients expect quick responses, even when your schedule is packed.
At the same time, the sector is facing structural staff shortages. Fewer people have to do the same amount of work. This means that every 15 minutes lost searching is 15 minutes that is not spent on real added value.
The math is simple: five minutes of searching per day, multiplied by a quarter of peak season, costs you over six hours of productive time. Per person.
Three approaches to document management under pressure
Method 1: The Friday afternoon check
Set aside fifteen minutes every Friday afternoon to wrap up your week. Review your sent items in Outlook. Which emails belong in customer files? Which documents are still on your desktop?
This small investment will save you hours of searching for correspondence from March in September.
Method 2: The "quick and dirty" organization
Perfect file structures are a luxury for quiet periods. During peak season, it's better to be roughly organized than not organized at all.
Make a simple division: urgent-this-week, important-this-month, and archive. Sort quickly and refine later.
Method 3: Use time pressure as a motivator
The high season forces you to make choices. What information is really important? Which documents will you never need again?
That time pressure can help you finally clean up that digital junk room that you never get around to tidying up when things are quiet.
From chaos to control
The story of a medium-sized accounting firm in Rotterdam illustrates how this works in practice. During the previous peak season, they still had the familiar problem: everyone stored emails in personal folders, documents were scattered across different systems, and searching took more time than working.
This year, they took a different approach. Every Friday, they took five minutes to wrap up the week. Important emails were immediately saved in the appropriate customer files. Ad hoc folders were cleaned up weekly.
The result: less stress, faster responses to customers, and a team that didn't have to reconstruct what had happened in March after May.
Bulk storage at the end of the week
During busy weeks, emails pile up. You open an email from customer Jansen, reply to it, and move on to the next one. You'll save it later.
Docubird solves this with bulk saving. Suppose you sent twenty emails to Bakery Jansen this week. Instead of saving each email separately, you select them all in your sent items. One click on "bulk save" and they are in the correct customer file. No twenty clicks, just one.
It also saves time for individual emails. You don't have to select names from endless lists. Docubird knows that [email protected] is linked to three different companies and simply asks: "Which of these three?" Instead of searching through thousands of customers, you choose from three options.
All emails retain their original date. That email from April 18 will remain dated April 18, even if you save it in May. This allows you to still follow the chronology of what happened and when.
Saving a week's worth of emails takes less than two minutes. And after the peak season, you don't have to reconstruct who said what and when.
Would you also like to stop manually saving emails? Please contact Richard Schouten or book a demo.