Every tax season has the same shape. The first two weeks are quiet. Then everything arrives at once, half of it incomplete, most of it by email, and a good share of it from clients who attached last year's slip by mistake.
The work of preparing a return is not what makes March hard. Chasing paper is what makes March hard.
Most of that is fixable, and almost all of the fixing has to happen before Christmas.
By February your clients are already reacting. By November they are not, which means a message from you lands as organisation rather than pressure.
A single email in mid-November does more than any amount of chasing in March:
Subject: Getting ahead of tax season
Hi [name] — I am starting to organise for the coming filing season and wanted to give you a head start. Here is what I will need from you, and roughly when. Nothing is due yet — this is so you can put things aside as they arrive rather than hunting for them in April. You can send everything through [portal link] whenever you are ready. If anything on the list does not apply to you, just tell me and I will take it off.
The last line matters more than it looks. Half the friction in document collection is clients not knowing whether an item applies to them, so they say nothing and you assume it is coming.
A generic list of every possible slip is worse than no list. The client reads twenty items, twelve of which are irrelevant, and concludes the whole thing is complicated.
Build the list from last year's return. If they had no rental income last year, rental income is not on the list. If they had three T5s, ask for three T5s.
A personalised list of six items gets completed. A generic list of twenty-four gets postponed.
Worth splitting into two sections: things you need and things that would help if they exist. Clients treat those differently, and merging them makes the essential items look optional.
Email is where documents go to get lost. Attachments strip out, threads fork, one client sends six emails over three weeks and you have no way to see what is still missing without reading all six.
A portal with an upload link fixes the mechanics: everything for one client sits in one place, you can see what has arrived, and nothing depends on remembering which thread it was in.
There is a security dimension too, which is worth being plain about. Tax documents contain SINs, income, banking details — precisely the information that makes identity theft possible. Ordinary email is not encrypted end to end and copies persist on servers you do not control.
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security has published guidance on why data residency matters for managed services, and the reasoning applies directly here: data stored outside Canada is subject to different privacy, security and ownership laws, which may take precedence over Canadian ones.
For a practitioner holding client SINs, that is worth a moment's thought when choosing where documents are stored — not because anything is likely to go wrong, but because you are the one who would have to explain it if it did.
The reason follow-up feels awful is that most of it is undifferentiated. You email forty clients the same reminder, thirty of whom have already sent everything, and now thirty people are mildly annoyed and ten still have not replied.
Track completeness per client and chase only the gap:
Hi [name] — I have your T4 and your RRSP receipts. Still waiting on your medical expense totals and the T5 from [bank]. Once those arrive I can finish the return.
Naming what you already have does two things: it proves you are on top of it, and it makes the outstanding item concrete rather than a vague sense of owing you something.
Read next: How to Stop Chasing Clients for Documents
The CRA accepts electronic signatures on the T183, T183CORP, T183TRUST, T2183 and T2200. This began as a pandemic measure in March 2020 and, as of 2024, is no longer temporary.
If you are still printing, signing and scanning authorisation forms, that is a self-inflicted bottleneck at exactly the busiest point in the year.
Two things to get right. The signed form must be retained — the CRA does check with preparers and request copies. And for the T183CORP and T183TRUST, the date and time of signing must be recorded on the form and transmitted to the CRA, so whatever you use to collect signatures needs to capture that.
Read next: The Best Way to Get Client Signatures on Tax Returns
Pick a date. Say it in November, repeat it in January, hold it in March.
To guarantee filing by the deadline, I need everything by [date]. After that I will still do my best, but I cannot promise.
Without a cutoff, the client who sends everything on April 25th costs you a weekend and is not sorry. With one stated three times in advance, they mostly do not.
None of it is complicated. All of it has to be built before the season starts, because once March arrives there is no time to change how you work.
General information about workflow, not tax advice. Verify current CRA requirements each season — they do change.