Workflow Diagram: 1065 Tax Return Process

Putting together a robust 1065 Tax Return Process Sheet (U.S. Return of Partnership Income) can be challenging! Which is why, in this article, we want to cover best practice tools, strategies, and tactics for your 1065 Form.

Designing your process sheet

To get started on your process sheet, it’s important to bring in all relevant team members. The reason we are advocates of involving your team is because they typically interact with the process sheet the most often. Therefore, they’ll help you not only get a clear baseline of how things are moving through the process, but also common bottlenecks amongst the team as well as the clients. Once you have a baseline of how you’re currently managing your 1065 tax return process, it’s then critical to examine each “bucket” within the process.

Bucket 1: The Foundation

This stage is where you setup the process with basic information, as well as critical metrics that you want to track and target throughout the process. Common and critical metrics could include budgeted or allocated hours, target turn around time, and the final due date. You can also include notes or relevant items for specific clients.

Bucket 2: The Process 

Next would be the fulfillment and process of completing the return, and should go hand in hand with your 1065 workflow diagram. The process is where the “action” happens. It’s very important to define specific steps, target due date, any dependencies that need to be in place, as well as budget time per task. Also, each team member should understand the common status updates and relevant labels they can put on the process sheet. It’s important that the labels and statuses are uniformed across the team.

Bucket 3: The Review & Metrics 

Finally (and perhaps our favorite part!), the metric review. This is a critical stage that is often overlooked. It’s important to review your key metrics such as actually time to complete (in hours), actually turn around time (in days), and actual profit margin. It’s important to understand these metrics across the board so that you can achieve your target profitability and growth of your firm.

Ready to Automate Your Workflow? Click Here to Watch a Full Video Demo