How Much Time Do Tax Preparers Waste Chasing Documents? (We Did the Math)

Every tax season, the same ritual plays out in accounting firms across the country. You send the document request. You wait. You follow up. You wait again. You call. You email. You text. You wait some more. And somewhere between the third reminder and the fourth, you start to wonder: how much of my career is actually spent doing this?

We decided to find out. Not with guesswork — with data. We pulled numbers from the IRS, the AICPA, the National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP), and Gartner. We read hundreds of threads on r/taxpros, r/accounting, and professional forums where preparers share the unvarnished reality of tax season.

The answer? A solo tax preparer spends roughly 210 hours per season — 5.25 full work weeks — just chasing documents. Not preparing returns. Not advising clients. Not growing their practice. Just... chasing.

Here's how we got that number, what it's costing your practice, and what you can do about it.

How We Got to 210 Hours

Tax season runs roughly 14 weeks — from late January when W-2s and 1099s start trickling in through the April 15 filing deadline. Some preparers extend into October with extensions, but the core “chase season” is those 14 weeks.

Across forums, practitioner surveys, and our own conversations with tax professionals, the numbers are remarkably consistent: solo preparers report spending 10 to 20 hours per week on document follow-ups during peak season. That includes sending initial requests, following up on missing items, answering “what do I need?” questions, and manually tracking who's sent what.

At the midpoint of that range — 15 hours per week — the math is straightforward:

15 hours/week × 14 weeks = 210 hours per season

That's 5.25 standard work weeks (at 40 hours/week). More than a month of full-time work, every single season, spent on document logistics instead of tax preparation.

“For 50 clients, I spend 15-20 hours a week emailing and calling. That's 100+ hours per season just gone. And these are good clients — they're not trying to be difficult. They just... don't send stuff.”

— Solo practitioner, r/taxpros

This isn't unique to solo preparers. A 12-person firm in a popular r/taxpros thread reported approximately 500 man-hours collectively spent on document collection during the 2025 filing season — roughly 42 hours per team member. At even $150/hour, that's $75,000 in lost productivity.

For solos who handle everything themselves — from the initial request to the final reminder — the time burden is concentrated entirely on one person. There's no admin to delegate to. Every follow-up email, every phone call, every “just checking in” text comes directly out of your billable hours.

Where Does All That Time Go?

Not all document chasing is created equal. Some tasks are quick; others become multi-week sagas. Here's how those 15 hours per week typically break down:

The single biggest time sink? Escalating follow-ups — those second and third reminders where you're essentially begging clients who have already ignored you twice. This accounts for a quarter of all document-chasing time, and it's the most emotionally draining part. You didn't get an accounting degree to become a professional nagger.

The tracking overhead is equally insidious. Without a dedicated system, most preparers maintain some version of a spreadsheet — Client A sent W-2 but not 1099, Client B sent everything except charitable receipts, Client C hasn't responded at all. Keeping this mental model current across 50, 80, or 100+ clients is a full-time job in itself.

What 210 Hours Costs Your Practice

Time is money isn't a cliché in professional services — it's a P&L statement. Every hour spent chasing documents is an hour not spent on billable work. Here's what that looks like at different practice sizes and billing rates:

Let's make that more concrete. According to the National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP), the average fee for a Form 1040 with itemized deductions in 2026 is approximately $236. If you could redirect those 210 hours toward preparing returns:

210 hours ÷ 2.36 hours per return ≈ 89 additional returns × $236 = $21,004 in lost revenue

That's $21,000 you could be earning — or $21,000 worth of evenings and weekends you could be spending with your family instead of catching up on the returns you didn't have time to prepare during the day.

The Industry-Wide Picture

Zoom out from a single practice and the numbers become staggering. As of February 2026, the IRS reports 807,651 active PTIN holders — the total population of tax professionals authorized to prepare federal returns.

Even if only half experience significant document-chasing burden (a conservative assumption):

403,826 preparers × 210 hours = 84.8 million hours per season

At a blended rate of $150/hour, that's $12.7 billion in lost productivity across the U.S. tax preparation industry — every single year. For context, that's more than the annual revenue of H&R Block.

Why Clients Don't Send Documents (It's Not What You Think)

Before we can fix the problem, we need to understand it. And the uncomfortable truth is: your clients aren't ignoring you on purpose. They're overwhelmed too.

Consider the numbers from the client side. The IRS estimates that taxpayers spend a collective 897 million hours on recordkeeping alone each fiscal year. The average individual filer spends approximately 13 hours and $290 on tax-related activities. And 20–25% of filers wait until the last two weeks before the deadline to begin gathering their documents.

When you layer those realities on top of daily life — jobs, kids, bills, Netflix — the reasons clients don't send documents become painfully logical:

1. They're waiting for documents themselves. Your client can't send their K-1 because the partnership hasn't issued it yet. They can't send their corrected 1099-B because the brokerage hasn't finalized it.
2. They don't know what you need. You sent a detailed checklist. They glanced at it, got confused by “Schedule K-1 (Form 1065)”, and closed the email.
3. They're overwhelmed by the volume. For clients with multiple income sources, investment accounts, rental properties, and charitable giving, the document list can run to 15+ items. That feels like a project, not a quick task.
4. They're classic procrastinators. Your January email doesn't feel pressing when April is three months away.
5. Your request got buried. You sent an email. It's now sitting between a Costco promotion and a LinkedIn notification, 47 messages deep in their inbox.

The channel matters more than the message.

According to Gartner, SMS messages have a 98% open rate compared to roughly 20% for email. That's not a marginal difference — it's a 5x multiplier. Your perfectly crafted follow-up email is worthless if it's never opened.

7 Documents That Cause the Most Delays

Not all documents are created equal. Some arrive promptly; others become multi-week (or multi-month) headaches. Based on practitioner reports, these seven documents cause the vast majority of delays:

Notice a pattern? The documents that cause the most delays are the ones that require the most effort from clients. It's not that clients are lazy — it's that assembling crypto transaction histories or compiling a year's worth of charitable donations is genuinely hard work. The easier you make the submission process, the faster these documents arrive.

Fewer Preparers, Same Volume: The Talent Crisis

The document-chasing problem is getting worse, not better — because the workforce is shrinking while the workload stays the same.

According to the AICPA's 2023 Trends Report, accounting bachelor's degree completions have declined approximately 30% from their 2014-2015 peak. The numbers tell a stark story:

• Bachelor's degrees in accounting declined 7.8% in the 2021-2022 academic year alone (AICPA)
• Master's degrees in accounting fell 15% in the 2023-2024 academic year (AICPA)
• Combined bachelor's and master's completions hit 55,152 in 2023-2024, down from approximately 80,000 at peak — a decline of roughly 31%
• The pipeline of new CPAs is not keeping pace with retirements, especially as Baby Boomer practitioners exit the profession

What does this mean for document chasing? When there are fewer preparers handling the same (or growing) volume of returns, every hour matters more. The firms that survive this talent squeeze will be the ones that ruthlessly automate administrative tasks.

The Current State of Document Collection

So how are practitioners currently dealing with this problem? The landscape falls into three broad categories:

1. The Manual Approach

Cost: $0 in software  |  True cost: ~$52,500 in lost time (at $250/hr × 210 hrs)

Email templates, phone calls, spreadsheet tracking. It's free in the way that doing your own plumbing is free — it costs nothing until you count your time. This is still the most common approach among solo preparers, not because it works well, but because switching to something new feels like one more project during the busiest time of year.

2. Full Practice Management Suites

Cost: $58–$142+/month  |  Examples: TaxDome ($58/mo), Canopy ($142/mo), Liscio ($60/mo)

These platforms bundle document collection with CRM, billing, e-signatures, and workflow automation. They share a common weakness: they require clients to create portal accounts.

“Half my clients refuse to use the portal. So now I'm managing two systems — the portal for the clients who use it, and email for everyone else. It's worse than before.”

— EA, 65 clients, r/taxpros

3. The Gap

Here's what doesn't exist (yet, in meaningful quantity): a tool that is focused on document collection (not a full suite), affordable for solo preparers (not $100+/month), and portal-free (no client account required). The current market forces preparers to choose between free-but-manual and expensive-but-portal-dependent.

What If You Could Cut 210 Hours in Half?

You don't need to eliminate document chasing entirely — some follow-up will always be necessary. But what if you could cut it in half? Let's look at what getting 105 hours back would actually mean for your practice:

• 105 hours = 2.5 full work weeks — that's half of June, completely free
• At ~2.36 hours per return, that's approximately 44 additional returns you could prepare
• At $236 per return, that's $10,384 in additional revenue
• Or: that's 105 hours of evenings and weekends you could spend with your family

The key insight from the data is that the channel matters more than the message. The 98% open rate of SMS versus the 20% open rate of email (Gartner) means switching channels alone can dramatically reduce the number of follow-ups needed.

That's the premise behind NudgeDocs — an SMS-first document collection tool built specifically for solo and small-firm tax preparers. Instead of sending clients to a portal, NudgeDocs sends a text message with a secure upload link. Clients tap the link, see exactly which documents they still owe, and upload directly from their phone. No account creation, no app download, no password.

Sources & Methodology

This article draws on the following data sources. Where we use estimates or ranges, we've noted the methodology.

• IRS Data Book, Fiscal Year 2022 — 897 million hours of taxpayer recordkeeping burden; average individual filer time and cost estimates.
• IRS PTIN Statistics, February 2026 — 807,651 active PTIN holders.
• AICPA 2023 Trends Report — Accounting degree completion data; ~30% decline from 2014-15 peak.
• AICPA 2024 Update — Master's degrees fell 15% in 2023-2024; 55,152 combined degrees.
• NATP 2026 Fee Survey — Average fee of $236 for Form 1040 with itemized deductions.
• Gartner Research, 2023 — SMS open rates of 98% vs. approximately 20% for email.
• Pew Research Center, 2024 — 97% of Americans own a cellphone; 90% own a smartphone.
• Practitioner reports — Qualitative data drawn from r/taxpros, r/accounting, and r/tax threads (2023-2026); direct conversations with solo practitioners and small-firm owners.

Related Reading

• How to Stop Chasing Clients for Documents During Tax Season — 7 strategies for faster document collection
• Best Client Portal Alternatives for Solo Tax Preparers (2026) — Side-by-side comparison of 7 document collection tools