For accounting professionals, tax season and month-end close already mean late nights and lost weekends. Every hour spent tracking down client documents is an hour taken from family, from sleep, or from the high-value work that earns the most and helps clients the most. Elon Bar-Evan, co-founder of PolyBooks, worked through three questions with Josh Maruska, accounting product lead at PolyBooks, about where that time goes when client documents arrive from every direction, and how practices can win it back.
The close-time chase: documents clients already sent
When documents arrive by email, text, and phone photos, the problem at close time is rarely that clients haven't sent anything. It's that the documents are scattered across channels and message threads.
Elon explained that documents trickle in throughout the year: "a 1098 by text in February, a brokerage statement by email in April, a photo of a receipt in July." If you're working on other clients' books when one arrives, you may not be ready to work on that client yet, so the document sits in a message thread. Weeks or months later, you know they sent it, but you might not remember how. Was it a text? Which email thread? A shared drive link?
Josh estimates that hunting down previously sent documents is where most of his wasted time goes at close. The stakes can be real. Josh worked with an estate whose attorneys sent documents piecemeal over months. With intake scattered, it was hard to see what had arrived and what was still missing. The estate's $180,000 tax bill was due either way, but the five months of delay by the client's attorneys added roughly $40,000 in penalties.
The practical takeaway: keep an up-to-date list of what you've received, or use a platform that tracks it for you and follows up with the client automatically on anything missing.
The verification gap: the wrong document in the folder
Most advice on managing client documents focuses on collecting and organizing files, not checking them on arrival. That's where problems hide.
As Elon put it, what keeps showing up when you open a client's folder is "the wrong document." A client sends a 1098, you see it come in, you mentally check it off, and you move on to thirty other projects. When you finally open it, it is the 1098 from two years ago. Now you're going back to the client weeks later, at the worst possible time.
The habit that matters is confirming each document the moment it arrives: right tax year, right person, right account, data intact. Accounting professionals can do that check by hand, or use a platform that does it for them and flags a mismatch the day the document arrives instead of weeks later. Either way, receiving a document and verifying it are two different steps, and skipping the second step is what creates late-stage surprises.
The intake decision most practices never make
When practices first decide how clients will send documents, the most common mistake is not deciding at all. Many start by telling clients "just get it to me however works for you." The result is a mix of email, text, Dropbox, paper, and fax, with every client following their own preference. That precedent is hard to undo, because tax clients are seen roughly once a year and retraining them can take two to three seasons.
Elon was clear that the mistake isn't letting clients use different channels. "It's letting each channel become its own filing system," he said.
There are two ways to fix that. One is to change client behavior: pick a single intake method, such as a portal or one dedicated email address, set that expectation at the start of the relationship, and move anything that arrives elsewhere into the client's folder the same day. The other is to meet clients where they are, let them continue to communicate using the method they want, but rely on technology to bring it all together with a system that accepts documents from any channel and gathers them in one place. This lets clients and staff each communicate the way they prefer. Either way, nothing gets lost in between.
The pattern: document problems are intake problems
Across all three answers, a consistent theme emerges. Scattered channels create lost files, unverified files create late surprises, and an undefined process lets both persist for years. The answer isn't forcing everyone into one channel. It's setting up intake so clients and accounting professionals can each work the way they prefer, while every document still ends up in one place and gets checked and verified when it arrives.
For practices looking to reclaim hours at close time, the starting point is simple: know what you've received, verify it on arrival, and make sure every channel feeds the same folder. As Elon's answers suggest, the tools and workflows exist to support that—the key is deciding to use them before the next busy season begins.