Why does personal tax still feel so manual?
It’s the one service nearly every firm offers, yet it often sits in the “messy middle” of the business. Reactive. Manual. Underpriced. Personal tax has a habit of staying stuck.
The thing is, most firms didn’t design it this way. Their personal tax setup just evolved—through team changes, client demands, and year-on-year workarounds. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. But there’s plenty of room to do it better.
Russell Gammon (Chief Solutions Officer at Tax Systems) joined us for a wider conversation about how firms can use AI more effectively in tax—and what it takes to turn everyday work into scalable, structured services.
The work is there. But the structure often isn’t.
Across the board, firms are already doing personal tax work. What’s missing is the structure.
The team might be scrambling to get information in time. Processes are often buried in people’s heads. And the value? It’s typically hidden in phone calls or bundled into year-end.
That’s the root issue. There’s no consistent client experience, and no internal visibility of what’s actually being delivered.
Firms that are making progress in this space aren’t necessarily building brand-new services. They’re tightening up the ones they already have—adding process, defining outcomes, and charging more confidently.
The biggest blocker? Headspace.
It’s not that firms don’t want to improve things. It’s that they rarely get the breathing room to do it.
Many are caught in the “stuck middle”—not sole practitioners, but not large enough to have specialist departments. It’s hard to step back and rework a service when you’re buried in it day-to-day.
But as Russell pointed out, change doesn’t start with massive restructuring. It starts with curiosity.
The firms doing this well are the ones asking:
- Why do we do it this way?
- Could we make this repeatable?
- What would this look like if it was designed on purpose?
3 places to start:
1. Get everything out of your head
Much of personal tax delivery sits in spreadsheets, emails, or someone’s memory. The first step is to map out the client journey. Not on a system—just on a whiteboard.
Where are the bottlenecks? Where are you duplicating effort? Where do clients slow you down?
Once you can see it, you can start to fix it.
2. Standardise what “good” looks like
Don’t automate a mess. Define what a high-quality tax job looks like—what info you need, how it’s delivered, what the client receives—and build around that.
You’ll find that once there’s a reference point, it’s much easier for the whole team to work consistently. That’s where efficiency (and profitability) starts to take hold.
3. Use AI to speed up the right bits
AI isn’t going to do your job for you—but it can take care of the time-consuming parts.
Firms using Tax Torch are cutting hours out of reviewing returns, summarising documents, and modelling live scenarios with clients. What used to be a juggling act between calculators and guesswork now takes a couple of minutes.
But it only works when there’s already a process in place. Tech accelerates structure—it doesn’t replace it.
Client communication doesn’t need to be complicated
When it comes to delivering tax planning advice, firms often worry they’ll overwhelm clients—or come across as uncertain. But most clients don’t want five options or deep tax theory.
They want clarity.
What should I do?
What will it cost me?
Will it save me anything?
The firms doing this well aren’t over-engineering things. They’re simply showing clients one or two smart options and backing it with confidence. It’s not about being 100% perfect—it’s about being helpful.
Start small. Scale what works.
Personal tax doesn’t need to be overhauled in one go.
Pick one part of the process that frustrates you or takes too long. Clean it up. Standardise it. See how much smoother it becomes. Then move on to the next bit.
This isn’t about building a new service from scratch. It’s about reclaiming time, delivering with confidence, and creating space to have better client conversations.
When that happens, personal tax becomes more than admin. It becomes advice. And advice? That’s where the margin is.
So—where could you reclaim 30 minutes this month to make your tax work smoother, faster, or more valuable? Try Tax Torch free.