Best practices for handling seasonal employees

Even if you have a team, you might need to hire seasonal employees during the busy season. For example, sometimes, it might seem nearly impossible to handle the tax season without additional help. Here, you’ll learn the best practices for hiring and managing seasonal employees in TaxDome.

Add a monthly or a seasonal seat for temporary member

Since seasonal employees will need a TaxDome seat only for several months, there is no reason to buy a full-term seat for them. You can add a monthly or a seasonal seat instead.

• Monthly seats (Pro plan): $100/month per seat. Renews monthly and is ideal for employees working short, unpredictable periods.
• Seasonal seats (Business plan): $500 per seat (US) or $600 CAD (Canada) for 4 months. Renews every 4 months and is designed specifically for busy season staffing.

In general, the flow is the following:

1. You purchase a monthly or a seasonal seat for each of your temporary employees.

2. You add a team member and set up the access rights they need . The best practice here is to use an email address that you control. This way, after they quit, you’ll be able to revoke their access by changing the password.

3. Once the season ends, you deactivate their account and can either reassign the seat or remove it to avoid unnecessary charges.

Onboard seasonal employees

To onboard your seasonal employees faster, share your standard operating procedure with them. If you understand that they won’t need all your instructions, you can make a shorter version and send this instead of the full text.

In TaxDome, you can use wiki pages as an onboarding resource. You can also include tips and tricks on navigating through TaxDome and links to the Help Center articles and videos. Here’s a help center section that they can use as a starting point.

Manage access for seasonal employees

You undoubtedly know how important it is to secure sensitive information from unauthorized access. Before your seasonal employees start working with clients, ensure that you have limited their access to confidential data:

• Assign as few global access rights as possible. You can grant them access only to particular accounts and documents if they need them for a specific task.

• Use pipeline automation to grant and revoke account access rights at particular stages. This way, you won’t forget to revoke the access when it’s time to do that.

Track time for seasonal employees

Many accounting firms use time-based compensation for seasonal employees during the high-demand season because it allows you to provide fair compensation and makes it transparent for all parties involved.

Your other team members may have a fixed salary or hourly rate, but seasonal employees may have different rates. To handle this effectively, you can create separate services in TaxDome with similar names but different rates.

• Make sure each employee tracks time spent on jobs .

• Set weekly team capacity . Make sure to analyze it regularly and adjust if necessary.

• Use the Time entries list to track each employee’s time working on your projects , ensuring everyone is compensated fairly.

  

Manage performance of seasonal employees

You need accurate work hours and task data to understand an individual’s performance. If you like the result, you may want to hire them for a more extended period, offer bonuses or ask them if they would be interested in working with you again the next year.

In TaxDome, you can get all the data you need using the reporting feature. It allows you to create reports based on different criteria , organize them into dashboards and set up alerts .

More about the data available in reporting .

Offboard seasonal employees

After the hot season, it’s time to offboard your seasonal employees. Here’s a list of things you should do:

• Deactivate the employee accounts. After that, they won’t be able to access the portal, and you can remove their seat to avoid further charges. You can restore their account in the future, if you want to work with them again next year.
• Reassign tasks or projects if necessary. Ensure that no client work is left incomplete.
• Update any shared passwords your seasonal employees had access to.
• Save the contact information of seasonal employees if you wish to rehire them for future seasons.