Seasonal employees: Best practices

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.

Since seasonal employees will need an additional TaxDome license only for several months, there is no reason to spend money on an annual subscription. You can buy a monthly license instead.

In general, the flow is the following:

You add a team member and set up the access rights. 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.
You purchase a monthly license for them.
Once the season ends, you deactivate their account so you don’t get charged anymore.

Onboard

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.

Manage access

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:

In Settings, 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

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.

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

Manage performance

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

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 won’t be charged for their subscription. You can restore their account 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.