Should you bill before or after in TaxDome?

You can run all your billing inside TaxDome

Your billing can live right in the pipeline: invoices fire at the stage you choose, so billing stops being the thing you forget at the end of a job.

The feature TaxDome got known for: lock the document to the invoice

Most people just send the return with an invoice attached: "here is your return, and here is a bill." TaxDome lets you lock it. To view the return, the client has to pay the invoice first. The invoice pops up before the document.

Why it works: the client treats paying as a prerequisite to seeing the return, rather than seeing the result, not loving it, and running off to their cousin who "does taxes" to redo it.

My take: bill up front

Personally, I moved billing to the start of the engagement. Here is the reasoning. People value a service before they pay, and it is easy to devalue it after. For me it is the opposite: a client drives me a little nuts until they pay, and once they have paid I am happy to do anything for them. Billing up front gave me a much happier tax season than the year I billed at the end, and then could not believe a client was emailing me again, as if this is not my day job.

But TaxDome stays agnostic, so decide for your firm

Different clientele react differently to up-front versus after. Some firms and some client types do better one way than the other. TaxDome is deliberately agnostic about the "right" way, and there is a lot to weigh: your client mix, your cash flow, and how you want the relationship to feel. Pick the policy, then build it into the stage so it happens on its own.

Bottom line

Lock the document to the invoice if you bill after, so you get paid before you release the return. Consider billing up front if you want an easier season. Either way, put the billing step inside the pipeline so it fires automatically instead of living on your mental to-do list.