Chasing W2s, 1099s, receipts, and signed engagement letters costs a small practice in billable hours diverted to non billable work, not in a line item that shows up on a budget. Multiplying hours spent per week by blended staff hourly cost, then by weeks in the season, usually produces a number larger than practices expect before they calculate it directly.
Why this cost is easy to underestimate
Document chasing rarely happens as one visible block of time. It happens as a constant stream of small interruptions, a follow up email here, a phone call there, a note to check again next week, spread across every staff member with client contact. Because no single interruption feels large, the total is easy to underestimate until someone actually adds up a week's worth of it.
The actual math
The calculation is simple once the inputs are honest: hours per week spent chasing documents across the whole team, multiplied by blended staff hourly cost, multiplied by weeks in the relevant season. A practice spending six hours a week at a blended cost of forty five dollars an hour, across a sixteen week tax season, is looking at roughly four thousand three hundred dollars in staff time on this task alone, before counting the client work those hours could have gone to instead.
Rather than estimate, use the interactive calculator on the homepage, it takes your practice's actual hours, staff cost, and call volume and shows the number live, along with what a fix would likely pay back in.
Why this is the highest leverage place to start
Of everything a small practice could automate, document chasing tends to be the most repetitive, most rule based, and least dependent on judgment, an outstanding W2 either arrived or it didn't, a signed engagement letter either came back or it needs another nudge. That combination is exactly what makes it the fastest place to see a measurable time reduction once a structured reminder system replaces manual tracking. See AI Document Collection and Chase for how this works specifically.
See your practice's actual number
The calculator takes two minutes and shows exactly what this is costing you.