Protecting Your Practice When the Workload Spikes: the 31 October Reality
Every practice has a rhythm to its year, and for most accounting and tax firms the busiest stretch runs straight at the October lodgement deadline. More returns, tighter turnarounds, longer days. It is also, quietly, the time of year when the conditions for a professional indemnity claim are most likely to line up. Not because anyone gets careless, but because volume and time pressure do their own work on error rates.
Most PI claims against accountants do not come from a single dramatic mistake. They come from an ordinary slip made under load: a figure transposed, a deadline missed, an assumption not checked because there was no time to check it. The busier the period, the more of those small openings appear, and the claim, if it comes, often lands months or years later when the client feels the consequence. The good news is that this is a risk you can see coming, which means you can plan for it.
Resource the review step, not just the doing. When work piles up, the first thing to get squeezed is the second set of eyes. It is also the control that catches the most. Protecting review time through the busy stretch, even a light peer check on higher-risk work, does more for your exposure than almost anything else.
Be clear about scope, in writing. A surprising number of claims turn on what the firm was and was not engaged to do. When timelines compress, verbal "can you just also…" requests multiply. Each one acted on without being written down is a small gap between what the client thinks you were responsible for and what you agreed to. Keeping engagement terms current, even a short email confirming an added task, closes that gap.
Notify circumstances early. If something does slip, the instinct is often to quietly fix it and move on. The safer path is to notify your insurer of the circumstance early. A claims-made policy responds to what you report while the cover is live, so raising a concern promptly can be what keeps the current policy on the hook, even if the issue only surfaces properly later.
Keep the paper trail the cover assumes. File notes, the email where you flagged a risk, the record of advice given and instructions received. In a calm month these feel like admin. In a busy one they feel impossible. They are also exactly what turns a defensible position into a defended one.
None of this is about working scared through October. It is about accepting that the busy season carries a known, seasonal risk, and putting a few simple guards in place before it arrives rather than reaching for them after something has gone wrong. If it would help to look at whether your current cover still fits the practice you are running into this deadline, the team at Abacus is happy to talk it through, with no pressure and no commitment.
