---
title: The 51 Working Days After October 15 Are the Most Valuable of Your Year
description: There are 51 working days between Oct 16 and Dec 31. Build your year-end planning client list before October 15, not three weeks after it.
---

[![toodledo\_logo (1)](https://blog.toodledo.com/hs-fs/hubfs/toodledo_logo%20(1).jpg?width=1000&height=162&name=toodledo_logo%20(1).jpg "toodledo_logo (1)")](https://www.toodledo.com)

Open main menu Close main menu

- [Home](https://www.toodledo.com/)
- [Products](https://www.toodledo.com/)
- [Pricing](https://www.toodledo.com/pricing.php)
- [Blog](https://blog.toodledo.com/)
- [Company](https://www.toodledo.com/info/contact.php)

[Productivity](https://blog.toodledo.com/tag/productivity) [Guides](https://blog.toodledo.com/tag/guides)

# The 51 Working Days After October 15 Are the Most Valuable of Your Year

[Hasnain Khimji](https://blog.toodledo.com/author/hasnain-khimji)

[Share this blog post on Twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=I+found+this+interesting+blog+post&url=https://blog.toodledo.com/the-51-working-days-after-october-15-are-the-most-valuable-of-your-year) [Share this blog post on Facebook](http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=https://blog.toodledo.com/the-51-working-days-after-october-15-are-the-most-valuable-of-your-year) [Share this blog post on LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://blog.toodledo.com/the-51-working-days-after-october-15-are-the-most-valuable-of-your-year)

October 15 falls on a Thursday this year. By Friday afternoon your firm will be doing the thing every firm does on that Friday — ordering food in, sending the email that says *thank you, genuinely, go home* — and somebody will say some version of "now we can breathe."

That's true for about a week. What happens after that week is the part worth planning, because between October 16 and December 31 there are exactly 51 working days once you take out weekends, Thanksgiving, and the two days nobody is reachable around Christmas. Fifty-one.

That's not "the rest of the year." That's a quarter of a busy season — and the only stretch on your calendar where the highest-margin work your firm sells is still possible to deliver.

## The window is short because the wall is real

Compliance deadlines are things you can miss and then survive, expensively. Planning deadlines aren't like that. A Roth conversion, a loss-harvesting trade, equipment placed in service, a charitable gift, a timing decision on income or expense — these die at midnight on December 31 and no extension exists. The fourth-quarter estimate has a few extra weeks (it's due January 15), but the decisions that *change* that number have to happen before the calendar flips.

So the shape of the window is unusual. It's short, it's hard-edged, and the value inside it is concentrated at the front. A conversation you have on October 22 gives the client ten weeks to act. The same conversation on December 12 gives them a shrug and a "we'll look at it next year."

## What the money looks like, and why this isn't a soft pitch

Advisory has stopped being the thing firms talk about doing. In Thomson Reuters Institute's *2026 Tax Firm Advisory Services Report*, 85% of firms said their advisory revenue grew last year — and among those, **88% said it was growing faster than compliance revenue**. Across the whole sample, advisory now averages **31% of total firm revenue**, and 87% of respondents said their firm planned to expand advisory in the coming year ([Thomson Reuters Institute](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accounting/tax-firm-advisory-services-report-2026/)).

The same report found something more useful than the headline. Firms that meet clients **quarterly or more often** reported advisory outpacing compliance at a rate near 90%, against **65%** for firms with less frequent contact ([Thomson Reuters Institute](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accounting/tax-firm-advisory-services-report-2026/)). Touch frequency, not service catalog, is what separates the two groups.

And the barriers firms named are not what you'd guess. Fifty-two percent cited staff skills gaps and 47% cited client resistance to paying for advice. Notice that "we don't have the service" isn't on the list.

## The real problem is an initiation gap, not a capability gap

Here's the finding that should bother you more than any of the above.

A May 2026 Censuswide survey of 500 UK businesses, commissioned by Ravical, found that **more than a third of businesses buying common accounting advisory services were buying them from someone other than their main accounting firm — even when their own firm already offered that exact service**. The leakage was worst at small firms: **48% at firms with two to ten staff**, 42% at sole practitioners ([Thomson Reuters Tax News](https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/a-third-of-accounting-clients-advisory-work-is-going-to-rival-firms-u-k-study-finds/)).

Read that twice. These clients did not evaluate your firm and choose a competitor. They did not know the conversation was available. Somebody else started it first.

That is not a sales problem and it is not a pricing problem. It's a *nobody owned starting it* problem — which is the same failure mode as an unanswered client document request or a return sitting in a reviewer's queue, just with a fee attached instead of a penalty.

The older evidence points the same direction. The Sleeter Group's *What SMBs Want* survey found **72% of small business owners had changed their CPA or accounting firm at least in part because the firm "did not give proactive advice, only reactive service"**, with more than 60% saying it played a significant or large role ([AccountingWEB](https://www.accountingweb.com/practice/practice-excellence/how-clients-expectations-of-cpas-are-evolving)) — and it ranked above poor responsiveness, lack of expertise, and high fees ([Abrigo](https://www.abrigo.com/blog/do-clients-want-accountants-to-give-proactive-advice-you-betcha/)). That study is from 2014 and the number has been quoted ever since, which tells you how durable the complaint is.

## Why the list has to exist before October 15

Now the operational part, and the reason this article is published before October 15 rather than after it.

Ask a managing partner in mid-November why the planning calls haven't started, and the answer is never "we decided not to." The first week after the deadline is recovery, the second is catching up on everything deferred since August, and somewhere in the third week someone says *we should do year-end planning calls* — and then has to build the list from scratch: pull the roster, decide who's a candidate, check who had a liquidity event or a new entity, assign owners.

That's a morning's work. But it's a morning that has to happen while the firm is at its least capable of finding one, and every day it slips comes off the front of the window, where the value is.

The fix is unglamorous: **build the list now, while the clients are still in front of you.**

Right now your team is inside these clients' numbers. The senior who just finished a return knows, today, that this client sold a building in June, or that one's revenue doubled, or that the S-corp owner has been taking the same salary for four years and shouldn't be. In three weeks that knowledge will have been overwritten by the next file.

Capturing it costs about thirty seconds per return: a task with the client's name, one line on why they're a candidate, and who's making the call. Not a memo. One line.

## What to actually do in the next two weeks

**1. Make the candidate list a byproduct of finishing returns, not a project.** Add one step to the end of your extension close-out: *flag for year-end planning — yes/no, one reason if yes.* Whoever finishes the return answers it. If it lives in your task system as a subtask on the job itself, it costs nothing and nobody has to remember it.

**2. Sort the list by when the client's option expires, not by fee.** It's a triage discipline, pointed at a different deadline. Some levers die December 31. Some survive into January. Some are really 2027 conversations that just feel urgent. Sorting by fee size puts your biggest client first; sorting by expiry puts the *most perishable* opportunity first, which is a different list and the right one.

**3. Give every name an owner and a by-when before October 15.** An unowned planning task is a planning task that doesn't happen — it's the most reliable pattern in firm workflow. "The team will reach out" is not an owner. A name and a date is.

**4. Put the first calls on the calendar for the week of October 19, before you know if you'll feel like it.** You won't feel like it. Schedule them anyway, in the week when a client still has ten weeks to act on what you tell them.

**5. Protect the window from the work that will try to eat it.** Q4 brings its own compliance load — year-end close, 1099 and W-2 prep, fourth-quarter estimates. That work has hard dates and will crowd out planning calls by default, because deadlines beat opportunities in every queue that doesn't deliberately separate them. If planning work and compliance work sit in one undifferentiated list, planning loses. Give it its own view so it can't be quietly deprioritized.

## Where a task system helps, and where it doesn't

Being straight about this: Toodledo is not tax planning software. It will not run a projection, model a Roth conversion, or tell you which clients are candidates. Your tax software and your judgment do that.

What it holds is the part that actually fails — the list, the owner, the by-when, and the evidence of what's been done. Practically: recurring tasks so the close-out flag rebuilds itself every season instead of being reinvented; subtasks so a planning call carries its own prep; a saved search sorted by date so the perishable names surface first; a shared folder so the whole team sees one board rather than five private lists. It's the same task infrastructure a professional services firm runs everything else on, pointed at the work that has no deadline forcing it.

The list is the whole intervention. The tool just means the list survives October.

[Try Toodledo free →](https://www.toodledo.com/signup.php)

## Frequently asked questions

**When should year-end planning conversations actually start?** The week after October 15, which means the list has to exist before October 15. A conversation in late October leaves the client roughly ten weeks to act. The same conversation in mid-December leaves them almost nothing, because most planning levers close on December 31.

**How many clients should be on the list?** There's no benchmark worth quoting, and any number you've seen is someone's guess. The useful test is the reverse one: a client belongs on the list if a decision they could make before December 31 would change their 2026 outcome. If nobody on your team can name that decision, they're not a candidate this year.

**Our clients resist paying for advice. Is this worth the effort?** It's a real barrier — 47% of firms in the Thomson Reuters survey named it. But note what the Censuswide data says: a third of clients are already paying someone for this work, and at firms of two to ten staff it's 48%. The resistance is often to *your invoice for something they didn't know they needed*, not to the service itself. Starting the conversation earlier changes which of those two things you're selling.

**We don't have advisory specialists. Does that disqualify us?** Staff skills gaps were the most-cited barrier (52%), so you're not unusual. But a year-end planning call is not a specialist product — it's a review of decisions still open before December 31 for a client whose numbers you already hold. Start with the clients whose situations your existing team already understands, and let the list grow from there.

**What if we miss the window this year?** Then set the close-out flag up now anyway, as a recurring step, so next October the list builds itself. The compounding version of this is a firm where the planning list is never built, because it was never allowed to disappear.

## Sources

- Thomson Reuters Institute, *2026 Tax Firm Advisory Services Report* (published December 2025; survey of **150 tax firm decision-makers** leading their firm's advisory practice, fielded September 2025) — advisory revenue growth, 31% revenue share, quarterly-touchpoint effect, barriers: [thomsonreuters.com](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accounting/tax-firm-advisory-services-report-2026/)
- Thomson Reuters Tax News, "A third of accounting clients' advisory work is going to rival firms, U.K. study finds" (July 15, 2026) — Censuswide survey of 500 UK businesses commissioned by Ravical, May 2026: [tax.thomsonreuters.com](https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/a-third-of-accounting-clients-advisory-work-is-going-to-rival-firms-u-k-study-finds/)
- AccountingWEB, "How Clients' Expectations of CPAs Are Evolving" — source of the 72% / \>60% figures from The Sleeter Group's *What SMBs Want* (2014): [accountingweb.com](https://www.accountingweb.com/practice/practice-excellence/how-clients-expectations-of-cpas-are-evolving)
- Abrigo, "Do clients want accountants to give proactive advice? You betcha!" — source of the ranking claim (proactive advice above responsiveness, expertise, fees): [abrigo.com](https://www.abrigo.com/blog/do-clients-want-accountants-to-give-proactive-advice-you-betcha/)
- IRS, Estimated Taxes FAQ — Q4 estimated tax payment due January 15: [irs.gov](https://www.irs.gov/faqs/estimated-tax)

*Note for readers: The Ravical/Censuswide figures describe UK businesses; US leakage patterns may differ in magnitude, though the initiation-gap mechanism is not country-specific. The Thomson Reuters survey is a 150-respondent sample of firm decision-makers, not a census. The Sleeter figure dates from 2014. Working-day count (51) assumes standard US weekends plus Thanksgiving Thursday/Friday and December 24–25 as non-working; adjust for your firm's actual holiday calendar. Confirm all tax timing against current IRS guidance before advising clients.*

### Leave a Comment

## Related Articles

[![Featured image for The Person Who Saves Your October Is the One Who Leaves in November - Toodledo Blog](https://blog.toodledo.com/hubfs/the-person-who-saves-your-october.png)](https://blog.toodledo.com/the-person-who-saves-your-october-is-the-one-who-leaves-in-november)

[Productivity](https://blog.toodledo.com/tag/productivity) [Guides](https://blog.toodledo.com/tag/guides)

### [The Person Who Saves Your October Is the One Who Leaves in November](https://blog.toodledo.com/the-person-who-saves-your-october-is-the-one-who-leaves-in-november)

Today is September 15. Your extended partnership and S-corp returns are out the door, or they aren't, and either way the room is quiet in the particular way it gets when...

[Toodledo](https://blog.toodledo.com/author/toodledo) 

[Read More](https://blog.toodledo.com/the-person-who-saves-your-october-is-the-one-who-leaves-in-november)

[Productivity](https://blog.toodledo.com/tag/productivity) [Guides](https://blog.toodledo.com/tag/guides)

### [Accounting Firm Workflow Templates: Build Your Library During Extension Season, Not During January](https://blog.toodledo.com/accounting-firm-workflow-templates-build-your-library-during-extension-season-not-during-january)

Every managing partner has had this conversation in February. A senior associate is out for a week, and suddenly nobody can tell you where three of her clients stand....

[Hasnain Khimji](https://blog.toodledo.com/author/hasnain-khimji) 

[Read More](https://blog.toodledo.com/accounting-firm-workflow-templates-build-your-library-during-extension-season-not-during-january)

### Let's stay in touch!

[Follow us on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/Toodledo/) [Follow us on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/toodledo) [Follow us on Twitter](https://twitter.com/toodledo)

```json
{
  "@context" : "https://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Hasnain Khimji",
    "url" : "https://blog.toodledo.com/author/hasnain-khimji"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2026-10-01T18:40:26.773Z",
  "datePublished" : "2026-10-01T18:40:26.000Z",
  "headline" : "The 51 Working Days After October 15 Are the Most Valuable of Your Year",
  "mainEntityOfPage" : {
    "@id" : "https://blog.toodledo.com/the-51-working-days-after-october-15-are-the-most-valuable-of-your-year",
    "@type" : "WebPage"
  },
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "url" : "https://blog.toodledo.com/hubfs/toodledo-logo-2026.svg"
    },
    "name" : "Toodledo"
  }
}
```