Four days post-4/15 — what was your single worst intake bottleneck this season?

Hi all. Now that most of us are finally coming up for air (and before extensions swallow the rest of our brains), I'm curious what the community's actual post-season retro looks like.

Not the "we should have billed more" or "we should have fired clients X, Y, Z" stuff — we all know those. I mean specifically on the intake side of the practice.

If you had to name ONE intake bottleneck that cost you the most hours this season, what was it?

A few patterns I've been hearing in my CPE study group and in conversations this week:

– Missing-document chase cycles — text / call / email / text again —
over a single 1099 or W-2
– Clients starting your organizer and disappearing for three weeks,
then rushing in on April 10
– Half-filled intake forms where you're still asking basic demographic
questions the day before filing
– The paper-to-digital gap — you went digital, but one client insists
on a physical Form 13614-C and it derails your whole pipeline
– Spanish-speaking clients needing a separate workflow because the
intake tools are English-only
– E-signature ping-pong adding 15–20 minutes per return
– Duplicate data entry between the intake doc and the actual tax software

Curious which of these actually hurt you the most, or if there's something totally different I'm not listing. "Client brought me W-2s printed on dot-matrix paper that won't OCR" counts.

Not here to sell anything. Just trying to get a clearer picture of where the real time goes in a small practice so I can calibrate my own retro before planning 2027 software evaluations. Will happily compile the responses and post a summary back here if people share.

What broke your flow the most?