If you’re a manager or partner, you may recognise this pattern: the same review point turns up again and again, across different people and different files, period after period — a sign of a gap in the process itself.

Why this costs more than it looks like

A single review point doesn’t feel like much. But every review point is another round trip — the reviewer flags it, the team member has to pick the file back up, make the change, and send it back. Multiply that by every job, every period, across the whole team, and it adds up to a significant amount of time. And almost none of it is necessary. If the same point is showing up across the firm, the work could have been correct the first time, with the right systems and processes in place.

What repetitive review points usually are

Review points that recur tend to fall into a few categories:

• Tasks missed or overlooked — a step in the file that doesn’t get properly actioned, like forgetting to attach a required report or statement, or not checking bank account details for a refund.
• Things done incorrectly — typos, wrong figures, formatting errors, like a formula calculated incorrectly or a transcribing error.
• Judgement not applied — most common in the more complex, judgement-heavy areas of tax law, where the accountant followed the process but hasn’t yet built the experience to know when something needs a closer look.

The first two are usually fixable by making the task and the standard clearer. The third takes longer to solve, because it comes down to experience, and experience in complex areas of tax law takes time to build.

Diagnosing the core issue

Before fixing a recurring review point, it’s worth asking a few questions about whether the guidance for that task existed in the workpaper or your internal systems.

Was there any guidance for this task at all? Something built into the file itself, rather than a conversation or something explained once in passing. If it wasn’t there, the junior was likely working from memory, or from whatever they’d picked up along the way.

Was it where the team member actually needed it? Guidance often exists somewhere in the firm — a manual, a shared drive, a folder from a few years back. It usually sits apart from the task itself, so someone working through a worksheet has to stop and go looking for it, and often doesn’t.

Was it clear and easy to follow? Step-by-step, dot points, something like “You need to check X” — not a paragraph the team member has to interpret. Guidance that’s technically available but vague is close to having none at all, because they still have to work out what it actually means.

Did it explain why, not just what? A step with no context behind it is just an instruction to follow mechanically. If an accountant doesn’t understand why a reconciliation matters, they’re far less likely to apply real judgement to it — they’ll complete it, but they won’t think about it.

Is the standard consistent across the firm? If what counts as “done properly” changes depending on who’s reviewing, preparers are being asked to guess which version applies to them.

What if someone wants to understand more? Not every team member needs the full context every time, but a single task can’t always cover the full complexity of tax law — sometimes a junior will hit a genuine grey area and need more than the standard covers. That’s when they need a clear path to further resources, whether that’s ATO guidance, internal technical documents, or someone to ask, and it should be easy to find from within the task itself.

What the fix actually looks like

Once you’ve asked those questions and diagnosed the issue, it’s time to build the fix into your systems so it doesn’t happen again: clear, easy-to-follow guidance that explains why, accessible where the work happens.

How Cimplico Workpapers approaches this

We believe review points shouldn’t be repetitive.

You can customise your firm’s standards and procedures, and we apply them directly where the work happens — inside the worksheet itself, at the point a team member needs them, not in a manual they’d have to leave the task to find. Each task carries a clear instruction plus extra context in the description, so an accountant understands why it matters, not just what to do.

Standards aren’t fixed once you set them up. You can refine them at any time – add as much or as little detail as a task needs – and changes sync to every open workpaper across the firm, so everyone is always working to the same version. If a review point keeps coming up, that’s useful information: refine the standard, and the fix applies everywhere it’s needed from that point on.

If the same review points are turning up across your team every period, it’s worth looking at the system around them, not just the individuals completing the work. Book a demo to see how this works inside a live workpaper.