Accounting firm links that survive tax season and seasonal staff

Thirty tabs, every morning, from February to April

The IRS e-Services page. Two state revenue portals because this client has nexus in two states. The secretary of state site for the annual report. The client's payroll provider. Their bank's login page for statement pulls. The prior-year workpapers folder. The e-file status dashboard. Your practice management queue.

You open them one at a time from muscle memory, and when the browser restarts you open them again. On a Tuesday in March that is ten minutes; across a season, across a staff of eight, it is a real number.

Then there are the client-specific portals — the ones where the login page URL is a nine-word path nobody could reconstruct, and the only record is in whoever last did that return. When they're out sick during the extension deadline, someone loses an hour to a URL.

A board per client, a session for the tab set

Give each client a board: Portals & logins, Filings, Payroll, Banking, Prior year. Give the firm a general board for the things every engagement touches — IRS tools, the state portals you use constantly, the e-file dashboard, the research subscription — and mark that one required so it lands on every preparer's account without a setup step.

Then handle the tabs themselves. Save the whole open set as a session, and reopen it as one browser window in one action tomorrow morning. The recurring tab set is a thing you should be able to open, not a thing you should be able to remember. Opt-in auto-saved browser snapshots go further: if the machine crashes at 9pm on April 14, the whole window layout comes back, including window positions.

• Board per client for portals, filings, payroll and banking pages
• One required firm board so every preparer has the same IRS and state tools
• A saved session per recurring workflow — morning tab set, monthly close, quarterly payroll filings
• Checklists with a recurring cadence for the filings that repeat: quarterly 941s, monthly sales tax, annual reports

Seasonal staff get exactly the right links and nothing more

A January hire who is gone in May should not receive a tour of every client the firm has. Share the specific client boards their work covers, view-only, and the cap holds in the web app and in the extension. They open every portal they need and cannot edit the master list, which is what keeps the client boards accurate through a season with six temporary people touching them.

In April, revoke access in one action. Every link stays with the firm, and the board can be reassigned to the year-round staffer who inherits the client. Compare that to the alternative most firms actually run — a shared spreadsheet of links, or the seasonal hire's own browser bookmarks. The spreadsheet has one permission for everyone; the browser bookmarks walk out the door.

The filing calendar next to the filing links

Boards hold checklists with a recurring cadence, so the quarterly payroll filing routine can live on the same board as the portals you complete it in — the step and the link in the same place instead of a task app pointing vaguely at "the state site." A read-only team calendar from an ICS feed puts the deadline calendar on the board too.

Day to day, make the boards the new tab through the extension. Every new tab during the season shows the client boards, searchable from a local cache, so "Franchise Tax" gets you the right state portal without a Google search that lands on a lookalike page.

Two honest caveats. Linksley stores links, checklists and text blocks — it is not a document store and should never hold credentials; keep passwords in your password manager, this holds the login page. And there is no Safari extension and no mobile app, so it is a desktop-workflow tool.