Year-end planning: Three advisors on where businesses should focus in Q4
The final quarter fills up fast with year-end work: closing the books, hitting targets, reporting results. What rarely gets discussed is what deserves your attention before December 31. Three quarters of the year are now behind you, which is enough evidence to know what has been working, and there is still enough runway to change how the year finishes. Three Baker Tilly advisors give their views on which spending has stopped delivering, what is being overlooked and what has changed underneath the plan.
Which investments are no longer paying off? AI adoption and outdated processes
For Tola Ijaduola, Director, People and Culture, in our Calgary office, technology investment that treats its users as an afterthought is producing the least value right now. “We are having such a big hype in AI that we’re not paying attention to the people who are going to lead that transformation,” she says. She describes a gap opening between the pace of technology and the pace of the people expected to run it. “There has to be the human capability that’s also working at the same speed that AI is working. AI is only as good as its adoption. Organizations shouldn’t underestimate the impact AI has on the people doing the work. Companies need to invest in people at the same pace as they are investing in technology. AI alone will not transform the organization. Employees need the skills, support and confidence to use these tools effectively.
Todd King, Tax Partner in our Dartmouth office, points to a second source of limited value: any process that survives only because it survived last year. He applies zero-based thinking to process rather than to budget, questioning every purchase and every step. “Next year is not going to be the same as last year,” he says. Challenging that assumption is the work.
What planning opportunities are being missed?
The opportunity most often missed is capacity. Todd King, Tax Partner in our Dartmouth office, had about 200 hours of new partner time to allocate this year. Rather than spend it on client work, he directed it into rebuilding the software his tax team uses daily, buying a system a competing firm had developed in-house and reworking it for Baker Tilly’s own process. The old tools were almost too sophisticated, so junior staff struggled with them, and work reached the manager group in need of rework rather than review. “This new tool allows our managers to truly manage,” he says. “We’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a long time. This is the year we’re just going to do it.”
Jarred Cohen, Senior Manager, Advisory Services in our Montréal office, says AI is making it increasingly clear who truly drives value within an organization. Identify those people, champion them and do what it takes to retain them. They are difficult to replace. Tola Ijaduola, Director, People and Culture, would spend in the same place. “If there’s a place to invest right now, it’s the people that are going to adopt the technology that we need for tomorrow.” Her office now rarely hires at the manager level, developing co-op students and staff accountants into those roles instead because they already know the clients and the culture.
What has changed that leadership has not acknowledged?
What leadership has not fully absorbed is how quickly a sound plan can become outdated. Jarred Cohen, Senior Manager, Advisory Services, points to tariffs as one of the most disruptive assumptions for planning this year. Exposure emerged early in the year, receded and then returned, with the added uncertainty of potential refunds and looming deadlines.
He points to a U.S. buyer that was looking to acquire a Canadian business. The transaction had progressed through financial and tax due diligence before the buyer recognized that tariffs could erode margins to the point that the business had very little value to them. Ultimately, the buyer walked away.
The other shift is on the financing side. “Banks have become much more disciplined in how they extend capital,” Cohen says. Private equity and venture capital investors have also raised the bar for due diligence across legal, commercial, financial and tax workstreams.
Conclusion
None of these decisions require certainty about 2027. They require a deliberate look at what the first three quarters actually produced while there is still time to act on the answer. As Jarred Cohen puts it, “As you approach year-end, you need to take a step back from the day-to-day and look at the bigger picture.”
Most businesses have that conversation with their advisor once the year is already closed, by which point the options have narrowed. Todd King, Tax Partner, argues the year-end meeting is the wrong place to walk line by line through financial statements when the valuable discussions sit outside them: succession, estate planning and blind spots. “We should be talking to our clients before something happens.” The quarter will fill itself with year-end work if you let it. The steps taken now shape how the next year opens.
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