AIOInsights / Industries / Accountants / How should an accounting firm publish filing-season hours so AI answers do not send clients to a closed office?
Accountants

How should an accounting firm publish filing-season hours so AI answers do not send clients to a closed office?

Put the season's hours where Google keeps dated exceptions, say the same thing on your site, and give every date an end.

An accounting firm should publish filing-season hours as dated exceptions, not by rewriting its regular schedule: Google Business Profile special hours for each extended day, a temporary closure if the office shuts for a week or more, and the same dates stated in plain text on the firm's website. Hours are a fact people ask about directly ("is my accountant open Saturday?"), and they are the fact a tax practice changes most often. A February schedule still showing in May sends someone to a locked door.

Why accounting firms get this wrong more than most

Few local businesses change their hours as much as a tax practice does. A typical year for a hypothetical three person firm in Omaha might run like this: normal weekday hours in the fall, Saturdays and late evenings from February to mid April, a week closed after the deadline, shorter summer Fridays, and a second push before the October extension deadline. That is five schedules in twelve months. If the only place they are recorded is a sign on the door and a line in an email newsletter, every public source is wrong for part of the year.

The same firm often answers the phone differently in season, with a queue or an intake form instead of a person. That belongs in the published hours too, because "open" and "answering calls" are different facts.

What Google gives you for this

Google's help page on holiday and special hours is built for exactly this: hours for specific dates that override regular hours and then expire. The same page is direct about longer breaks: "If your business is closed for 7 or more days in a row, or will be closed for an unknown period of time, you should mark your business as Temporarily closed." Regular hours stay what they are the rest of the year, which is what the Business Profile guidelines expect.

Special hours have a property that matters more than it looks: they end. A firm that rewrites its regular hours for tax season has to remember to rewrite them back. A firm that enters special hours for each date does not.

What the website should say

Put a short, dated hours block on the contact page and in the footer, as text, not as an image of a flyer:

An hours block that stays true

"Regular hours: Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. Tax season, February 2 to April 15: Monday to Friday 8 to 7, Saturday 9 to 2. Closed April 16 to April 24. Phones are answered by appointment line during tax season." Every changed period has a start and an end date.

If your site uses LocalBusiness markup, schema.org's OpeningHoursSpecification supports dated periods through validFrom and validThrough. Use it only if someone will update it on the same day as the visible text; stale markup is a second wrong answer. Our note on whether structured data helps AI covers that risk.

Where the old hours linger

  • Bing Places, Yelp and any association directory that shows hours.
  • The QuickBooks ProAdvisor or Xero advisor profile, if it lists availability.
  • A PDF client letter from last season, still linked from the resources page.
  • An old blog post titled "Our tax season hours" with no year in it.

Any of these can be read by a search crawler and quoted back. Add the year to seasonal posts, and remove or update the rest.

A tax season hours checklist for January

  1. Decide the season's schedule and write it down with dates, including the closure after the deadline.
  2. Enter each extended day as special hours on the Business Profile; schedule the temporary closure if you close for a week or more.
  3. Update the dated block on the website the same day.
  4. Update Bing Places and the other listings that show hours.
  5. In May, check that everything has returned to regular hours, and search your site for last year's dates.

Hours are one small piece of AI visibility for accounting firms, and one of the few you fully control. If you work mostly with remote clients, how an AI decides which states you serve is the related question.

Not legal or tax advice. This describes how AI systems read an accounting practice in public; your state board of accountancy, Circular 230 and your own counsel govern what you may publish.

Questions

How should a CPA firm set extended tax season hours on Google?

A CPA firm should enter extended tax season hours as special hours on its Google Business Profile, one entry per date, and keep its regular hours for the rest of the year. The firm's website should state the same dated hours in plain text. Special hours end on their own, so the profile returns to the normal schedule after the filing deadline without a later edit.

Should an accounting firm mark itself closed after tax season?

Google's guidance says a business closed for seven or more days in a row, or for an unknown period, should be marked temporarily closed on its Business Profile. An accounting firm that shuts for a week after the April deadline should do that and say the same on its website; a firm that is open fewer days should publish the reduced hours instead.

More questions from accountants

This page is part of AI visibility for accounting firms, the AIOInsights guide to how AI systems find, read and describe this kind of practice.

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