How to prepare for earnings season?

First figure out which companies within your coverage and watch list you will be responsible for tracking. Make sure you've toggled news alerts for new SEC filings, I like BamSEC the best if you don't have Bloomberg.

You won't know the date & time of the release until a little bit before hand, but companies generally follow the same schedule as the prior year. If they report first week of Feb, make a calendar alert to keep an eye out for XYZ's announcement PR.

Once you have alerts set up and a rough idea of the time frame for each release, start going through each of your models and get everything set up to drop a new quarter in. This means make sure all the formulas are set to populate new LTM figures once you just drop in the new #s. This will save you an immense amount of time if all you have to do is drop the #s in and not worry about formulas/formatting the day of.

For multiple earnings at the same time, prioritize based on any earnings misses / surprises and figure out which calls you need to be on vs. can just read the transcript later. You can take care a lot of note writing while mgmt goes through their prepared remarks because its basically the same as the PR.

I'm on the buyside and cover a lot of names, but have never really found earnings to be a headache with enough prep.

Make sure you know where the numbers are coming from. Some models... is it an estimate, is it a plug, is it a reported number?