JJStephens

Just once when a client says 'just put down something for now & we'll fix it later' I want to say, 'Okay, for now I'll put down a million dollars and we'll fix it later.' I have a feeling there would be no need to fire that client.

In late 2015 my client (a church) paid rent (twice) for a family in the community that had suffered a serious calamity. I feel reasonably certain a 1099 to the landlord is required; I'm not aware of any exception for benevolence rent payments. The landlord insists a 1099 is not appropriate and has refused for months to provide a W-9. BTW, I re-instructed my client to withhold future 1099-able payments to any payee until they have a W-9 in-hand. I'm assuming the landlord's refusal is probably the result of under-reporting rental income, but in this case it doesn't make much sense to refuse to provide the W-9 and accept a 1099. I would think the landlord would want to show at least some income and two months worth of rent could be easily absorbed into that. Yes, I know (s)he is legally obligated to report it all. That's not my problem as landlord is not my client--I'm simply stating what I assume to be true about the motive for refusing to provide a W-9. I suppose there could also be some issues of not wanting to show up on a government agency's radar--perhaps dodging a warrant or could be an illegal, er, I mean undocumented worker--no, I mean illegal. Do any of you know of a reason why issuing a 1099 could be avoided in these circumstances? Any suggestions about compelling the landlord to comply?

I signed up for a 14 day free trial. Seems to work well and my clients are adapting okay. Right now I'm inclined to sign up after the trial ends.

Actually, it was via e-mail. And it happens that it is from one of my oldest and dearest friends. Still, the temptation was there

Brand new Drake user. I've done a handful of returns. Even with having to learn on the fly I'm taking only about 2/3 as long as I did with ATX the past year or two. So far so good. Ar any of you using SecureFilePro? If so, how is it working for you? How do your clients like it? Any tips/traps you can share? Thanks for any insights you can offer.

Client has been bugging me for a couple days to send the K-1s for the trust from his mother's estate. He had emailed a document that according to him had' everything I needed.' That return finally made it to the top of my to-do stack. Turns out all he provided in the email attachment was the amount of each beneficiary's distribution. I told him I need the trust's income & expense info to prep the 1041. He told they don't care about the 1041 right now, I can do that later. All they want right now are the K-1s. Deep sigh. How quickly can April 18 get here?!?!?

Do you think that if enough of us signed a petition we could get the IRS to change the nasty 'on-hold' music that hasn't changed since the infernal revenue code was enacted in 1913? It was awful before but now that they're leaving us on hold for longer and longer periods, it's enough to drive me loony (yeah, I know, loonier). What think ye?

As I tell folks who show up at my yard sales, if you think my prices are unreasonable feel free to offer more! Actually, over the years I've put a ton of time into it but that's water under the bridge. It costs me nothing to help out someone else and goodness knows I've benefited from a lot of free advice on this forum over the years.

I serve clients (mostly clergy) all over the country. I can't meet with most so years ago I created an interview style Organizer. It's worked very well and my clients love it. I send all my clients a link to my web site where they can go and download the latest version (I update it throughout tax season as I think of new and improved ways of doing things). I haven't done much more than change a few dates on this year's version--hope to add some more tweaks over the weekend. Anyway, here's a copy in case any of you want to use it. Feel free to personalize it any way you wish. Tax Organizer.pdf

When I was just learning to write in kindergarten my mother was freaked out that I wrote everything upside down and backwards. She talked with the teacher who just laughed. She said she saw it all the time and that I'd grow out of it within a few weeks. She was right. But I never really grew out of being weird in so many other ways. Go figure.

First, I'm assuming the employing church is a small employer (the vast majority of churches are) and therefore, not subject to the large employer reporting requirement. Were the premiums paid for a group health insurance policy? If not, they probably have a problem. I work almost exclusively with churches and other ministries and find that many of them are still paying premiums on private/marketplace insurance. In most cases that is no longer permitted. It might be worth inquiring about--might be a revenue generating opportunity helping the employing church correct their procedures.

I just got some spam from the folks at TRX Software. Remember them from several years ago? I do. Bad, really bad memories. They offered me their super duper new product for a mere $399.99. As I suspected, they're the outfit behind the deluge of offers to set up a tax prep kiosk in some of the dollar stores. Well, garsh, I had a pretty good day going. Now I'm in a foul mood.

Nothing to it. I could do that. If I wasn't so old and weak and clumsy ;-)

First year Drakie--still learning but loving it so far!

That's what I ended up telling him to do.

This is one of those 'I ought to know this but don't' questions. Client received a K-1 from his deceased mother's Living Trust. He incurred some expenses related to maintaining her property and administering the trust (mileage, supplies, repairs). Can he deduct those? My guess is they'd be a Schedule A, Other Misc Deductions item. He also had to pay an assessment to the trust to cover some expenses. What say those of ye much wiser and more experienced than me?

Quick update on this. The problem continued to happen and even got worse. I wrapped up a return last night, saved it and closed ATX. When I opened ATX this morning the return was blank. I called ATX support. It is apparently a known issue following 14.7 updates. She renamed a hidden file deep in my Windows folder forcing ATX to recreate that file. She said that would take care of it. I asked what specifically was wrong. All she would say is, "It's just a file that got corrupted. We made it create a new file so that should take care of it." I tried to press but that's all I got out of her. So far, I'm half way through re-entering the data and it appears to be working ok. By the way, when I first called she asked if I had upgraded to Win10. When I said no she replied with an enthusiastic, "Good!" Makes me wonder if Win10 isn't playing nicely with ATX software.

Client does a fair amount of business travel and occasionally stays with family or friends. He has a CPA friend who told him that for her clients she allows 1/2 the standard per diem rate when her clients travel but stay with family/friends. Is there some special rule I don't know about that allows for that treatment? I thought you either qualify or you don't.

Aarrghhh! It just happened again. I was working on a return for about 30 minutes. Had to step away for a few minutes. When I came back I had a message saying ATX was not able to connect to the server (I've gotten that a lot over the last couple years) and asked if I wanted to retry or cancel. I clicked retry and the program closed. Lost the whole thing. I'm normally pretty serious about frequent saves but I was so intense on this one that I don't recall having clicked the save icon. My bad. So auto-save hasn't worked since 2011. I didn't know that. Well, I guess I'm only at risk for another 10-15 extensions. I've already purchased Drake for next year. I used to love ATX. That seems like a long time ago.

Thanks for the tip Jack. Alas, it didn't work. There was only one version listed and it was also blank. I ended up just rekeying in all the data.

I started a return back in August--entered all the data I had. However, client mentioned farm rental income so everything got put on hold. Just started to work on the return again. It's empty. Nothing there. Anyone else ever experience this? Better yet, anyone have any idea what happened and if it's a loss? I don't think it's a failure to save issue. I'm set to auto-save every five minutes and I'm stickler for frequent saves. I've used ATX most of the last 20+ years and have never seen/heard anything like it.

I went to a Drake sales seminar over the summer. While I decided to go with Drake (a decision I had been mulling for 10 years), even the demo of the hosted version didn't go very smoothly and the presenter didn't push it at all. I don't have the same aversion to cloud based software some others have (I'm using it in some other areas). As far as Drake Hosted is concerned, maybe someday. But IMO they're not even close yet.

Thanks all. Very, very helpful. So I guess it turns out I did the right thing ... even if my rationale for why was a bit vague!

I don't do many trusts (which is probably a good thing) so I need to borrow some of the wisdom of some you trust gurus. In 2014 a long time client became administrator of a complex, grantor trust (mom's estate) that owns a small cottage and also has some residual mineral rights on another property sold long ago. I recorded the royalties on the extracted oil & gas and the taxes paid thereon. I did not include repair and maintenance costs on the cottage (used exclusively by family members for brief get-aways). My rationale was that costs can be deducted only if they are related to the source of income. One of the kids--an attorney--is questioning my handling of the cottage costs (and now, so am I). Did I do the right thing or should those costs have been deducted on the 1041 (if so, where)? One way or the other, the attorney is asking for specific cites to back up whatever I do. Help!!!

My main machine & main laptop are both Win7 but I have a laptop and a tablet with 8.1. I don't care for Win8 tiles so I use a Win7 shell--after it loads I can't tell the difference performance-wise.