Abby Normal

It's a debatable topic. I have several H/W LLCs that I disregard and put on Sch E. First off, it will not likely be raised on an audit. Second, the IRS has no tax to gain by moving it to a 1065. Third, we have automatic removal of late filed 1065s if all income is timely reported by partners. I'm not worried.

Installment sale if they are cash basis?

If grants were to individuals you have to list them even if they're less than 5,000. See Part III.

Has anyone ever seen one of these PTPs that really made money? Because I sure haven't. I think they're so complicated that most people can't tell if they're making money or not. Plus our fees are much higher when clients have these investments.

It's a mobile scanner not a production office scanner. Get the iX500. That thing flies!

We print them out of QuickBooks on plain paper and mail them in.

​Thanks for pointing that out! I may never have noticed that or known what it meant.

Rich,

We went paperless with payroll returns two years ago and with business workpapers one year ago. It's been great. We scan client records like bank statements and print all QuickBooks reports, spreadsheets, etc. to a pdf. Our client files are becoming more empty every year.

Joe

1200 / 100 returns is 12/return. Don't know how anyone could complain about that.

​Almost 400 clients. Mostly one state but I have clients in about 8 different states. Unlimited efile. I buy the Max package which gives me 3 users, but I needed 5. In 2013 I had to buy unlimited users for $600. This year I can buy 2 users for $198. Last year I paid 1,939 and this year it's 1,615, so I'm happy.

I was going to switch to Total Tax Office package which has 5 users but with the licensing change it's cheaper to stay with Max. I don't know what other pluses TTO has over Max, but it only looks like a different research system.

Edit: So I was incorrect about saving $400. I'm only saving just over $300. Still, I'm happy!

Everyone in my office has a small scanner at their computer. In addition to being convenient for the user, it gives us a ton of redundancy if a scanner fails. Before all my employees had scanners they had to interrupt another employee whenever they needed something scanned of faxed. We scan and print to Windows Fax to send faxes which is a huge improvement over using a fax machine.

I have 3 S1500 ScanSnaps and 1 iX500, which is the replacement for the S1500, which is no longer made. My oldest S1500 has well over 100K scans and just keeps rolling!

Second, the Fujitsu recommendation. Only scanner I will buy. If you don't need TWAIN, we really love the iX500. The ScanSnap software is user friendly.

I'm saving $400 this year on ATX due to changes in licensing:

This year you have the ability to purchase user license bundles. You can purchase 1 License for $99 or 5 Licenses for $299. You can buy the 2 additional Licenses for $198 but you get a better deal by adding 5 Licenses for $299

If you have Clergy with a Sch C, there is an error where even though Clergy Worksheet 2 limits the Sch C expenses, the total loss shown on Sch C line 31 is as if the expenses were not limited. I have reported this to ATX twice now (as of today)  and it has not been fixed.

With ATX I can open 3 small returns for different clients but I have a large return open, I can't even open a second return. I hope they address this.

I couldn't figure it out on the ATX site so I emailed my contact and got this reply:

This year you have the ability to purchase user license bundles. You can purchase 1 License for $99 or 5 Licenses for $299. You can buy the 2 additional Licenses for $198 but you get a better deal by adding 5 Licenses for $299. Just let your account manager know which direction you would like to go in.

This is a nice savings for me because I was paying about $600 for unlimited licenses.

I've been known to turn the ringers off on the phones during peak hours.

I've been seeing more and more code X. To me it's just a code F.

My desk is always clean. Yes, I'm one of those. I have a hard and fast rule: only one client's file on my desk at a time. I don't want clients records ending up in another clients file. I've seen this happen at other firms where I've worked.

Sounds good to me.

The 11,122 is COD income that can be excluded by bankruptcy or insolvency. Sounds like the software is splitting the total COD between line 21 and 4797, which would make 4797 no gain or loss because proceeds = adj basis.

We even efile extensions for people we have not heard from and are not sure they're coming back. We've had people show up later in the year and I wouldn't want them to have to pay late filing penalties because I didn't file an extension for them.

I had a client leave me because I didn't get their return done before 4/15 last year and they owed some penalties. I paid the penalties even though they still said they were leaving. They hated the preparer they met with last summer so much, they decided to come back to me. I showed them a little extra love and attention this year.

We've been efiling all our extensions. The batch add extension feature stupidly prints all the extensions and takes so long you might as well add them all manually, especially since you have to open the client to dot all the i's and cross all the t's and create the efile.

I'll have to submit my idea to ATX for a batch way to create federal extension efiles based on last year's tax.