Preparing For Your Appointment
At the beginning of January our office will either email or send via USPS all the documents you’ll need to start gathering your tax paperwork together to send to us. Those documents typically include the following:
How to Prepare for Your Return – a guide to help you get all of your documents together and what order to put them in for when you deliver them to our office to start working.
Engagement Letter – this outlines our policies and procedures in the office and let’s you know what to expect from us and what we’ll need you to do to ensure that we’re both on the same page. It is required that all clients sign this document BEFORE we begin working on your return. If you need to complete this form you can fill it out online HERE.
Client Information Sheet – this yearly information sheet is our way of finding out what your last tax year was like and also to get some idea of what might be happening in the new tax year. This form is updated each year depending on new tax laws so it’s important that you only use the current year version we send to you. Again, it is required that all clients complete this document BEFORE we begin working on your return. If you need to complete this form you can fill it out online HERE.
Sending Us Your Documents
We request that clients send us their documents two weeks before their scheduled appointment. The best way to send us documents is through our Client Portal. It’s fast and secure and it will alert us once you’ve uploaded a document to let us know to get started. Otherwise, clients can mail us their documents however we strongly, STRONGLY, advise you to make copies of whatever you send us in the mail just in case your package to us gets delayed or lost…it can and did happen. We also have a physical dropbox installed in the vestibule of our office building that’s open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We check it twice a day for new items. Of course you can also hand deliver it to our office on the second floor too but be aware our office closes for lunch from 12:30pm to 1:30pm and our door will be locked.
Even if you don’t have all of your documents two weeks ahead of your appointment, send everything that you do have at the moment. If you’re missing something, we’ll make note of it and we’ll assign you a due date to get missing work back to us. If for any reason you don’t think it’s possible to get your documents to us two weeks in advance please let us know immediately. We’ll help you reschedule your appointment and, if need be, file an extension for you to provide you with more filing time.
Time For Your Appointment
Appointments are held either by a phone call, a Google Meet video conference, or clients can come into the office for the review. Review appointments are 30 minutes long and involve comparing the current year return against your previous return for any major changes, briefly discussing any needs for quarterly payments to cover tax deficiencies, and any minor tax issues that need to be thought about for the upcoming year. If we feel we need more time to discuss the upcoming year we’ll nudge you to schedule a tax planning appointment for after the first filing deadline.
Once returns are completed we’ll notify you so you can review them and we will send you the necessary signature pages needed in order to file your return. You can sign those pages in one of three ways, electronic signatures through our portal (again, the fastest and safest way), you can come into our office and sign, or we can mail them to you. All tax returns are electronically filed unless there is some circumstance with your return that prevents that from happening. If it has to be paper filed we’ll provide you with a copy to mail and complete instructions on how to do it.
If you’re a client that normally just mails your documents to us anyway and do not have a scheduled appointment already, send us your documents as soon as you have all of them available. When your documents come into us we’ll contact you about whether or not you need to have an appointment.
For clients whom we file extensions for and see after the first filing deadline (typically after April 15th) if you don’t have an appointment scheduled by April 15th you can contact us to schedule OR…. we’re just going to create one for so that you get on the calendar. You can always change it but at least it gets you on our radar.