A short instructional video by Donna Genie (July 2019) explaining the firm's tax preparation workflow for clients, including portal use for uploading documents, finalizing uploads via a Resources form, and new payment/engagement steps (EchoSign engagement letter and Xero invoice for deposit). Emphasizes use of calculatedmoves.com, folder organization by tax year, and email as primary contact.
Hello, welcome. It is time again for tax preparation. I just wanted to go through a few reminders of how to proceed with your tax preparation and make this a nice and smooth process. First off, as you may know, we had a name change this year, so for a long time we've been Bordeaux and Bordeaux CPAs. We have now moved our name to a more modern approach, just like we do with our accounting to calculatedmoves.com so our web address will still work in the old fashioned, but if you want to go to calculatedmoves.com that'll be the easiest way to get there. First off, with the tax preparation, we're going to ask you again to use some of the same procedures we've used in the past with uploading files to us. So when you go to our website you want to click on the client area in the upper right corner and go to Share file. That is your location where you'll be uploading documents to us. You'll log in here with your email address and password. If you've forgotten your password, of course you can click on the forgot password icon and it will walk you through resetting that password. I know some of you may only use that a couple times a year, so it's easy enough to forget, but it's also easy enough to reset. As we have in the past, we are no longer sending out organizers. We just don't want you to work that hard. You submit the information to us, we'll coordinate the efforts to make sure that everything works smoothly and get everything in its rightful places on the tax return for you. If you do want a copy of an organizer just to be able to go through and double check that you have everything, please just shoot me an email and we'll upload that to you in a secure fashion so that you can use that. But again, no need to fill all of that information out as you upload your documents. Remember that you can do that all year long. You don't have to wait until now. I've got our upload documents open and share file for Margin homer here, so let's just run through the process very easily. When you log into your portal you will see these folders here something similar. You'll always have an uploads folder. That is the only folder where you can place documents and upload those to us. You can add those into each of the year folders. Now we'll be preparing 2018 taxes so please upload into 2018 for that year. But as you can see, if you just made a charitable contribution for 2019. Feel free to go ahead and upload that into the 19 folder for next year's preparation. Okay, when you go in, you may click Browse Files to browse on your desktop to where those files are located, or you can use the plus sign and go to Upload right here. Okay, once you've uploaded though, please make sure that you click the Upload button in the bottom left. If you do not click that, the files will not come to us. You should receive an email confirmation once you upload as well. Okay, in the email that I sent to you, once you've completed uploading all of your documents and this process may take a little while, obviously through the end of January you'll probably be receiving documents and maybe a little past that as well with some of the investment statements. Once you've completed that process, there's a link in the email that I've just sent to you. You can also go to our website to do this, but you will want to finalize your process and tell us that you finished the upload of all the documents and you're ready to proceed with taxes. To do this, go to the Resources page and say proceed with tax preparation. Again, this same link is in the email that we just sent to you. You'll fill in some name and email updated information for us to make sure we have the current documents and also if there are any other sweet items you need to tell us about, anything we should watch for or any big changes in life, let us know here in the Other Items that we should know about section. Once you submit this form, that email will come back to me and that will signal to me that you are ready to proceed with your tax preparation. I'll then sort through the documents and I will send you two things this year a little bit new. I'll be sending you the regular engagement letter through EchoSign as usual. I'll also be sending you a second document which will be an invoice from Xero with an X and that is where you will pay your deposit. So rather than uploading the credit card information to me, you will just pay that invoice and click right through that will finalize your payment process. Then once we have that information, both those steps, the engagement letter as well as the payment, we will proceed with your tax preparation and get everything in motion. Remember, if you have any questions at all on anything, email is the best way to contact me. We have a silent office here so there are no phones on desks, no phones ring in our office so that we can concentrate on 100% of our efforts on the current projects that we're working on. So if you need to talk with me, please shoot me an email. If a conference is necessary, we'll set up a scheduled call to handle that. I hope all has been well with you in the past year and that everything is going smoothly for 2019. If any of your needs have changed, please feel free to let me know. And I look forward to helping you get the tax preparation process out of the way. Thank you very much.
