Get your tax documents together before meeting with your accountant. Procrastination and missing paperwork are the main delays. Insight Tax needs everything upfront and can turn around a return in two weeks once they have it.
Tax season can be stressful for all of us, but especially for a business owner. You're trying to juggle all the things in your business while also being put up against the deadline to get your tax returns filed, which means you got to get your information to your accountant. The whole process can feel pretty overwhelming. Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. You could hire a professional, maybe Insight Tax, Tax Geniuses, to get that done for you. But even if you're a do-it-yourselfer, there are things you can do to make it easier. Honestly, over the years, I think one of the biggest hurdles that we've seen is that sometimes just getting started is the challenge. And I think that challenge kind of happens because for most of us, when we hear the word tax, it's not something that immediately brings us a thrill. So we want to put it off. It's easy to procrastinate taxes. It's easy to move that to the next week, month. You know, just we're always going to push it back on our to-do list. Now the thing likely that is the challenge in getting started, so maybe we don't know where the first step is. Well, the first step is gathering documents, and that often is the hurdle for the client. Like in our case, we can't do the return if we don't have the information. And sometimes clients make the assumption that, hey, I gave them my P&L, or I gave them my W-2, and it should be good. Or sometimes we have clients who've given us access to their books, and they just think that we know when to get in there, but we're not gonna check the client's QuickBooks login every day until the books are ready. We are gonna need the client to tell us when that's actually ready. And I get it. You have other stuff on your plate. Gathering all your docs and scanning and uploading them, that can be the challenge. You should know that most accountants though can't do your return until they have all of the information. Here at Insight Tax, for example, once the client gets us their information, we have a 2-week turnaround time. Meaning? They get us information, they'll have a copy of the return to review within 2 weeks, but we can't start the process until we know that we have everything. So if there's one takeaway from watching this video, I hope it's at least understanding the need in the beginning to overcommunicate with your accountant. Don't just assume your tax return has been started. Because they might be emailing you information or requests for information that you're not seeing, or you thought you sent everything, and so the emails get ignored. I know this. We send a lot of emails out, and we know they get ignored based on when the client asks us questions. It clearly means they didn't read our emails. I get it, whatever. We're busy. We're juggling— you're juggling your business. We're trying to help you. I get it. But overcommunicate. That's the best way, especially as you create a new relationship with the accountant. This will help you understand how they work. And as you get the list of things that you consistently need year over year, it becomes smoother and smoother. Now, to save you a Google search of what you actually need to send your accountant, we do have a straightforward list that We have created. The link is in the description below. Now, it's not an all-inclusive list, but we think it's pretty good. And so go ahead and download it. That's going to save you some time and give you kind of an action item list of things to consider that you should be sending to your accountant. So download the list, and obviously not all of it's going to apply to you, so Find the documents that are relevant to your situation, get those to your accountant, and that'll get the ball rolling on getting your tax returns completed. Now remember, even in times of stress, taking time to do this will alleviate some of your stress, because once us as accountants have the information, you're good. We'll do the rest, and then we'll get you a copy of what we've done so that you can review it. Before it's finalized. Most accountants are going to work the same in that regard. Their timing might not be as great as ours. Sometimes you're waiting months and months and months, and they rely on you to ask them if the return's done before they tell you, oh, we're still missing information. But most will still send you a copy before the return actually gets filed. And remember, the IRS is out to get you. They suck. They suck.
