How to Become Your Tax Preparer’s New Best Client
Many small business owners undervalue the importance of a tax expert, but your business can work much better with the help of a tax preparer. A tax preparer gives you peace of mind to work on what matters. You also have the certainty that your taxes are in order and you are making the most deductions.
As the name suggests, a tax preparer prepares your taxes. Even though you may think that you only need them during tax season, your business will benefit the most if you have a permanent bookkeeper who organizes your bills and income and helps you plan ahead for taxes and payments.
What Does a Tax Preparer Do?
Your tax preparer assembles all of your tax filings by the set deadline. Because of their knowledge of tax laws, your tax preparer can quickly review your income statements alongside your personal and business expenses to determine what tax deductions or credits you are eligible for. Furthermore, tax preparers can look at past and present tax returns to advise on lowering your tax liability going forward.
Throughout the process, a tax preparer will likely do any of the following tasks:
- Collect financial data and compile it
- Calculate tax credits, liabilities, and deductions
- Complete all necessary annual tax forms
- Ensure all tax filings comply with federal and state tax laws and regulations
- Prepare reports and review for possible errors
- Offer advice around smart tax strategies
When it comes to small business tax preparers, these individuals typically work alongside your company accountant or bookkeeper. These individuals, along with payroll specialists, often compile their monthly statements and reports so the tax preparer has the most accurate information.
Become Your Tax Preparer’s Favorite Client
Your tax preparer is very busy during tax season. If you show up at the last moment with incomplete records or inaccurate reports, your tax preparer may struggle to properly prepare your taxes. However, there are things you can do to partner with your tax preparer in a way that sets you both up for success.
Maintain Your Books All Year
When you file taxes, the IRS will want to inspect all aspects of your small business finances to ensure that you are running your business correctly and paying all of the correct taxes. This type of in-depth glance at your business finances requires well-maintained bookkeeping throughout the entire year. Adequate tax planning is downright crucial, especially for small businesses, because one misstep could cost your company thousands of dollars in fines or tax penalties.
There’s no way you can prepare an entire year’s worth of income and expense reports, payroll documents, and other paperwork in the month or two before taxes are due, nor should you try to do this. If you find that managing the books is too much for you to do, you may want to hire an outsourced bookkeeping company like Remote Quality Bookkeeping.
When you work with us, we make sure all of your bookkeeping is done right. We make sure your books look seamless, and we track all of your financial metrics for you all year long.
Meticulous records throughout the year mean that you won’t run into any problems while filing your taxes. With our help throughout the year, you will be ready to file your taxes and make use of any favorable tax deductions that can benefit your business. What’s more, your tax preparer will be thrilled with the minimal effort required on their part to wrap up your tax preparations.
Organize Your Documents
Tax preparers always appreciate clients who are organized. While maintaining your books throughout the year is critical for tax preparation, organizing all of the individual documents needed for tax filing goes a long way, too.
There’s nothing worse than handing a tax preparer your documents only for them to come back and tell you all the things you’re missing. If you can, keep all business expense receipts and store them digitally into folders based on the type of expense or by month. Other documents, like payroll reports, bank statements, P&L reports, monthly accounting ledgers, charitable donations, and any other relevant information should be organized based on the type of document, and should have as much information as possible.
Maintaining well-organized documentation helps your tax preparer work quickly and efficiently, not to mention it ensures your taxes are filed on time. If you aren’t sure what documents your tax preparer needs, reach out to them well before your appointment and ask. Many professionals have checklists they can provide, and this makes it easier for you to double check that you have all the necessary documents organized in a way that the tax preparer will understand.
Ask Questions
Sometimes one of the worst things you can do as a small business leader is sit back and not remain actively involved in the books. Although you don’t need to be the one reconciling income and expenses or filing your taxes each year, you should remain a part of the team. Sometimes, this means you may have questions along the way that you’d like answered. So, ask away!
Remote Quality Bookkeeping is always happy to help with any questions you have about our bookkeeping, accounting, and payroll processes. Similarly, your tax preparer would rather answer your questions now than file something incorrectly later this spring. It’s always better to get clarification on processes and documents than provide inaccurate information.
When you ask your tax preparer questions, it shows that you are invested in making their job easier. You want to understand everything so you can handle as many steps of the process each year going forward. You can also relay any information your tax preparer provides to your bookkeeper so they can make any changes to their processes along the way. All of this makes the tax filing process streamlined and hassle free.
Keep Up With The Payroll Forms
Payroll can be confusing. Thankfully, our Remote Quality Bookkeeping accountants, tax preparers, and bookkeepers have the necessary skills, tools, software, and knowledge to take care of your payroll in a professional and timely manner.
Once we start managing your payroll, you know that all filing is in order and you won’t miss deadlines or pay fines. We organize and oversee paychecks, deposits, payroll reports, and 1099 forms for freelancers and independent contractors and send all necessary forms to the IRS.
Business owners then have a clear picture of payroll expenses and we can even provide them with weekly reports. This helps businesses estimate their expenses and better manage their cash flow.
When we work with you on your payroll, your CPA will find tax filing at the end of the year easy and straightforward. You also benefit from knowing throughout the year how much you are spending on payroll and how your final tax payment is shaping up.
You Manage Your Business, We Manage Your Bookkeeping
The best way for you to focus on your business is to assign your bookkeeping needs to Remote Quality Bookkeeping. As a professional outsourced bookkeeping and payroll services company, we provide cost-effective, efficient, and accurate bookkeeping services for small businesses and franchisees throughout the United States. Become our new best client and benefit from professional financial and accounting advice.
We offer outsourced bookkeeping and payroll service, forensic accounting, and franchise bookkeeping. More importantly, we offer peace of mind and a daily financial view of where your company is heading. We can help you determine how you can expand and how to manage your income and expenses to maximize the benefits for your business.
At the end of each financial year, we will hand you a clear report on profit and loss, balance sheet, and inflows and outflows. This data is also available in real time on our secure servers. This way, you can keep a tab on separate clients and get an overall picture of how your business is performing.
In addition, if you have a franchise, we can assist your franchisees with their bookkeeping and help your franchise expand. With the right tools, we can deliver comparative reports for you to better understand how your franchise is doing and which branches are outperforming their competitors.
You can be your tax preparer’s new best friend by trusting Remote Quality Bookkeeping with your bookkeeping and accounting. We take care of invoices, bills, payroll, and reports, thus letting you work on your business. We help all businesses focus on their core strengths by trusting us to work on ours.
Start your free trial, request a free quote, or schedule a free demonstration and see why businesses trust us with their books!
