Groundbreaking: McFarland-CPA’s new Tax Organizer—Coming Soon!

 

Tax Organizer Coming Soon!

We are working feverishly on the Tax Organizer!


Like our attempt at a clickbait-style headline?

As part of McFarland-CPA’s ongoing commitment to delivering the best value, in the quickest way, at a cutting edge price, we are putting the finishing touches on our online tax organizer.  Most tax pros employ only one of the few options available for working with clients and price their services accordingly. We have striven to take the best aspects of each of these and synthesize them into a new way of doing business.

What are the options:

  • An in-office, face-to-face interview
  • An online file upload with follow up interactions via voice, email, or, rarely, online chat
  • Email a form (most common) and hope clients will fill it out prior to an appointment to drop off the resulting packet

Each of these alone has pros and cons and we’ll touch on the major points of each. For the first option, the most expensive one, this is like getting your hair done. It’s a custom job and takes up a lot of the pros time. You should expect to pay a lot for this approach if you are dealing with a trained professional. H&R Block and many other store-front franchise operations drop you in a cubicle to be interviewed by an entry-level staffer following a set script. That approach saves on costs but obviously you’ll lose the benefit of years of experience and training. Also, you should expect a lot of back and forth, which many people find frustrating, in order to develop a complete set of information for your return.

In the second option, the one followed by the early adventurers wandering out into the wilds of the internet, you could expect, and should still expect, a lot of back and forth. There was, and is, almost no way to make that work without the structure of the third option.

The tax organizer questionnaire is the solution to the unstructured problem of option two and is really the script for the entry level folks in some implementations of option one (remember H&R Block?). This option forces you to look through a sixteen page questionnaire (yep, we printed out the one the AICPA provides tax practitioners and it was 16 pages long) selecting what applies and what doesn’t. It’s a one-size-fits-all tool.

Our approach, which keeps costs to a minimum while providing a full CPA review of your situation, is a hybrid of all of these that allows us to start together on your adventure with tax-advantaged wealth accumulation and financial independence. We use an online tax organizer engineered to guide you through only the relevant parts of the organizer. In this way, we are similar to tax software. The information you provide through the organizer will be evaluated for reasonableness and probable completeness and then we’ll prepare the correct forms for you. Some items have multiple options and we have the experience to think through those and come up with the best solution for you. Software just doesn’t do that (unless you believe that Watson is actually evaluating your tax return using fuzzy logic).

We anticipate sending you the link to the online organizer later this week which will put us all in an excellent position in the countdown to April 17 (that’s the filing deadline for this year without an extension). If you want your return prepared and submitted later in the year, the organizer will provide you that option.

As always, we, the members of McFarland-CPA, want to express our gratitude for your patronage and can’t wait to get started on this journey with you! We think you will be much better off for having known us as the years go by and are thankful for the opportunity of serving your financial needs.