All Activity

You can take the class for credit at the link provided. Since Tax Practice Pro is using this as an online offering, I do not think it would be appropriate for me to giving it out on my own to anyone.

This year's addition of bulk 1040 extensions was a huge timesaver, too.

Yes, the macros are a fabulous tool. Highly recommended.

Thank you for all your hard work for us!

Not questioning the settlement per se, but rather if there is something IN the settlement where, for example, his larger share of investments was designated as because she was getting the house. If there is wording specifically stating the house as his reason for getting more investments, that could be a de facto purchase of his part of the house, increasing her basis. TIA to all for answers; I'm just going to tell her she gets to exclude $250k, their joint basis from purchase, plus any major upgrades done while they/she owned the house.

Dad got back to me; situation is different from what I understood from grandfather. BB Yacht Club scholarship (even though check was written by BB Church). Family is NOT members of the Yacht Club. Offered annually to all graduating seniors in the DEHS Band. Essay contest with 3 prizes in the form of a check. My client won 1st place of $5,000. Check was made out to him personally with the memo " A BB Yacht Club Member's Name Scholarship." (Member wanted to support HS music.) No other paperwork. No mention, verbal or written, on a restriction on the use of funds. Knowing this family, though, it was no surprise that they worked the DD Tech to split the funds between 1st and 2nd semesters, applied to student's account via cashier's check. Dad did keep photos documenting all the process, if I need them. I think dad is saying the funds were used for tuition.

It was called a scholarship but was paid to the student for whatever he wanted. The student has no relationship to the specific scholarship/person whose name in on the scholarship. However, the student attends the church that has the scholarship fund; only church members received scholarships. Grandfather hires me to prepare his grandkids tax returns; he's an investment banker and has invested monies for them since they were born. I talk to the dad once/year to get his return info for Kiddie Tax on his kids' returns. I'll check with dad/church member, but grandfather thinks there was no application nor essay or anything. Grandfather thinks what ever committee at that church just picks a few recipients out of their HS graduates. I'm trying to confirm or get details from dad. Prizes & Awards and taxable? Gift and not taxable?

Sounds great.

A few things I had done some country blocking with .htaccss on the old server, but never felt confident that I had a complete list of IP ranges The new server is running nginx, so no .htaccess Cloudflare keeps the traffic from even seeing the website, since they manage DNS and issue the challenge before a request to the server is made Aside from the country blocking, they're doing other bot detection magic, plus I'm adding custom web application firewall rules that are specific to the forum app. I'm a fan of doing as much of this as possible at the proxy, but I also have nginx rules set up for anything that gets through.

I tested cloudflare. Did not offer me anything I could not get from htaccess country allow. Still plenty of bots in the us which is why I added the ip testing service.

I switched and have had no issues that couldn't be resolved with a quick phone call. I did the practice returns when I first tried it and by the time tax season started for the most part I was up and running at about the same speed as ATX. It just gets a little getting use to, but overall I am very pleased.

How did the Trust determine who the $5,000 would be awarded to? Any relationship between the student and the trust? Did the scholarship specify what the money could be used for?

I'm using CloudFlare to manage DNS and as a proxy in front of the site. If I set up the rules to block traffic from outside of the US at that level, they won't even hit the web server. My only worry is that if a forum member is blocked for some reason, they're not going to have any way to let me know they can't get in. Since enabling the captcha 30 minutes ago (click the checkbox to prove you're not a robot), out of 910 challenges only 4 were solved. It may not be necessary to block the traffic completely if the challenge is effective against the type of traffic I'm trying to prevent.

Avoids issues with not meeting the EU cookie type warnings. I block my site from non desired countries for the same reason. I also use a bot/vpn/proxy testing service too. It really cuts down on the non desired access. In my case, especially for blocking access to my order form from those who use VPN to try to test card numbers (almost always actually outside the US, but using a VPN). If you are interested in what I do, send me a direct email.

I've just set up rules to issue a captcha challenge for any visitor not from the US or Canada to help with the bots and spammers. I'm interested to know if anyone on the forums gets caught up in those--if not, I may block traffic from outside North America entirely. I wouldn't normally do something like that, but this is a very US-specific site. Can anyone think of a reason not to?

You are welcome! I ironed out and documented the process yesterday, and everything went smoothly this morning.

Wow! Quick work, Eric. We appreciate your knowledge and hard work to make this move and to continue to monitor it for us. Thank you!!

Alright, everything is moved and at first glance, things appear to be working normally. A lot has changed behind the scenes--more than I'd normally like to change all at once, so please report any issues or broken features you encounter.

College student received a $5,000 check written to him from XXX Church Trust with YYY Scholarship in the memo. Taxable? Other Income? Kiddie Tax?

Hi folks, The server move I mentioned last month will begin soon: You'll know it's in progress when the forum is replaced with a static message, and you'll know it's back up when the message is gone and there's an update on this post. I've done a trial run of the migration and although it went smoothly, I expect a few bumps over the coming weeks as it starts getting real traffic. Thank you for your patience!

I agree with virtually everything stated so far in this thread. I too switched to Drake in 2012 and never looked back. It takes a little getting used to because it isn’t forms-based, but forms based software is way over-rated (especially since forms-based software still relies upon worksheets to a significant degree). Drake is great software and it still amazes me how stingy Drake is with memory. Startup is rapid, operationally it’s nimble, and backups are lighting fast. One hint if you switch to Drake. As soon as you get comfortable using it, spend some time learning how to construct “macros”. You can use them to design a lot of customization to automate numerous repetitive and routine tasks.

Good luck with that. I have a gal, have had her for years, and she is just a delight to work with.

Thank you to all who responded. The OP talked the client into claiming an office of 600 sq. ft in an 1800 sq ft. house, so the business use is 33.3% I asked the client if he could justify regular and exclusive use of his entire basement for use in administering the farm operations and he responded "of course not!" I think I can talk him into amending the office to a more reasonable 250 sq. ft, in which case we can amend both returns and still leave the 401-K payment intact since we will also reduce the other expenses for the office from 33.3% to 14%. Ringers