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This year I asked my chronically late filers to have their paperwork to me by Aug. 31st. Amazingly, most of them have complied. I have two clients who just seem never to be able to get it together until October and then it's a real struggle for me. I just fired one of them and am waiting for a return call from the other and I want them to go elsewhere too. Do you ever fire clients who habitually wait until the very last minute? There is no fee high enough to compensate for the grinding frustration. Or, maybe I'm just getting crankier in my old age....

Yes, I have fired clients, well, only two, who were like this. As you noted, it isn't worth it to you or me to care more about their returns than they do. Recently I have been going on dive trips in the fall so have a much earlier deadline which has been honored. And I build in plenty of time for me to complete the work. About a month out I remind those stragglers that I will be out of the country so they should start looking around for someone else. This year, no stragglers! Well, there are the new clients, one now in Berlin never having filed but we are almost caught up from 2011 and another new one who has to wait until Oct. 6 to meet the physical presence test. But her returns are actually finished. Cranky is okay!

ATX programs have always been a major resource hog. When the ATX program is installed, it sets up 4 different database servers on both standalone and networked systems. IMHO the program starts and tries to access the servers before the servers have spun up which generates the error messages, which is just bad programming. Earlier this year when I would get this message, I would wait a minute and it would always start up on the second try. Since I have installed a SSD hard drive on my Win 7 Pro 64 bit system with 6 Gigs of Ram, this error has not happened. By the way, since I have installed the SSD, my system is ready to go from a cold boot in less than 1 Minute.