Abby Normal

If it's all investment income, you can often ignore the state if the bene doesn't live there. But states are all different. My philosophy is, don't file the state, and if no one screams, it's all good!

The check will be cashed because banks process those. That's why it's mailed to a PO box.

No Caller ID?! We can see the last 50 incoming calls and dial those numbers with the push of a button. What I HATE is when they call me on one number but want me to call back on a different number. I always call them back on the number the called me from first, for MY convenience.

Copious notes in ATX is the only way I remember most of these things and also how I pass on what I've learned so my employees are better/faster next year. Always be learning, always be improving, always look for ways to save time and aggravation.

Now you're the hero!

Yes, I have a few of those. Eventually I found the FECWKST and could stop putting it on line 21. Mine aren't taxable in the other country, though. Or so I'm told.

We've asked for an option to choose the number of columns and have a difference column because 99.99% of the time, we're just projection next year. Would have been wonderful this year to just have 2 columns with a difference column and lots of white space to type notes. Oh, well. Getting rid of the zeros gave me space to type my notes.

...on the Planner form if I had the preference to print without zeros checked.

I'm going to shoot from the hip and say you're ok to do that because he had constructive receipt of the money and gave it to the other bene. I'd advise him to actually take the distribution next time and write a personal check for the gift. And I'd have him file a gift tax return this time if it's over the limit.

My eyes burn occasionally. I put an ice pack on them and/or put my face in front of the office vaporizer. We run the vaporizer most of the winter because it gets so dry and to avoid static electricity.

I told him if he gets any more 1099s, just throw them away.

New client this year had 22 forms 8283 last year, and the icing on the cake is the description fields are jam packed with quantities and detailed descriptions. It must have taken hours. 90% of our descriptions are "household & clothing".

Not sure how you're backing up to two places, unless you mean exporting, but that's a manual operation. You can go into Admin Console and change the backup folder to your docs, but at this point, you'd have to move all the previous backups to the new backup location manually. But the once every 24 hours backup for tax return files should be your bigger concern. With CrashPlan (and perhaps other backup plans), it back up files as often as you choose. I have it set for every 2 hours, and before I go home, I manually trigger a backup.

I meant to give everyone the annual warning to turn off auto updates for windows. New updates always come out the 2nd Tuesday of every month. Sorry! All my fault. Unless you're on win10, then it's M$'s fault.

Carbonite does not backup the default folders that ATX uses for both data AND backups, so if you're using ATX, move your backup folder to a location that Carbonite does back up. Also, Carbonite only backs up frequently changed files (like tax returns) once every 24 hours. This is why I left them for CrashPlan.

We usually hold broker statement clients to about now, but this guy was in FL and just got back to a stack of mail. But he's one of my longest, best clients and he absolutely loves me... and his wife just died.... so I didn't bill him for a redo.

Maybe the 1041 won't allow 2% deductions next year, and my plan will fall to pieces. CPE gonna be intrestin' this summer!

I enter them on the 1099DIV and ATX puts them on the 2% line... where they belong.

I like trusts anyway because you're getting all the deductions into AGI. Put the house in the trust and deduct the real estate taxes too.

My invoices just have one line '20xx federal and state tax returns' but my job sheet has a line for assembly and efiling and clerical, etc. The amount for each of those varies by the client.

Nope. 4/16 at 6pm and it's a half hour away from my office. Plan to eat some snack type food as dinner while driving down to count as my dinner break. Still, that's at least one return that won't get done unless I can rally and work an hour later than normal that night.

Sometimes the programmers try to do too much for us, and we'd be better off if they didn't.

So I agreed to be on my friend's liquor license (in exchange for booze) for a few months so they didn't have to close their doors. Guess when the meeting is with the liquor board. Go on. I'll wait.

I was with a client and had left my phone in the mode where it reads incoming texts. A friend replied to text and dropped the F bomb. I thought it was hilarious. The client didn't react so I just let it be. But you know how half the time you can't understand the voice, well, they say the F word really clearly, believe me.