Abby Normal

...check your Sch A carefully. I just found bogus tax paid to DC with the 2014 return on the state tax screen, because of that unnecessary requirement to have the other state present in 2014. I sure hope ATX fired the programmer who made that totally unnecessary change in 2014.

You may be missing distributions. The point of doing the balance sheet is to ensure you haven't missed anything. I have clients like this who don't use accounting software. I make them give me a proof of cash for the year, with each month in a separate column. And I prefer to have all the bank statements too.

Origination fees have to be calculated as a % of the loan amount to qualify as points, but fortunately, I've never seen one that isn't. Points The term “points” is used to describe certain charges paid, or treated as paid, by a borrower to obtain a home mortgage. Points also may be called loan origination fees, maximum loan charges, loan discount, or discount points. A borrower is treated as paying any points that a home seller pays for the borrower's mortgage. See Points paid by the seller , later. General rule. You cannot deduct the full amount of points in the year paid. They are prepaid interest, so you generally must deduct them over the life (term) of the mortgage. Exception. You can deduct the full amount of points in the year paid if you meet all the following tests. Your loan is secured by your main home. (Generally, your main home is the one you live in most of the time.) Paying points is an established business practice in the area where the loan was made. The points paid were not more than the points generally charged in that area. You use the cash method of accounting. This means you report income in the year you receive it and deduct expenses in the year you pay them. Most individuals use this method. The points were not paid in place of amounts that ordinarily are stated separately on the settlement statement, such as appraisal fees, inspection fees, title fees, attorney fees, and property taxes. The funds you provided at or before closing, plus any points the seller paid, were at least as much as the points charged. The funds you provided are not required to have been applied to the points. They can include a down payment, an escrow deposit, earnest money, and other funds you paid at or before closing for any purpose. You cannot have borrowed these funds. You use your loan to buy or build your main home. The points were computed as a percentage of the principal amount of the mortgage. The amount is clearly shown on the settlement statement (such as the Uniform Settlement Statement, Form HUD-1) as points charged for the mortgage. The points may be shown as paid from either your funds or the seller's. https://www.irs.gov/publications/p530/ar02.html#en_US_2015_publink100011857

To ensure an EFIN is not compromised, the IRS said preparers should check their EFIN status page within their e-file application comparing their records to the returns filed to help protect their EFIN. To do this, log into the e-file application through e-services and make sure the summary of the volume and activity of the returns e-filed in the last two years matches the preparer’s own records. I just did this but I had never done it before. All looked fine!

There was also a 2013 update that they had to pull and reissue. In fairness, 2014 and 2015 (so far) have not had any update issues.

If running 2014 Admin Console does not start the 2014 server service, press WinKey+R (for run) then type services.msc and press enter. Find ATX 2014 Service (or whatever year you're looking for) and if it's not running, right click it and chose Start. I bring up Task Manager every morning to make sure all my ATX Servers are running.

I've always mailed out the 8283 and gotten it signed. I believe it's required.

This is copied from the slides of a CPE course I took. Shared Responsibility Payment Penalty Is the Lesser of: Sum of the monthly penalty amounts, or Average cost of bronze level insurance. Monthly Penalty Amounts Are Greater of: The applicable flat dollar amounts, or A % of the family unit’s combined MAGI in excess of their filing threshold for the year divided by 12 Flat Dollar Amount Penalty Is Lesser of: The sum of the monthly amounts for members of the family from the table below, or 300% of the per adult penalty. Flat dollar amounts (annual) Year 2014 2015 2016 Adult: $95.00 $325.00 $695.00 under 18: $47.50 $162.50 $347.50 Percentage of Income Rates: 1.0% 2.0% 2.5% I think the annual flat dollar amount cap of $325 per adult will apply for most singles. Families will vary a lot more.

Yes tax season is compressed for most of our clients now into 4-6 weeks, solely due to qualified dividends. I'd like to string up the fool who invented that concept. We don't transmit any returns with brokerage accounts until 4/7 unless the 1099 says it's final or it's a very simple account. They all sit in purgatory. We still get corrected 1099s during the summer, but they rarely make much difference.

Should make for a very interesting year.

They all let you add folders and file types, but some block you from adding specific folders like c:\Windows or C:\Program Data because the designers deem these to be system folders that are unnecessary to backup. I prefer a backup solution that doesn't put such restrictions on me.

http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2016/02/09/maryland-comptrollerfranchot-cuts-off-returns-from.html

Upload one of your PDFs here and I'll remove the password without knowing what it is, then you tell me if it's safe. Yes, the PDF will probably not be intercepted by nefarious crooks, but if the client's email can be accessed by someone else, their data is exposed.

Firefox has a 64 bit version, too.

iDrive is a blast from the past. Didn't realize it had become an encrypted backup system. Nice!

I used Carbonite for over 10 years. I know how it works. Yes, you can add some folders but you cannot add all. And, unfortunately for ATX users, you cannot add the Program Data folder. I called them two years ago and that sealed my decision to find a new backup company. The other main reason I left them is that frequently changed files, like ATX data files, only get backed up once a day. So you start on a return and the first time you save it, Carbonite backs it up. The second time you save it, Carbonite says, whoa this is a frequently changed file, and it marks it to be backed up next 24 hours after your first save. That's not good enough of for me. I don't like to go home at night until I'm sure all my work has been or will be backed up shortly. That never happened with Carbonite. CrashPlan defaults to backing up every 15 minutes, but I found that to be too much, so I set it to 1 hour. We're basically always backed up. I haven't felt the need to back up internally to a network drive, but I haven't ruled it out. You can't have too many or too frequent backups. In ATX, I like to backup a return I'm working on every 30 minutes at the most.

Thanks, I was more curious than anything else. I'm sure I'll have a new computer with a 1TB SSD before I come close to running out of room on my existing SSD. But it would be useful for those using Carbonite (Switch to CrashPlan! You won't regret it.) to have their backups in a folder that Carbonite will backup.

And make sure you use line 11 on Sch A for the mortgage interest and enter the mom's name and address in section 2.

I do all my H/W LLC rentals on Sch E. Any IRS agent with half a brain knows there is nothing for the IRS to gain by forcing them to do a 1065. And the penalty removal is automatic. I'm not worried.

So do you use ATX backup and change the location to your desktop folder (bad idea by the way) and to a thumb drive, or do you just copy the ATX Backup folder to your desktop and thumb drive? I just tried a thumb drive backup this morning out of curiosity and I selected 54 returns but it was taking so long I had to kill it. It only got to 2.

ATX creates an internal backups, as do many other programs. Of course you need to external backup all your data, internal backups and other important files. You'd be crazy not to. I just wanted to know if anybody had changed file locations and if they'd had any problems. It sounds like no one here has.

My concern is diskspace. My main drive is a 500GB SSD that's about 40% full. My D drive is 1.3TB and that's where I have my data for almost every other program. ATX takes up quite a few GBs every year so I'd prefer to move the data and the backup on my D drive, where I have much more space.

10 replies in and I still don't any answers.

But can you pronounce it properly?

I left Carbonite because it could NOT back the Program Data folder because they dubbed it a system folder. It was hard coded into their software. Also, I had several problems with Carbonite that they were not willing to fix, much less acknowledge. Agree wholeheartedly that the first rule of backup is to do a restore. The second rule is to check what is actually being backed up. CrashPlanPro is the best backup software I've found.