Abby Normal

Yikes! A Personal Holding Company? Haven't had to think about that in years. https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2020/jul/beware-personal-holding-company-tax.html

Speaking of marriage and husbands...

And sidewalks, driveways, fences, etc. are land improvements depreciated over 15 years. Of course, valuing those would be difficult without a cost segregaton study and that may not be worth it for these properties.

I signed up for an id.me account yesterday and it was quick and easy, and kinda cool. Of course, I have a smartphone. I've had one for 20 years and would be lost without it. Id.me is a universal login for federal sites. I'll use it for eservices and ssa.gov mostly.

The repair regs did open up a lot of things to being expensed, but there isn't quite enough info to decide. Here's a related article: https://www.thetaxadviser.com/newsletters/2021/apr/expensing-hvac-costs.html Here's the pertinent IRS page: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/tangible-property-final-regulations

ATX's price is what attracts most people, but if you do multistate, you'll want to buy the Advantage version. ATX handles multistate corporations and partnerships very well. Like most here, I've used 7 different programs over the years (including Drake and Intuit), but I'm the fastest with ATX. I can really fly around a return. Until the only return is I need to do is my own, I'm sticking with ATX.

The only accident I ever had was on the day after tax season ended, so I tried not to drive anywhere on that day.

The one account that always makes me facepalm is 'Reimbursements.' "We were just reimbursing our employees for things."

Yeah, I've seen some over the years. The ones I hate are the ones that keep adding new accounts. I had one that set up new accounts with the year in the name. Serioulsy? We already have dates in the general ledger.

I hate doing tax returns without reconciled bank statements and balanced books. There's close to zero chance that the return is correct.

If you're using depreciation and not ever choosing mileage, just enter the expenses directly on Sch C in other expenses.

The tax is the only number that matters. What you've paid and what you owe are not a consideration.

One of my customizations of the 4868 in ATX is to link the prior year tax from the Comparison form to the 4868. I figure last year's tax is better than a zero, especially if I have no documents from the client. Programmers should add an option to the 4868 to use last year's tax rounded up to the next thousand, to make our lives easier.

The error says the tax period is wrong. Did you mark short year initial return? What dates did you enter? I'm guessing you did not check one of the boxes for initial return?

I used ChatGPT's free version to ask some tax questions and the results were very good. All our tax research will be AI driven fairly soon, and personally, I've been waiting for this my entire career.

With web mail it does (I think). Sure if you're using Outlook or Tbird, deleting an email from your computer won't remove it from the server where your email actually lives.

The gain is less than the depreciation so it all has to be taken this year. Doing an installment sale will not help.

Because programmers don't prepare taxes for a living, so they don't truly understand our processes. I've complained about these kinds of things on extensions for years, with both ATX and the last tax software I used.

Efile attachments are no big deal. Just keep them under 1 MB. Larger attachments can prevent efiling, especially if you have slower internet.

Or PA, NJ or NY. But yeah, Ohio is the worst. My first Ohio was a part-year moved to MD. I ended up doing 4 separate OH returns.

You delete both the sent email and the received email so the jpeg isn't sitting on some server out there forever. If you get a Google voice number, the text will go right to your computer with no need to email it to yourself.

Disk images are your friend. You should set up a task to image your disk every night, and keep as many images as you can store.

When all else fails, just type whatever you want in the letter. Just don't save it for all future returns.

Using those input forms is very inefficient. Just put it where you know it goes. The only 1099 input forms you need to use are INT, DIV, B, and R.

You could always sign them after the IRS contacts you, which after your clean audit, they probably won't ever audit you again.