FreedomTaxed

Why? In my anecdotal world, I'm seeing younger people willing to take on small companies, but the capital to achieve transfer of ownership is almost totally absent. Hence we see small business after small business just folding up like origami, since the owners got too old and there's nobody to take over. The current owner of my shop has mentioned wanting to buy out competitors; not the majors, like HRB, Liberty and JH, just strip-mall shops like our own. That seems a viable approach since the capital-sized bite for us is small enough to handle.

Good. Some stability there.

After reading this thread and thinking it through, making the PDFs at the time of Completed, is a very good decision, and server space isn't an issue. I mentioned 'forensics' since I've now spent nearly 2 years at this job, struggling to piece together WHAT happened, WHO did it, and HOW to fix the problem it invariably created... for an agency with online records going back to 1998. But almost nothing was appropriately tracked. Almost nothing was documented, for sane definitions of "documented". Jack would come in here and fire all of us, even me, if he had ever seen this mess. And yet... I must move forward. I have to fix all the problems of previous years, and learn from the mistakes of each tax season (which I now have total control over), so that the next tax season is better. One thing I definitely want to get away from is the implied administrative policy of 'throwaway' tax preparers. Naturally it's hard to find a person who's only available to work for 3-1/2 months of the year. Part of my managerial aim is to find year-round work for these people; for a non-CPA, this is really impossible. We've retained a seasoned client who is willing to sales- and head-hunt for us. But the core issue is that it's hard to find people who are worthwhile, who will keep coming back into this company. Just today I had to deal with the possibility that one of our experienced preparers is actively dodging ACA and Sch.C/E/F training. We need this guy for the tax season, but if refuses to train (using a variety of excuses, like he'll call a CPA friend on the phone when he needs help during an appointment), then I'll have to give his seat to somebody else. All of a sudden, with 5-7 tax preparers, you start to realize that you're more beholden to them, than they are to you; one person gets sick, another's kids get sick, and you have a serious hole in your appointment schedule. The solution is to overhire, but since I'm not the company owner, that's been deemed an unnecessary expense. So that's out. I guess I shouldn't turn this into a company-rant thread. But you can see what I mean about forensics and administrative policies.

We just accomplished the two-monitor setup this year for most tax preparer desks. Aside from 2012 which was only partially done, making PDF scans of documents is also only setup for this year. Scheduling was only put on software last year. ATX login permissions were just done this year, then retro-fitted to previous years. Heck, keeping centralized track of client payments is only being done this year for the first time (since tax preparers set prices and collected payments personally in all prior years; total chaos). We're a paper shop with an e-file and ATX veneer that was running on inertia. So any change I make that is in a positive direction, is what works for me. This year, we'll have to rely on the Completed flag. Pulling this company into the 21st Century isn't over.

It's too bad that this sort of thing happens constantly, so that the good advice comes only after the event it was designed to soften. When I was 33, I only had a will, which had been made as a matter of course while I was in the military. Even today, it's the same will, but the circumstances under which it would be executed, have definitely changed. Yet I haven't changed it. On top of that, I have significantly more property, and I have concerns about the possibilities of end-of-life circumstances which involve a living will. For example, I've seen hospice care in action, and I'm certain that I want nothing to do with that. I keep telling myself "I'll take care of those this year" but that never ends up happening, year after year.

I look at our $15000 equipment investment as a 5-yr plan. We have to get at least 4 years out of the deal; 5 is the target; so if we get 6 or more, it's a gift. Our previous installed base of computers was about 4-5 years old. Ultimately we're looking at an equipment cost of about $2 per client per year. Our ATX purchase price is about the same. So the hardware and software place a paltry cost upon each client. (I worry about preparer wages and bonuses instead.)

Well, this is interesting. I know about the "Completed" flag. We're making use of those now, as we go back and cleanup the years of database sloppiness. However, that Completed flag is only a couple of years old. Printing to PDF upon completion is a good idea. It's better to have some backup like that, than nothing but hope. I'll go over that with our senior preparer. The other advantage to that method is that our admin people won't even have to open the ATX program to produce another client copy; the disadvantage is the print step could be missed, creating yet another labor sink during "clean up" season (April 16th to 30th).

Well, I feel like a "n00b" about this, but it's becoming an issue in our office. I've been thinking of emailing CCH to ask if there's a utility that you can use that allows a user on our network to look at all aspects of a client's tax returns from any particular year, but which denies the user the ability to change those tax returns. In other words, I need ATX's user interface, but the data it looks at is set to "read-only". We're getting problems with tax preparers across the board who simply have twitchy fingers and bad practices. They open a tax return in a previous year's ATX (say, Dwight and Sandra Jones from 2009) and then after examining the return they make an accidental change or click "Save" when closing it. The accidental change could be the depreciation calculation, or it could be not noticing they hit the keypad on their keyboard and it put a string of number digits in the 1040 first name field. At the very least, the client return for that tax year is marked with a new date of last change, which also messes up our company administrative forensics (aka "what the heck happened there?"). Yelling at people is a bad way to enforce this level of security. And our use of the "Completed" flag only goes so far, in previous years. So, restricting the user permissions that way doesn't work as it should. This year, in our physical training program as conducted in our office at our desks, I'm seeing trainees who are dipping into previous years and I just don't know what they're doing. The trainer's been alerted to these things and we dealt with the issue in class, but as I said, yelling at people is a bad security system. I need something better, like a utility that pulls out a single client's tax return from a single year and just displays it (with our without access to active worksheets).

It's distressing that HRB is looking to grow their way out of their problems. I know I'm asking for it, but even given that HRB, LTS and JH aren't exactly my competitors, they really need to drop their prices since that's the real direction where the industry must head. HRB needs to find ways to do the same tax returns for a lesser cost, just for starters, since their quarterly losses demand that. But if they can't even drop their prices, then their only option after tripping this badly is to run faster to avoid falling. And that must end badly for them, as well as their clients.

Will this alleviate the problem of the IRS suggesting the tax season will be delayed again?

ATX tech support told me the same thing, NECPA. An easy fix, but unexpected.

Thanks, Pacun. I'm sure you understand that we suffered from "penny wise, pound foolish" when it came to the computers and server. After letting ATV2014 run empty and idle on all the PCs over the weekend, I'm seeing the CCTS error message on all the PCs now. Of course, our PCs go into sleep mode, so I can easily posit that that's part of the 'problem'; I click OK on the message after waking the PC up, and it doesn't appear again... until it goes to sleep and wakes up again. I can increase the time-until-sleep in the Windows power settings so this doesn't bother me. I'd like to remind everyone here that I enjoy speaking here about ATX and that we're all friends; all brothers-in-arms against the yearly storm that crosses our desks and countertops. I keep telling our tax preparers that THEY are the skilled labor, and I'm only here to make sure the B.S. of the job is minimized so they have all the time they need to conquer the serious problems that arise in tax preparation. This forum is my B.S. shovel and I value it highly.

Oh. Thanks, Jack. I'll make some time later to get the earlier years running by calling ATX tech support. I'm a bit stressed now, what with our training schedule.

I largely agree with Jack. Let's put this issue to rest. After a disastrous tax season (two, really; 2012 and 2013), among other events, we lost at least half our clients. After logging over 4000 clients in the 2009 season, we bottomed out (hopefully) at 1400 during 2013. The 2012 and 2013 redesigns could not have happened at a worst time for our company; it was the perfect storm of hardware issues, software issues, and a huge array of personnel and policy issues, combined with two tax seasons that were delayed by the IRS. Since I was tasked to pull our company out of this swan dive, I've invested in the following: SERVER: Dell PowerEdge T320 SERVER OS: Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials WORKSTATIONS: Dell XPS 8700 ... all of which were obtained and installed by October. Total hardware expense was about $15000, with a few hundred dollars of labor for technical advice. I migrated our ATX2008 through ATX2013 files onto the new server, then made them alive on each workstation. That worked well enough, although rollover detection was random. Then I loaded ATX 2014. First on the server, then on the senior preparer's machine. I did all the updates and rollover of preparers and ERO, then I let the machine sit overnight. The next day, I made a new tax return just to try it out. Seemed OK. Then I went from PC to PC, loading up ATX2014. As you know, this is a multi-step process, where you load it from the DVD, then you start it, then select the ATX server it talks to. (In this case, the server is the file server, running Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials.) On just one machine, the last one, but no different than the rest, I had problems. When I ran ATX 2014 the first time, it detected the file server, was set to that, and then it silently crashed. After I restarted ATX 2014, 3 minutes later it gave me the "retry" message... the first I've seen of it in months. This just isn't a hardware issue. There's nothing particularly wrong with my computers and server. I think there's an instability that's in the program that's poorly understood by ATX. And I say all this by stating in addition that we have no serious desire to choose another app vendor; we're with ATX to stay. If we regain our client base due to extensive investment and advertising, then we're looking to put 2000 entries into our ATX 2014 database.

We had a failure loading ATX2007 on our new Win7Pro64 machines, and ATX tech support told us that nothing older than ATX2008 would be supported. So we gave up; our new deployment of Win7Pro64 machines (Dell XPS 8700) has ATX2008 through ATX2014 on the desktop. We'll put one of the best, but old WinXP machines back on the network, and we'll TeamView (remote control) into it when we need to check anything from those earlier years.

The vortex model is still not totally accurate. The planets only go around the Sun due to physical viewpoint; the reality is that the planets, asteroids, comets, dust, gases, and the Sun itself, all vortex around a "barycenter". Often this barycenter is within the Sun, since the Sun has 98% of our system's mass. But the Sun's path through space wiggles since it also goes around this barycenter point (which is itself wiggling). All mass effects a gravitational pull on all other mass. The planets tug on our star, just like it also tugs on them. Heck, the planets raise TIDES on the surface of the sun. It's an interesting universe. Mass warps space, and the warp of space alters how mass moves. It's beautiful.

Pay some attention to the difference in read and write speeds. The cheaper SSDs tend to have significantly lower write speeds. That's why the following SSD example is generally a better deal at $120 than ones selling for $80 to $100: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=897039&gclid=CKLA-I62yr0CFe07OgodhkIAuA&Q=&is=REG&A=details You should consider tweaking the system a bit when an SSD is installed. Windows drive operations aren't optimal for SSDs. http://www.overclock.net/t/1133897/windows-7-ssd-tweaking-guide Disclaimer: Not associated with either site. Having used ATX 2012 and 2013 on PCs with system-drive SSDs and without, for the cost of 'upgrading' to an SSD, I'd have to say it's well worth the price, even if you hire some service guy to 'make it so'. I say this because when you're wrestling with tax problems in front of clients, wait times become a factor, mostly for your results and sanity.

The bigger issue with me is that people with PTINs aren't held to any standard or accountability to any noticeable degree. In other words, if you show a clear pattern of screwing up tax returns, your PTIN should be disabled and then you'd have to physically show up at an IRS service center to account for your actions if you want it re-enabled. Why isn't that an effective means of controlling tax preparers? Why bother issuing PTINs at all?

Pardon me if I don't hold my breath on that one. This giving up in court is a real victory, true, for what really matters: What our liberties are. If you can prepare your own tax returns, then that same liberty extends to some person you pay to perform the same work. People who are screwing up or committing frauds, using that liberty, should be punished. But our government agencies are filled with desk sitters and paycheck collectors. Placing more demands on the tax preparers doesn't do anything to address that... the extra effort will be enacted by the fraudsters, and the IRS will continue to fail to police these actions. Wasn't $15 billion or so outright stolen last tax season via EIC fraud? It's just too lucrative; hence a guy doing these frauds will take the courses and still file dozens, maybe 100s, of EIC frauds, and collect that $200-$800 per return regardless. Let me put this another way: We use PTINs now, and still the frauds are rife. The IRS has had plenty of years to flex its muscle. It's clearly not doing it, and with equal clarity I can see that it won't do it in the future. About the only thing that can put this to rest is that the IRS sets an error tolerance number for each PTIN. As soon as you create 3, 5, 10 or whatever number of critical errors in one tax year, your PTIN shuts off (meaning it automatically fails in the e-file) until you show up physically at an IRS Center to answer for those errors. How difficult is that? Oh wait, that comes back to having a functional accountability system in the first place, with IRS employees that actually pursue institutional goals instead of driving desks and collecting pay. Sorry, I forgot about reality there for a second.

Seems lucrative. Are we in the wrong business? Just kidding.

It's sad to see how much of this business runs on fraud, and it's even sadder to see how little the IRS seems to do about it. What was the point, exactly, of requiring tax preparers to be registered? Outright regulation of tax preparers seems doomed to the same effective irrelevance. I asked a certain somebody today about the consequences of "hoarding" tax returns. He said if the IRS ever even noticed, they might issue a "violation". No fear in his eyes, to be sure.

Regulating tax preparers to that degree was just silly. And I'll tell you why: 1. You can prepare you own taxes anyway. 2. Despite being prepared by somebody else, you're still responsible for your own tax returns. That the IRS demanded preparers have a silly number is itself a gross imposition. Further regulation was just beyond the pale.

I know Jack's gonna kill me for remaining on Windows XP, but I did get this update to install flawlessly when I did two things: 1. I ran ATX 2013 and it pulled down the update, then prompted me to close the app to continue. 2. I pulled up the Task Manager to prepare to kill sfs.serverhost.exe process. 3. I pulled up Control Panel and THING #1: Stopped the Windows Firewall. 4. I then allowed the program to continue, and it stopped ATX 2013. 5. I quickly THING #2: Stopped the sfs.serverhost.exe process. 6. The ATX 2013 13.4.3 installer ran without a problem.

I almost had one the other day, but they grew recalcitrant once I pointed out that filing the extension didn't relieve them of the need to make estimated payments in case they owed taxes for 2013. Is there a lot of blind-filing of extensions done? I'm just trying to perform due diligence, and I didn't actually say that I wouldn't file their extension for them.

From my decades of experience in IT, Jack's advice is sound. Windows has always maintained "resources" that are hidden from the user (think of them as "lists" which get built, consulted, then destroyed) and which run low or become totally exhausted, due to how cranky the applications are. For the common user, the only practical way to recover from a low-resource state is to restart Windows. There may be ways of running utilities that act like the normal garbage-collection processes of Windows that recover some of these inefficiently-allocated resources... but like I said, for the common user, the solution is to reboot.