Catherine

Congratulation, Pacun -- and welcome to the EA club!

I pretty much charge for the time it takes; half-hour minimum charge, even for just one W-2. Plus postage if they want me to mail them directly.

Congratulations to your daughter! You are right to be very proud of her. But tell her not to do any MORE -- she'll use up her lifetime supply of all-nighter's before she's out of college - and THEN what will she do when she has kids?!?! (Ask me how I know that can happen.....)

And this one: I want to live in theory; EVERYTHING works in theory.

Most new versions of QuickBooks will update and then run a data file from an older version. If you are not giving this client her data file back (less likely, as her version way pre-dates the "accountant's copy" facility), then why bother to keep the oldest version? Try making a copy of her data file and opening the copy with a new version of QB -- worst that happens is that you ruin the copy. At best, you'll find you don't have to do computer gymnastics at the Olympic level.

There are some issues with versions older than QB 2010 on Windows 7. There is a QB support number for those issues, it is 800-574-7492. Just had to look some stuff up for a client this morning. Also see this link: QB support articel Oops; that should be article, not articel. Dylsectics untie!!

Take two minutes and 20 seconds to be amazed and amused. Hand Dancing And they manage to do this with perfectly straight faces, too. Wow. Thanks to my cousin for forwarding the link to me.

That phrasing is a thing of beauty.....

I was looking at that SendOutCards place online -- but wouldn't that come under the Section 7216 disclosure rules if you use it for existing clients?

Thank you for this reference, KC. I had a similar situation (household employee) and got myself tangled in knots in Pub 15A -- this link cleared up my confusion and now I can issue a correct W-2 for a household employee. And if anyone has a situation like this in Mass, I also checked with an expert I know at MassDOR and he confirmed that you do indeed use the Federal taxable income as the Mass taxable income. It's somewhere in Chapter 62 of MGL, but the guidelines they have on their web site have no information on employer-paid OASDI.

Never said or implied they weren't in Georgia. Just that this woman's accent (a type I did not recognize) was so thick that she was, for all intents and purposes, incomprehensible at normal speaking rates.

Welcome back to you -- and maybe to Chaz, too!

I put one up in the fall and spent some time on it and updated it a couple times in quick succession. Almost no one knows about it or sees it. I'll stick with bookkeepinghelp.com for my advertising -- almost everyone who finds me goes through them. It's less than $200 per year and they do all the search engine optimization etc.

There was a _wonderful_ cartoon in the New Yorker some time ago. Two guys in business suits; one says to the other, "These new regulations will fundamentally alter the way we get around them." PTIN's and preparer testing will just change the way the crooks do business ("It will cost you SO much more if I go through all the administrative nonsense; so you sign the return as "self-prepared" and I'll keep my fee low." - I've heard variations on that from clients about prior preparers over the years). Much better to spend time & money finding, shutting down, and jailing fraudulent preparers. But no, they put the burden on those already following the rules. Why -- because we're easy to find! And we follow the rules, and pay the fees, and properly advise the clients - and the crooks have each done five fraudulent returns while we fought with administrivia.

Isn't that the truth????? 35 years here and I am still not fully qualified to be a paid preparer. Well, there is a difference between _qualified_ and _credentialed_. After 35 years in the business, I should think/hope you are qualified! You just don't have the alphabet salad after your name.

The bigger problem is that we have nincompoops in Congress without the testicular fortitude to tell the truth about the train wreck awaiting us (or, they are too ignorant of basic economics to see it). Bernie Madoff was a rank beginner compared to the Ponzi scheme of Social Security & Medicare -- $100-plus Trillion-with-a-T of unfunded mandates and a "trust fund" that was raided for general operating expenses decades ago. When it comes to buying their way back into power by stealing the people's money to spend on pork and special interests, nothing beats a politician. And BOTH parties have been guilty. And WE have been guilty as well -- asleep at the switch, not paying enough attention, and not voting the self-serving bums out regularly. The debt, the deficit, the unfunded mandates, and the Fed monetizing that debt more every month, is a recipe for horrendous disaster. It's not enough tax receipts (NOT "revenue" which implies they somehow _earned_ it, which they did not), it's too much spending. The Federal government is only supposed to take care of the big-ticket items - defense, border control, international relations - and everything else is to be done at the state, local, and personal level. Out of control spending must STOP, now. The government must live within its' means - just as the rest of us do. And we have to pressure the new Congress to keep their intentions to stop the hemorrhage. Don't now accuse me of not wanting to help the unfortunate. They are one of the prime reasons FOR limiting Federal power. Who has done more to help children stricken with cancer - the NCI (part of NIH) or St. Jude's Hospital? Which one runs more efficiently? Which one's function can be usurped by another outside group IF they get too big/bureaucratic/inefficient to work well -- thereby giving them strong incentive to stay flexible? If you have $100 to give to one of them, where will your $100 do the most good for the most sick kids? According to the government's own charitable giving guidelines, one should refrain from donating to a charity if less than 85% of funds raise go to the charitable purpose. Is there ANY government bureau/organization where as much as 50% of the funds go to the "social support" service? By their own standards they do not deserve funding. I am a libertarian because I believe in individual liberty and the responsibility of individuals to help those in need. One cannot foist those responsibilities off onto government (or have government usurp them) without seeing incredible amounts of waste and fraud and a worsening of the conditions that were supposed to improve. Every iota of power the Feds take, every scrap of personal responsibility they "relieve" us of, hurts every one of us - the poorest and most needy worst of all. They must be reined back to their Constitutional limits. I can be done -- but it took a hundred or more years to deteriorate this far, and it's going to take decades to fix. Is it worth the effort? YES. Because this is still the ONLY nation in the world founded on the principle that power is sovereign in the PEOPLE, and that the government is OUR servant - not the other way around. I bow to NO man, and NO government, now or ever. Enough with the rant; I have 941's, W-2's, and 1099's to prepare. Catherine

Got mine weeks ago, also the spiral-bound big 1040 book but more recently. They did not come together, nor did they come anywhere near the same day.

All I know is that they do a bunch of things at once.... also figured once there was one response, others would chime in, if only to correct me. I'm in Massachusetts, where a BIG family farm might be 1,000 acres - half of it in Christmas trees. And no one acre flat enough for more than a small tractor.

I just LOVE those commercials! There was another set, too (not discover) that talked about affixing an Amazonian forest secret token to your rebate request and then waiting six months for your $10.... it was a radio commercial, I think, not TV.

I'm not a cowboy, but here goes" 2. glass or plastic paned hose with auziliary heat and ventilation control for starting seedlings. 3. storage (animal, machinery, plant materials, soil amendments 4. big machine that harvests current crop (and can post-process as well, such as sorting) and plows the land to be ready for more seeding at the same time.

Be warned folks, and hope that you do NOT need any technical support from ATX this year, if my experience this week was any indication of this year's "quality". I had quite the two-day adventure with ATX. This year I had purchased the Fixed Asset Manager (since it was _so_ nice of them to delete the asset history in ATX last year, I needed it). But with one thing and another I never installed it until this week. Or I tried to. Despite what the User Guide said, I could not choose the installation location. Since I have a partitioned drive and keep ALL my tax software on one partition, a default installation to the C drive was not acceptable. So I called on Tuesday and the person at support for the FAM had an accent so horrendously thick it was almost impossible to understand her. But by asking her to SLOW DOWN we were plodding along trying to make progress. Eleven minutes into the call, and she still did not get the basic point - which was that I could not install where I wanted to. And then, mid-sentence, she hung up on me. Real slick; real professional. Called back yesterday (Wednesday). This person's accent wasn't nearly as bad (and I do _not_ mean Southern accents) so I could at least understand her. She, however, was utterly incompetent. She kept putting me on lengthy holds (while she tried to talk to someone with a clue?) and after TWENTY-ONE MINUTES she had gotten to the point of understanding the question I called with. Another FORTY (yes, 40) minutes of no progress (but many, many minutes on hold interspersed with her asking a number of _stupid_ questions that had nothing to do with the issue - and then sticking me back on hold) and she said she was transferring me to the technical team. When I protested that a full hour was ridiculous and that should have been done as soon as she knew the question was beyond her, she stated there were "protocols" that had to be followed. "Protocols" be damned. It should NOT take ONE HOUR to get to a technical specialist (who was then able to solve my issue in 4 minutes). This is completely unacceptable and totally unprofessional on the part of ATX/CCH. And it may well be that next year I do what I've been thinking of for several years now and switching to Drake. And you can be sure that I reamed them a new one (politely) in each of the two "customer satisfaction surveys" they sent after each call. Catherine

I used it just this week. I priced out an order with and without it and it was a little less; maybe about 5% (didn't keep the figures with me). Not sure if I'll be a "regular", but it is an option at least.

Increasing my fees in specific areas. There are about a half dozen clients that I want not to return and am hoping that higher fees for their returns will do it. At the least I will make closer to what they "cost" me in terms of aggravation. I've also re-vamped my data flow paths and set aside specific areas for newly dropped-off papers, in-process returns, and finished work awaiting pickup. All those places are off the floor for the first time, LOL! Catherine

And Massachusetts state returns are due on the 19th, since the 18th is a state holiday. Federal returns are still due on the 18th since most of the MA forms go to Hartford...

Thank you for the Google search option! It should help when we're looking specifically for state info or stuff like "AMT". Catherine