Maribeth

Ah . . . . . warm corona . . . . . . I had forgotten . . . . . . .

Oh, It is so great to be in tax season and have almost everybody back on board! Booger needs to walk on down the street and find out what's going on with Janitor Bob. Maribeth

Hey Elrod, What's for dinner??? Maribeth

If you have a PTIN, then you put that number in the appropriate box. and do not place anything in the social security box. If you do not have a PTIN, then you put your social security number in the social security box. You ONLY use one number. Does this help? Maribeth

You would only use your social security number if you do not have a PTIN. Maribeth

I know, I know, I know. In our office, the biggest complaint on ATX is their print routine. It takes me 15 minutes to prep a return and 30 minutes to get it printed out in the order that we use. Maribeth

Theft losses deductible on Schedule A are considered a business loss for purposes of computing a current year net operating loss. Maribeth

Well, maybe my luck is changing. Just received a call from a nice young man, Gill Watts. He is sending me a demo disk and I am to receive it by next Monday. No explanation as to what happened to the two other disks, but that is okay -- I just want someone to make it right. Maribeth

I have been following the comments on this board about the changes to the depreciation section of ATX and I thought, well, it might be time to transfer everyone to the Fixed Assets Manager. I called a sales person named Robin on the 14th of December. Had a very pleasant talk with her. She assured me that a demo disk of the manager would be sent to me that day. I would get the disk before Christmas, have a chance to play around with it and then we would have a web demo on Monday, the 28th. So . . . . . . by 12/22/09, the disk had not arrived. Robin was gone for the entire Christmas week. I spoke with a nice salesperson, Chris, who could not find that the disk had every been sent. So she assured me that she would get the disk out to me, second-day delivery, so that I would get it sometime during the weekend after Christmas, and be able to review it before my web demo with Robin. Monday, 12/28/09, came. No disk. No phone call from Robin. Then I received an email from her, saying that she had tried to call me but all they had was my fax number. Hmmm. . . . . . . I emailed her back, told her I wasn't very happy, and I could not understand why she did not have my telephone number, as I have been an ATX customer for 10 years now and I have had the same telephone number for all of those years, in fact, I have had the same telephone number for 27 years. She emailed me back and send me a link so that I could update my customer contact info. As ALL of my contact information was on the email I had sent her, I deleted her email and did not reply. She can kiss my a**. As of today, Wednesday 12/30/09, still no demo disk. So what is going on back there??? This is the first real trouble I have had in communicating with CCH since their takeover. Does anyone have a direct contact that I could contact in order to get the demo disk shipped to me. Even thought CCH doesn't seem to want my business, I still would like to look at the fixed asset manager before tax season gets too hectic. Sorry for the long posting. I was hoping venting here might make me feel better ---- Maribeth

Of course you know that that corporate resolution and the supporting minutes are in the file cabinet and it will just take me an hour or so to find them. Maribeth

You need to split the transaction into its components and then go from there. 1. Your clients borrows on his line of credit. He then chooses to loan that money to the nonprofit, under a written note with stated terns. At this point, your client has incurred a debt of $xx and has received a contract receivable of $xx. 2. The nonprofit makes systematic payments on the contract receivable to your client. A portion of each payment is interest. The nonprofit has interest expense of $xx and your clients has interest income of $xx. 3. Your client makes systematic payments to the bank for the LOC. Your client has interest expense, some of which might not be deductible. See point #4. 4. On your client's tax return, your client will have interest income from the nonprofit. Your client will have investment interest expense for the amount of interest paid to the bank. Your client "should" be able to deduct this entire amount every year because the interest income received should equal the interest expense. Maribeth

What Art is talking about is not naming the actual pdf file, rather naming & indexing the documents inside the pdf file. This is a process similar to the one I saw at the QB update, they call it their Esort function. KC steered me to GruntWorks and they have the same process. It takes your scanned documents and then identifies, names and indexes them in 1040 order. I do not believe that you can do this on your own using any version of Abobe or a pdf writer. I believe that it takes a lot of processing power and still needs to be handled by an outside service. Anyway, please look at GruntWorks. It is pretty awesome. Maribeth

I have a funny feeling that the LearnMore person is actually the sales rep from TRX that first came on this board trying to sell us on the TRX ATX software. The only poster that I have seen respond with the convention of "@name" is that representative, his name was Braeden Kehoe. Maybe he has moved on down the road to this new service bureau. Maribeth

KC, as always, you are the fountain of knowledge. Thank you, thank you. Maribeth

I just attended the annual QB update and sat through part of their Lacerte presentation. Intuit has a program that allows you to scan the client's tax documents, upload the info to the Big Intuit Computer in the Sky, and they organize the documents for you. In about 30 minutes or so, you get an pdf file that has the documents in tax-form order, which is organized and indexed. I know that I am not explaining this very well but it is NOT a document management program, it is rather a scanned tax documents tool and it really, really looked great. They call it the Intuit Document eSort. Has anyone seen any product that might be comparable to this and if so, how did it work for you? This would be a great addition for ATX to have. Maribeth

I believe that the 4797 does not know which form you originally deducted the §179 expense, so you have to manually add the recapture to the form from which you originally deducted the expense. If the §179 was on a K-1, then I would handle the income just as you handle the unreimbursed partnership expenses. Set up a additional entity, named §179 recpature or something like that, use the EIN of the pass-through entity and show the recapture on line 1. That should then take the recapture to Schedule E, page 2, and then to Page 1. hth, Maribeth

I also took advantage of the TRX offer and signed up with them. During July, I received a phone call from CCH Customer Support and the gentleman advised me that CCH would be sending the product in November and that they would be offering all of the support. I called CCH Customer Support today, after looking through these postings (1-800-638-8291), and the representative looked at my account and advised me that all was okay and that they would be shipping in November. So it appears that TRX is no longer in the ATX business, but that for the 500 of us or so, we received an excellent discounted renewal. Maribeth

Western CPE is one of the best CPE providers we have ever used. They also have webinars, some of which are free. Check their website, www. westerncpe.com, for their free webinars and other classes. We have been participating in their webinars because of the ease, comfort and $$ savings. Maribeth

You will use an 1139 to carryback the corporate NOL as long as you prepare it and send it BEFORE December 31, 2009. You will not lose the NOL if the return is delinquent; however, you will have lost the election to carryforward the NOL so you MUST carryback the NOL. Maribeth

I have 5 corporations to do today. Most of it is just doing the 5% work that did not get done for the last extension. My corporation -- I will do that sometime this evening. I have had to let those deductions grow, you know! What really threw me this year? I had forgot that the trusts were due today. Won't forget that again, that's for sure. Maribeth

Dear KC, We finally broke down and purchased the Time & Chaos software that you have mentioned in the past. It is utterly awesome. We started with Time & Chaos, then added their email service. I will be looking through their Time & Billing program after 9/15. I don't know why we waited so long. Thanks for your recommendation. Maribeth

I still think that you need to find out what the original transaction was. If the mother sold her stock back to the S corp, then the entry would have been cr n/p, dr treasury stock (or some other equity account). Now the mother forgives part of the debt. The entry then is dr n/p, cr treasury stock. No income recognized. You have to find out how the note payable got recorded on the books. If the son purchased the stock from the mother, and used proceeds from the corporation to do so, then the note could have been booked by the cash he took out and it never, ever was a real note to the mother. It was a note to the son. In that case, the son still owes the money. Again, you have to find out what the original transaction was. And in this stock transaction, I am still not seeing any income. I see a basis reduction on one side and a reduction in sales price on the mother's side. Maribeth

Do you know what the original entry, to record the purchase of the mother's stock, was? I would assume that it was something like a credit to notes payable and a debit to treasury stock. So the discounting of the contract would provide a credit to treasury stock? Maribeth

The boat itself is a non-depreciable item. The expenses incurred on the boat for business purposes would be deductible, subject to the 50% rule. Maribeth

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/platform.asp And as with most things that go round and round and round the internet, this piece is NOT by Bill Cosby. Here's the link to snopes with some of its history and background. Maribeth