Tax Season 2018 Blog Series [1/10] – Tips on Preparing for 2018 Tax Season

Tax season is the time when accounting professionals are center of attention. They work for long hours while they must maintain the quality as well. Challenges during the tax season that an accounting professional has to face are in various verticals.

From adapting to the new regulations to adjusting the operations with the client’s demands, every task needs a serious attention and that can drain even the best.

To help the accounting professionals to tackle these challenges, Ace Cloud Hosting presents “Tax Season 2018 – Blog Series” in which we will discuss various tax-related issues and tips on how you can ensure an accurate tax filing in this tax season.

4 Tips to Prepare Better for Tax Season 2018

“Well prepared is half done.”

Tax season 2018 is just weeks away now and to help with the saying mention above, we are listing down the tips that can help you prepare better for this busy season.

1. Review Yourself

Understanding your potential is the most important step toward any preparation. As an accounting professional, you must review the potential that you hold.

How many clients your firm can handle and at what level, do you need to hire more staff, is the system in place effective enough, and so on there are several more perspectives that you can consider.

Following steps can help you in evaluating your accounting firm:

• Collect reviews from existing clients
• ROIs on various processes
• Performance analysis of individual staff and team

2. Keep Up with New Tax Regulations

The art of life is a constant readjustment to our surroundings. – Kakuzo Okakaura

The art of tax preparation follows a similar pattern. One must keep track of changing tax regulations, especially the ones that are different with different states. Along with that, an accounting firm must ensure that the staff is also aware of the new changes. Depending on the size of the firm, you can pick a medium to update them all on the same.

As a smooth execution of this task, you can assign one person to collect all the information on the changes with the tax regulations by IRS and they can deliver a training session on it. You may simply share the updates over emails, but that may miss out on the accuracy of information delivery, at times.

3. Proper Accounting System

Implementing a proper system is all about doing the smaller tasks in the right manner, which demands an effective micromanagement. From implementing a neat process structure to deploying reliable accounting and tax software, there are a number of boxes that you need to check.

If you have preparing taxes for clients, it is likely that you already have a system in place, but the scope of improvement is always there and figuring that out could be your key to a successful season. For example, you may take your existing desktop solution to the cloud to secure the data and, at the same time, allows the independence of choosing any device to work upon.

If you want to upgrade your accounting system by hosting the tax applications on the cloud, you can check some interesting offers here.

4. Connect with Your Clients More Effectively

The effectiveness of communication with the customer can be a clear indication of your efficiency with the taxes. With a transparent communication medium available, you are always aware of the requirements of the client.

The faster you update the client about the required accounting information or document, the faster they will be able to provide you with it.

Going with the unified communication solutions is the best way to keep the communication with the client transparent because the requirement of the mode of communication can vary. With the same client, you may have to interreact over the voice call, video call, share documents, exchange text, etc. If you can get a communication solution that can hold the same for you.

Moreover, transparent communication with the client includes the part of keeping them updated on the process of their taxes. As most tax preparers rely on tax software for filing and exchanging the status of them regularly can be daunting with the email communication.

Going with a cloud-hosted tax application adds ease to their life as you can create different users to access the software. It keeps all the stockholders on the same page.

Wrapping Up

Starting early and keeping things organized is always the key towards achieving any goal. You can say the same for tax filing as well. For that, there are several technologies at your service and you need to do is pick the one that suits your requirements. You can also mention what you are doing for a better preparation of the tax season 2018.

With the next blog in the series, we will list the documents that should be on your checklist for a proper filing of taxes. To remain updated on our blog, please subscribe to the blog.