5 TIPS TO CLOSE THE TAX SEASON

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1. Back-Up and Protect Your Data
As the tax preparer, backing up and protecting your data should be a primary concern. Making regular backups to an external storage device at a minimum of once per week is important. Imagine next week your hard drive fails. The returns you’ve done, acknowledgement reports, PDF copies, and scanned documents are gone. Without a backup, your only hope is to take your computer to a technician who is going to charge hundreds of dollars to attempt to recover data and there is no guarantee they succeed. If they can’t recover the data, hopefully you had paper copies, but it could take hundreds of man hours reinputting data. If you don’t have paper copies, well, we hope you are lucky enough to never get audited. If you have a backup, you would only need to spend a couple hours bringing your data over and you’d be ready to go. Taxware does NOT store a copy of your data. Seek competent technical advice to keep your computers and data protected.

For detailed instructions on how to backup your data click here or contact technical support and a technician would be happy to assist you.

2. Don’t Forget to Pull in Acknowledgements
As a security measure we purge acknowledgement records every 30 days. This means after 30 days we will only be able to tell if the return was accepted or rejected, however we will not be able to read the reason why the return was rejected. If you have returns that are awaiting acknowledgement for longer than 5 days, call technical support and a technician will investigate why your acknowledgements have not come through.

3. Have Last Minute Rejects?
Don’t stress, if you get a rejected return on April 18th the IRS gives you a 3 day grace period to fix it!

4. Start your Free Trial with Textellent.com
Do you want to grow your business for the 2021 Tax year?  Now is the time to evaluate and start your free trial with Textellent, the text marketing and appointment scheduling platform that is fully integrated within your Wintax program.  Just one short on-boarding appointment and you will be up and running.  Doing this in the off-season should help you have the time to really delve into the many benefits and options this additional program could provide you and your business.

5. Celebrate!
Last but not least, plan and go on vacation! You deserve it! TripAdvisor is one of our favorites.

Updated Unemployment Compensation Exclusion

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The IRS revised their unemployment exclusion worksheet today. The change basically excludes the Unemployment subtraction from MAGI calculation in the forms and worksheets listed in the IRS link listed below. We have applied these worksheet changes to the Wintax – 1040 program and they are available in the latest update.

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New Exclusion of up to $10,200 of Unemployment Compensation for 2020 1040 Returns

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The IRS released the following information regarding “The American Rescue Plan”. We have updated our program to reflect those changes. After applying the update, you will need to go into any existing tax returns for calculations to be applied. New tax returns moving forward will be automatic. If your client has unemployment income, and is below the applicable threshold, an automatic entry on line 8 of Schedule 1 “Other Income” with “UCE” as the description and a negative number will be produced. The link below will give you more information on the IRS website.

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IRS, Summit partners issue urgent EFIN scam alert to tax professionals

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WASHINGTON – The Internal Revenue Service, state tax agencies and tax industry today warned tax professionals of a new scam email that impersonates the IRS and attempts to steal Electronic Filing Identification Numbers (EFINs).

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Important EIP Update

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Hello Taxware Clients,

We have received a few questions regarding how to select or set a tax return as an EIP filing only return. We think the confusion comes from the IRS requirements in the 2019 tax year.
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Wintax NextGen Automatic Backups

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Starting with the 2020 version of Wintax there is a new file structure for your data that will allow for easier backups of your data and setup information. The biggest change is that your data will no longer be defaulted to be saved in the program folder directly, but instead to a Settings and Data folder that, by default, will be located in your Taxware folder.

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All taxpayers now eligible for Identity Protection PINs

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IRS YouTube Video:
Get an Identity Protection PIN – English | Spanish

WASHINGTON – The Internal Revenue Service today expanded the Identity Protection PIN Opt-In Program to all taxpayers who can verify their identities.

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TAXWARE ANNUAL SEMINAR 2020

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Although we truly missed seeing everyone at our in-person seminar event, we realize that the benefit of reaching more of our clients in this online platform for 2020 may be one silver lining to the adaptations we have all had to make this year.

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Top 4 Ways to Secure Your Wintax Data

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1. Windows Lock Screen – One of the simplest ways to protect your data is to lock your computer after it has idled for a short time. Enabling this is simple. Push your windows start button and type the words ‘Screen saver.’ Then, choose the option for turning on the screen saver, or changing the screen saver. You should see a screen similar to the image below.

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Special $300 tax deduction helps most people give to charity this year – even if they don’t itemize

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WASHINGTON – The Internal Revenue Service today reminded taxpayers of a special new provision that will allow more people to easily deduct up to $300 in donations to qualifying charities this year. Read more