This Is How To Get Ready For Tax Season

“Being a CPA during tax season is easy. It’s like riding a bike. Except the bike is on fire and you’re on fire, and everything’s on fire, and you’re in hell.”

April 15th is a lot like Christmas. Both can be extremely chaotic if not planned for properly. Let’s be honest, how many of us have all the gifts purchased and wrapped well in advance?

The tax season is no different. If the correct paperwork isn’t gathered before the big day, feelings of stress, overwhelm, and anger can take center stage.

With the tax deadline looming ahead, how many of you are still in the “not ready to get started” stage? Do you have reservations about starting the tax planning process early? We suggest reading the rest of this blog to understand why it is so important.

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Read More: Tax Planning Strategies: What You Need To Know For 2020

The hard truth is that without an adequate amount of time to commit to the process, your business will be affected. Most companies do not have the time or staff to dedicate to tax season. Here is where partnering with a financial expert is so valuable. If your business can relate to any of these struggles, hiring a professional may be the best course of action:

• you’re short on time
• the paperwork is overwhelming
• you don’t feel confident handling the taxes for your company
• you have a complicated tax situation
• your staff is five or more people

If finding a way to help your team cut down on time allocated toward tax preparation and save your clients money, would you take the opportunity to find out more? If you haven’t thought about how collaborating with outside accounting and finance experts could benefit your clients, this tax season may be the best time to start.

Partnering with a team of experts will make your job easier by providing the information you need when you need it. Collaborating can also help to establish an efficient close process and more.

What Can A Financial Expert Partnership Help With?

1. 1. Reconciling Balance Sheet Accounts
      Teaming up with experts can help the CPA with examining general ledger (GL) balances and reconciling (or foot) the amount to independent documentation such as a bank or loan statement. This can help to ensure completeness and accuracy as of the specified period end date.
   2. Updating Fixed Asset Schedule
      Many companies rely on their tax accountants to produce a fixed asset schedule at year-end. Partnering with experts can help reconcile fixed asset additions, retirements, and depreciation every month to ensure proper classification and expense recognition.
   3. Address Open Balances
      Our team will help ensure that the beginning amount for an account is correct. Our experts can also match prior year reporting before testing the activity of the account.
   4. Physical Inventory Count
      Proper measurement of inventory is a critical element for businesses being able to interpret and understand their profit margins. Partnering with accounting and finance experts who can conduct a physical inventory count to establish a correct inventory quantity and value. Also, they can develop monthly inventory procedures to enable the company to internally maintain accurate inventory amounts each month, which will eliminate significant adjustments at period ends that can skew profit margin analysis.

Read More: Avoid the “Inventory Issue” and Learn How to Calculate Your Ratio

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That Is Not All We Can Do

Here are some other areas we can assist in data collection:

• • Vacation, PTO, accrual for bonus
  • More extensive cut-off testing – accrual expenses / deferred revenues
  • Warranty/Returns Allowances/Reserves
  • Reconciling changes in Equity
  • Review of agreements and amendments to leases, debt and operating documents
  • Analyze capitalization policy
  • Review of related party transactions
  • Summarize accounting methodologies, changes to policies and business operation

Working with a team of accounting and finance experts will accelerate your ability to complete the work. A team can help ensure critical errors are avoided (ones that are often caused by rushing to meet a deadline).

Signature Analytics’ can partner with your company to support and enable your on-site team and get the job done this tax season and beyond.

Contact us today to understand how our services can help you focus on what your business does best, while we take over the bottomless piles of paperwork.