Getting Ready for Your Tax Accountant: Tips and Tricks
It’s all set – we’re right. And they might even think the Accountant doesn’t have anything to do. Just spit out a tax return? But often that is not the case. You need to first look at the information that you’re sending to your Accountant. Because you as a Business Owner should be able to have some feel for whether or not it’s ready for the Accountant.
Things like it doesn’t make sense to you. You should be able to read through your profit and Loss statement, look at the different types of income. Look at the different types of expenses. Does it speak to you? Is it making sense to you? The way things are categorised? Is it polluted? One of the things that I think is a real shame about our industry is Accountants that prepare tax returns have gone from, in the last 20 years since we’ve had the more of the do-it-yourself accounting, have gone from being able to sit down with you with your shoe box full of information. Talking about your business and how it’s been, and then preparing that financial information from what you’ve told them and giving it to you in the form of a tax return.
Now, instead, sometimes that very important discussion is missed and your information s delivered by the cloud. Maybe conversations are had , and the accountant might find that there’s all sorts of mess in there? Now you might’ve done something wrong. Your Bookkeeper, might’ve done something wrong.
The personal stuff might be in there with the business stuff. Anything could have happened with the data that’s in there after all. There’s a good saying; garbage in / garbage out, but if there are things missing, the garbage hasn’t even got in there yet, if you haven’t put in information about, perhaps using a vehicle, you might be missing out on some tax deduction.
So, it’s still important that you talk to your Accountant. It’s still important that you look at what’s going to them before it gets there. So, if you’ve got any questions about preparing yourself, ready for your Tax Accountant, please reach out and join us on another episode of Better Business Insights.
When getting ready to pass your information on the accountant for preparation of tax returns, you can save heaps of time and money by checking a few key things.
