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Advice for Tax Preparers

Making tax preparers lives easier one blog at a time

Learn Why New Accounting Staff Eat Time & How to Fix The Problem

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 eating time

Accountants by the nature of our profession want to follow rules. Therefore, we like it when we have guidelines such as an employee handbook that tell us how to respond in an accounting firm to a particular situation. However, new accountants soon find out that the firm grapevine provides unwritten rules to be followed as well. One example is in the area of the billable hours (the time each person charges to the job for preparing and reviewing the tax return or audit) that a staff should put on his timesheet. If the staff person talks to people in the firm they will get one or more of the following answers: [click to keep reading…]

The Definition of a Secret in a Public Accounting Firm Tax Department

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I could not find who originally said it. But the following quote is one that I heard from a management consultant friend of mine on a regular basis. He said the definition of a secret is

“merely information that is passed one person at a time”.

His point was that any information you give or action you take in front of anyone at the firm is at risk of being communicated to another person in the firm. It does not matter if the information is personal or professional or if the information was given accidentally or on purpose.

Therefore, you should keep to yourself anything that you do not want the partner group to know.

Breaking the Rules

I know that you are going to break the rule I just noted to you. All of us do it at one time or another. We form friendships with our coworkers and we want to talk with them about our personal and professional lives.

But keep in mind that every time you do it,  you need to consider the following questions: [click to keep reading…]

Tax Preparers: Learn about Four Professions that Create Problem Clients for CPA firms.

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Man Eating PC Tax accountants might work with numbers, but we are in a people business. You will run into good and bad clients in all professions. But the following professions tend to cause CPA firms more grief on average than others. If you are assigned a client in one of these area then look at the prior year files to see if the client tends to cause a problem for the firm. [click to keep reading…]