Tax Tip: Create a Process ; Make it Efficient ; Watch the Trend

Simply asking your CPA questions and looking at information which the might have been overlooked or didn’t know was deductible can result in a tax refund for many individuals. It’s that time of year, so I’d like to recommend a basic tax-saving strategy, which will serve you well this year and for years to come:

Create a Process: With everything we do–paying our bills or getting ready for work–we each have some general process that becomes repeatable. So establish an easy, repeatable process that will help you prepare throughout the year, all those tax receipts and documents you will need for tax filing season.

Make the Process Efficient: Not only will a process help save you money come tax time, but the more efficient the process is determines how much it will save you. The old method of throwing documents in a shoe box and dropping it off at the accountant’s office is surely not a process and completely inefficient. So create a process efficient enough that there’s no need to search high and low for all the tax documents come January and February, and eliminate the final “give-up strategy” which defaults to “file the basics and pay the rest.”

Watch The Trend:  Before you file that return, take a look at it & compare it to last year’s return. Really the first 2 pages of the return will show you most of what you need. How has your income changed? How has your deductions changed? What might change next year?

Tax time is never “fun”, but you can make it painless through a little careful planning.