|
|
The
Basic Taxwise Tips and Tricks may be useful for volunteer tax preparers.
This section of advanced Tips and Tricks may be more useful for Site
Coordinators and Transmitters who would like to increase their
productivity and reduce the effort of doing repetitive work. The comments here are based on practices that work
well at some sites, and are offered in the spirit of sharing. Your
own mileage may vary. Check back often; more hints will be added as time
goes on.
- Remove the override capability!
- Using overrides may seem a quick way
of filling forms; however, it means that you are doing all the
checking rather than letting TaxWise do it for you. Advise the
volunteers to avoid using overrides, and to reinforce the point,
take away that capability by setting the appropriate privileges for
you own user group.
-
- Customize those Print Packages!
- Rather than print individual forms
or select which forms to print, it is generally useful to set up
Print Packages for different purposes. At one site, the file
copy generates one copy of each form and worksheets, and is given to
the taxpayer for their permanent records. The signature pages
include 1 copy each of the Federal and State 8879 for the taxpayer
to sign and return. Individual forms should be printed directly from
the return rather than from the print package or classic print
menus unless it is to replace or duplicate a single form.
-
- Be kind to trees! Print forms, don't order,
stash and recycle!
- It seems a good idea to order
large quantities of tax forms to keep on hand in case of need. At the VITA Milpitas
Community Library, only intake forms
are ordered since they are filled by hand by taxpayers. Generally,
when forms are ordered, they arrive packed in
separate boxes. When space is limited, it is not possible to
spread out the forms, and difficult to locate the relevant form
since the boxes are not labeled with their contents. If the
site is affiliated with a library, it is possible to use forms that the Library distributes.
In other cases, it is easier to print out blank forms as needed than
hunt for the right form.
While this may appear wasteful, experience shows that when pre-printed forms
were ordered, several boxes of forms were recycled at the end of the
season, but less than two full boxes of blank paper were used for the whole tax season.
-
- Set the Site Name, SIDN and EFIN on
the Tax Forms Default Page AND Forget!
- In site visits year after year, a
lot of time was spent establishing if the Site Name, address, SIDN,
EFIN and correctly entered on each generated return. It
is a waste of volunteer time trying to remember this information
each time and entering it. A better solution is to fill in the
information on the Tax Forms Default Page for the Admin users, and
periodically copy it over to the directory of each user. This
way, once the Site Coordinator has set this up, the only thing the
IRS visitor needs to check is if the computer knows how to run
TaxWise properly.
-
- Lock some fields!
- With respect to the Site Name, SIDN
and EFIN on the Tax Forms Default, an even better practice is to set
the fields to the values relevant for you and lock them so that most users cannot change them.
It may be entertaining to see Relationship Managers going
scrupulously and painstakingly over each field to check that the computer
remembers the setting on the forms. Try not to LOL too
much! In
fact, why not lock all the fields on the 1040 so that the volunteers
have to fill in those schedules and worksheets rather than use the
calculators and override field values that are best left calculated
by the computer??? It was found that although these fields
could not be overriden, they could be used to link to worksheets,
schedules and other forms.
-
- Create those e-files early!
- Creating the e-file before printing
out the 8879s is helpful because that way the DCNs will appear on
the 8879 rather than you filling it in by hand later in the tiny
space available for it. However, you will need to assure your
volunteers that it would not be the end of the world if the taxpayer
changes his or her mind about e-filing with you. This fear of
accidentally sending the e-file to the IRS seems to have its origin
in the TaxWise training with undue emphasis on the importance of
filling accurate e-files. Volunteers need to be given the
confidence and the requirement to create an e-file even if it has to
be changed later, so that you as the transmitter can be sure that at
some point the return was ready for filing, and it will also help
the volunteer get rid of some of those errors. The reality is
that e-files need to be proactively sent rather than be sent
automatically. The ironic part is that the login requirements
for transmitting and accepting acknowledgements is much less
stringent than for logging in to the TaxWise support website or
TaxWise University.
|
