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hey guys in this video I'm going to talk about everything that I sent to my accountant this year so that they can prepare my taxes so we are starting and soon we'll be getting deep into tax time so hopefully this can serve as a little motivation if you are helping your bookkeeping clients prepare for tax time or if you own a small business yourself like your bookkeeping business or a different business and you need to get that ball rolling get your brain moving on what types of things you need to be collecting for your accountant and I'm a bookkeeper I do not prepare taxes I have a video that talks about that right here if you should or should not prepare taxes it'll be linked in the description box as well so this is kind of like the basic stuff as a bookkeeper that you'll need to think about and then the last like third of this video I have a list of other things that I personally sent that is like a little more specific to me I'm also going to link a few other videos for you that I think you'd find helpful I have one how I work with accountants I have one about my year end process as a bookkeeper last year and also one that talks about the differences between bookkeepers and accountants and CPAs and tax preparers and that all gets kind confusing so watch that one after this so now in my household we have two businesses I have a business and my husband has a business I own a bookkeeping business and I started out as an LLC so this tax year I'm going to be at LLC I am switching to an S corp which is something you can look into and ask a CPA if it makes sense depending on your income level and in my business I have three contractors that work for me and no employees and my husband's business structure I believe is called a partnership Corporation a PC which is a bit more complex than my business he has about 10 to 12 employees so we run payroll for that and because of his business structure he gets both a salary and a distribution so he gets like a regular W-2 like any employee would get for any business and then he gets distributions as an owner that basically like kind of comes out of the profit of the business so as you can see we have a few things going on some of them might be familiar to you some of them might not be and we did get a new account this year so we're kind of starting fresh with like a new nice checklist and stuff so I want to share that with you guys and our accountant did send us a packet with all the this stuff a bunch of stuff we had to say yes or no we own a house yes or no we have kids so starting out with the engagement letter we just had to sign this to say yes we give you permission to complete our taxes access to QuickBooks so if you go into the gear icon and then manage users you can add an accountant to a QuickBooks account so I use QuickBooks Online accountant as you know and I have all my clients listed under there it's very easy to add the accountant to one of my clients books it was a little trickier to add it to my books because it was like I was adding the accountant as a member of my bookkeeping firm so let me know in the comments if you've had that problem before and if you've had any trouble with it because even when I gave him complete access he wasn't able to pull the reports he needed so anyways I just sent him the reports that he needed but I'm curious if anyone else has had that problem too and for many years I didn't even give my accountant access to QuickBooks I would just pull them a profit and loss a profit less detail and a balance sheet and send it to them so that is definitely an option especially if you're your business is pretty simple next is bank and credit card statements so for every account that we have which is two checking and two savings account for the businesses I sent him the January statement and the December statement some CPAs might want the whole year of bank statements so you can check on that but that was just those eight I believe statements I sent him and my accountant uses smart vault which is a secure way to send all of these documents I have a video coming out I think it won't be out for a couple months but it's all about how to send confidential information as a bookkeeper so I'll link that too when it's ready and you want to send any 1099s you have so for me I have multiple sources of income and for you maybe each one of your clients is giving you a 1099 so maybe you work for 10 clients as a bookkeeper they should all give you a 1099 for some of my income sources I had to log into a website and search where to find the 1099 so like YouTube AdSense so I get a 1099 from YouTube I had to go into my AdSense account and within like my Gmail account outs and figure out how to download that so sometimes it takes a little bit of searching to get the 1099s but you do want to be collecting those as they come out all through January I'll leave you my video in the description Box about that too next thing is taxes paid so your accountant needs to know how much you've already paid in taxes to see you know how much you owe and this is something we kind of like did not have a good grasp on in the past so I really try to be proactive I pay all of our quarterly taxes online on the IRS website so if you make a login and you always log in with the same info you can see your history of how much you've paid and our accountant did list like all the forms we needed and some of them were payroll taxes like how much payroll taxes we used which I had to go into our payroll company Gusto and download some of that information so they listed like all the tax forms which I don't even know what they all are but it's like a 940 a 941 form 132 and schedule B so all of these possible taxes that you could have paid they need to know that leads me to payroll so again I went into our payroll company and I downloaded pretty much all the reports I could find that I thought would be helpful they wanted receipts for charitable donations so I uploaded those into the smart Vault system and the W-2 for employees so that's my husband like I said he gets a salary so we included his W-2 I do not get a W-2 because I only work as a contractor and I'm not an employee of my business then a fixed assets list so this isn't like my strong suit but basically if you have bigger assets like equipment and stuff then you want to depreciate it every year so basically we have this ongoing list of assets and so we needed to cross off any assets that we got rid of this year and add any new ones that we bought info about home office spaces so this is my home office I let the accountant know what percentage it is of my entire square footage of my house so I pulled this up a few years ago I think I found the square footage and then you know did all the math about what the percentage was same with internet usage you can also do cell phone I don't really use cell phone for my business that much but talk to your CPA if you own your own business and it makes sense for you to deduct some of those home office expenses all right next is retirement contributions so who's ever managing your retirement accounts there's a certain IRS form that they're required to give you so again we logged on to that website pulled it off and then gave it to the accountant and then there was a questionnaire there was like a 10 like 7 to 10 page questionnaire and they just asked everything that might affect our taxes so like did we have a new kid this year did we get married or divorced did we buy real estate did we get an inheritance like any of this stuff it was like Check Yes Yes or most of ours were no it's like check no no no no no okay yes we had one of those we might need to find documentation on that thing so we had to basically check yes or no on all these questions and possibly get more documentation for certain things if we did have a yes so then based on this questionnaire here here is another list of things that you might want to include I think these are things that we did end up needing so my first list is kind of like the general stuff that everyone needs and then this list can be a little more specific but I thought this would be helpful for you guys to see also what I am needing this year and I'll go over these more quickly the first one is a mortgage statement if you own a house you need this form 1098 which is like an automatic form they should send you or you'll need to go into your mortgage company and download it 401K match this is for my husband's business because he does a matching program and so he needs to know how much the employer contributed as the match cash distributions are basically like our own paychecks like how much did we take in owner's draws loans if there's any loans my husband used to have loans on his business because he bought it from another partner but now we have those paid off so we don't really have any loans PPP forgiveness was during the pandemic when if you didn't want to lay off your people you could like apply for money if you needed that so we needed a letter for that an operating agreement which I don't know I think that just tells like how the business was formed or like some of the procedures payments to college funds for our kids so in Oregon we have what's called a 529 and then the last thing on the list is student loan stuff so if you're paying off student loans I think they want to know how much you pay paid and how much interest you incurred and then anything about inheritance If you inherited money that's taxable and then mileage I do have a video about mileage I will link below it's a little tricky there's different ways to track mileage any real estate transactions like I said that can have a big impact on your taxes we didn't have any this year and a property tax statement to which we do pay property taxes so that is a lot of stuff it was like really overwhelming actually to like be collecting all this stuff luckily I mean I've been doing it for a number of years now so I kind of like have a little bit of foresight and I like learned from my mistakes every year I'm like oh we didn't track our tax payments very well our quarterlies so I need to make sure that I track them very well this year so let me know in the comments if there's anything I missed anything else you had to get to your accountants give me a little clapping Emoji in the comments if this was helpful give this video a thumbs up if you're trying not to file like an extension this year and let's just chat and commiserate in the comments about how you're feeling about tax time thank you guys so much for watching and I will talk to you next week with another bookkeeper video thanks so much bye