How Firms Can Better Prepare for Next Tax Season

Imagine you are sitting in your office one day and a business client came in and dropped a six inch thick stack of paperwork and receipts on your desk and asked you to help make enough sense of it to submit a tax filing to the IRS. Your first reaction might be to head for the nearest paper shredder, but – if your job depended on it – you would most likely spend hours of time organizing the information in hopes to gain a fundamental understanding of what is in that file and how you can best help your client.

For CPAs, this is what tax season can often look like when working with their LLC, self-employed and contractor clients – right up until the filing deadline on April 15. Given the meticulous nature of tax preparation and the stress involved, many CPAs and business owners who are still recovering from this past filing deadline are also thinking about how to better prepare for 2016.

Making sense of someone’s business taxes when you see the business owner only once per year is like trying to understand a complex story when you’ve missed all but the last 15 minutes of the movie. Backtracking to put the pieces together can often lead to a more time-consuming tax preparation process, which can make the filing more stressful than it needs to be. For that reason, many CPAs have established a policy where they won’t provide tax or audit services for a client unless they also do their outsourced accounting throughout the year. Not only does it offer a more service-oriented model where the CPA can continually offer expertise and work collaboratively with clients, it also allows the CPA to gain a conceptual understanding of the business operations and lay the groundwork for faster turnaround and more accurate tax filings.

The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) knows the tax season struggles CPAs face better than anyone and encourages CPAs to take on the outsourced accounting services for the tax clients. In 2009, the AICPA named cloud-based accounting system, Intacct, as its preferred provider for financial and accounting solutions. Not only is the AICPA the single most influential organization within the accounting realm, it is a part of the global International Federation of Accountants, who uses Intacct internally for their own accounting and financial solution. The relationship between Intacct and the AICPA has continued to grow the past six years, and Intacct is still the first and only system preferred by the AICPA because of the ability to help CPAs work more collaboratively with clients to help them make better, more forward-looking business decisions. This is especially apparent during tax season because CPAs will already have the information and context necessary to prepare tax returns without the mountain of paperwork to sort through.

Since the inception of the partnership in 2009, Intacct has continued its dynamic approach to accounting by adding even more features and benefits that are specific to accounting professionals. Whether it is the accountant’s console, where CPAs can quickly and easily switch back and forth between all of their clients, or the template approach for setting up a new customer from an existing customer, Intacct is continually meeting the needs of CPAs around the country by streamlining previously cumbersome work processes and saving them valuable time. Given that Intacct is a cloud-based system, it is ideal for CPAs who work remotely, travel, or simply need the convenience of accessing client data from anywhere. Intacct’s flexibility and scalability truly makes it a comprehensive solution for CPAs and CPA firms of all sizes.

Intacct is the only system on the market that was truly built for accountants to use as part of outsourced accounting services. The CPAs who use Intacct for their clients can quickly and easily extract the right data to deliver those forward-looking insights to business owners because they are truly experts in that one system. That level of standardization allows the CPA to dig deeper and take a much more analytical approach to a company’s finances all outside tax season. CPAs and business owners can then collaboration on the best financial plan for the business and make any necessary changes before it comes down to the April 15^th deadline. No one knows the financials of business quite like a CPA, and Intacct allows the CPA to make a unique, even deeper, impact on the financial side of the business all year round.

While the 2014 filings may already be on the books for most people, both CPAs and business owners should already be thinking about how to make the 2015 filings faster and even more accurate. With more and more CPAs taking on outsourced accounting duties for their clients throughout the year, the need for them to have a flexible, cloud-based system is greater than ever. The AICPA has recognized this need in the market, which is why they’ve done the due diligence for CPAs by continually choosing to partner with Intacct as the preferred provider of accounting solutions. With Intacct, CPAs truly have the opportunity to avoid that six inch thick stack of paperwork and receipts being dropped on their desks because they’ll already have all the information they need at their fingertips.

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Kevin Cumley is the Director of the Intacct Accountants Program.