Personalized Tax Preparation Experience

Welcome Letter

In late January, you will receive a Welcome to Tax Season Letter. This letter has all of the important information required for this time of year, like due dates and any special announcements about what’s going on with our office.

Engagement Letter

At the same time, you will also receive an engagement letter. This agreement outlines the responsibilities of you as an individual and our responsibilities when preparing your return.

This contract will need to be signed every time we prepare a tax return for you.  

Extension

Once the engagement letter is signed we file an extension on your behalf. Why do we file an extension? TO PROTECT YOU! Please visit our FAQ page to learn more about why we require our clients to file extensions even if they are going to file the return on time. Do not worry: there is no penalty for filing extensions. The IRS receives over 10 million extensions every year. There are no penalties for filing extensions and it does not put a “red flag” on your account. 

Questionnaire

Once you sign the engagement letter, our portal will automatically send you a questionnaire about what happened during the year. The form will ask for information that is important to protect you and complete your tax return in the most effective way possible. Once we’ve collected all of this data, there’s a question about completing an organizer. An organizer is a form designed to explore and explain your situation, and you can choose to include one in your tax preparations. If you’d rather not use one, that’s ok, too! Feel free to choose No or Yes, and then continue onto questions pertaining specifically towards yourself. 

Uploading Documents

 Once you submit the questionnaire you will receive an email with instructions on how to submit documents. There will be several different ways to submit your documents. If you choose to upload your documents electronically, you will also receive a link from the portal to upload your documents.

Document Organization

 Now it is time to sit back, relax, and let L&H take it from here.

During this stage we will be organizing your documents and looking through your answers to the questionnaire.

First Look

The return process has begun! We are preparing your taxes and identifying potential savings or errors in the documents you provided us. During this phase we may reach out to you for questions or additional documentation, but we will let you know if we need anything from you. 

Quality Review

We will review, double, and triple check to make sure that not your tax return is accurate and takes advantage of any tax-saving opportunities. During this phase we may reach out to you for questions or additional documentation, but we will let you know if we need anything from you. 

Payment to L&H

Once we have completed our quality review we will send you an invoice for our services and a filing summary that includes important notes about your return and any observations we made during the process. Once payment has been processed you will be able to review a draft of your return. 

Finalizing your Return

 When you have reviewed your return and your summary you can either approve the document or schedule a meeting with your preparer to review it together on a phone or video call. Once you are comfortable with the return you will approve the document via the portal. 

Signature

Once you have approved the draft of your taxes on our portal, we will send you a link to sign in and e-sign your tax return. 

Filing

Well done! You have completed your taxes for the year. We will take it from here by electronically filing with the IRS and once they accept, you’ll receive an email containing all of their acceptance information as well as instructions on how to get back or pay what is owed if necessary.