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With a kid in college, I have to complete my taxes a month and a half before the IRS deadline to be able submit my financial aid application in time. This year, my deadline was March 1, and I was scrambling right up to midnight. Thank God for the Internet or I would have never made it.
When doing my taxes in previous years, I frequently depended on the IRS Web site at www.irs.gov for easy access to all their forms in printable format. And the last two years, I've used TurboTax software (from Intuit) and submitted my returns electronically.
Now I find that I totally depend on TurboTax. Because I run my own little business, I have to fill out Form C, for which the tax rules seem designed to force you to hire an accountant. Fortunately, TurboTax prompts you with all the relevant possibilities, such as how to get the largest allowable deduction for your home office, and how to handle purchases that can't be counted as a straight expense (like furniture and computers and software) and calculates the amortization or depreciation, and then remembers from one year to the next how you stand on those.
Also, in case of emergency, Intuit/TurboTax now offers Live Tax Advice over the Internet. Yes, it's just a list of tax advisors and they all charge fees, but that's better than trying to get an appointment at the local H&R Block office, when everybody's in crunch mode.
This time around, I was saved repeatedly by access to online data about my accounts. Yes, I save every ridiculous piece of paper related to my business-related expenses. And yes, I spend hours sorting through all that paper and entering it in a paper ledger. And yes, I also use Quicken to enter all my checks and all my credit card purchases. But, somehow, "all" is never really "all". No matter how obsessive I force myself to be, when it comes time to do the final calculations and enter the numbers in TurboTax, inevitably some key pieces of paper are missing. This year, I was able to find and print out all the missing data online in a matter of a few minutes. I felt like I'd won the lottery.
For instance, my bank, the Digital Credit Union, like many other banks, now makes lots of information available over the Web. I can see a complete record of my transactions over any range of dates (up through the beginning of 2001), and can search through all those entries. I had lost a monthly statement and was behind on balancing my check book; but quickly retrieved the missing information and hence was able to finish my balancing. Where I couldn't read my own scribble in my check register, I could see images of any or all of my cancelled checks online. While I was missing a copy of one of my real estate tax bills, my bank had a record of all the tax payments; and, of course, had real estate mortgage interest paid, and all bank interest received.
Trying to sort out some purchases that I had made by credit card (and decipher badly printed/smudged receipts), I was flabbergasted to discover that I was missing a key credit card bill from Universal. Then I checked the small print on a bill for another month form the same company and discovered that they had a Web site. A few minutes later, I was printing out all the info from that missing bill.
I buy lots of stuff at Amazon -- from books to computer peripherals to software. I had credit card records of all the purchases, but no record of the details of some of those purchases, so I couldn't really tell what was business-related and what wasn't. So I went to Amazon, opened my account page, and quickly saw a detailed record of each and every purchase I have ever made there.
Then for the submission of financial aid information, I didn't need to fill out paper forms and race to the post office. Rather, I could go to the Web site http://www.fafsa.ed.gov and fill out the most hellish document I've ever encountered -- the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Yes, they had had a site up last year, but at that time it was so incredibly slow and awkward that it took hours to complete and you ended up wishing you had done it on paper. This time around everything went smoothly (knock on wood).
So, thanks to online record-keeping and record-retrieving of this kind, I probably saved a day or two hunting for the missing pieces of paper; and a week or two if I had had to request replacement info by phone and get it by snailmail. And the online submission of tax forms and financial aid forms means I don't have to depend on snailmail, certified, with return receipt requested to know that my forms have been received and to prove that I officially met the deadline requirements.
Long term, my experience this year leads me to believe that eventually nearly all my account information will be available over the Web. When that happens, I won't need to save all these crazy scraps of paper, and won't have to spend hours sorting through them, and trying to make sense out of their smudged print.
Of course, better still will be the day when the graduated income tax
is repealed or replaced with a low and reasonable flat tax :-) .
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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