Provide These Documents to Your Accountant When Filing Your Taxes
When you need to get your taxes filed, you should consider hiring an accountant. This allows you to have the taxes filed for you, while the accountant does it effectively and gets you the biggest tax return possible. Here are some documents your accountant will need when filing the taxes.
Tax and Payroll Documents
The first main type of document you need to bring to your accountant is anything relating to the income you received during the year. This might include a tax document from your employer, or statements for your self-employment income. Remember that you need to report all forms of income, so you might have multiple forms from the IRS, including one for your regular employer, one for your spouse who was on unemployment, and other forms for various types of income, like a side business you run out of your home or money you received from social security. All of these need to be brought to your accountant when having your taxes filed.
Receipts For Deductions
You will also need to gather any receipts that pertain to your deductions and bring them to your accountant. For example, if you made several donations during the year, those can typically be deducted from your taxes. You need to have receipts from the charity, otherwise the donations will not be counted. This might also include documents showing how much you paid for school or medical expenses you intend to deduct. Self-employed individuals might have receipts from their rented office or retail space, utilities, gas receipts from meeting clients, and receipts from purchasing office equipment.
Dependent Information
The accountant also needs to know about any dependents you can claim on your taxes. Keep in mind that only one person can claim any individual as a dependent. If you are divorced and your spouse claims your child as a dependent, you won't be able to. Make sure you have discussed this beforehand. Typically, the parent with custody of the child is going to claim them as a dependent. You can also ask your accountant about claiming others aside from children as dependents, depending on who lives in your home and who you are taking care of. Bring in documentation for them as this may be needed when filing taxes.
Purchased Property information
If you purchased a new home in the last year, you might be able to get a tax break for that property. Bring along an documentation you have for the home, whether it is a title for the home, the loan information from the bank, or a receipt from the purchase.
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